David A. Norris - Haunted Serbia

Haunted Serbia
Representations of History and War

in the Literary Imagination
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Haunted Serbia
Representations of History and War
in the Literary Imagination
David A. Norris
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

2016
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CONTENTS
❖
Acknowledgements ix
1 Politics of Literature in Socialist Yugoslavia 1
2 Historical Fiction, Haunted Fiction 20
3 Restless Ghosts 38
4 Uncanny Histories 64
5 In the Shadow of War 91
6 Making War Real 117
7 NATO’s Phantoms 147
Bibliography 179
Index 186
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
❖
I wish to acknowledge the assistance I have received from the School of Cultures,
Languages and Area Studies and the Dean’s Fund of the Faculty of Arts, University
of Nottingham, for allowing me sabbatical leave in 2012 and again in 2015. These
periods gave me the crucial time I needed to spend on research and writing in order
to complete this book. Many friends and colleagues have also helped, although I
suspect that they were not all aware that what might have seemed a conversation
on another topic has actually fed into this project. I have benefitted from such talks
with Jovan Delić of the Department of Serbian Literature and Adrijana Marčetić
of the Department of Comparative Literature, both at the University of Belgrade,
Zoran Milutinović of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University
College London, and Vladimir Zorić of the Department of Russian and Slavonic
Studies, University of Nottingham. My understanding of Serbian literature and
cultural history has developed through my sustained contact over a number of years
with the late Predrag Palavestra, literary critic and member of the Serbian Academy
of Sciences and Arts. Similarly, I owe a debt of gratitude to a number of Serbian
authors for their input, often over a cup of coffee or a meal, sadly not all of whom
are here to see the final version: Radoslav Bratić, Aleksandar Gatalica, Miroslav
Josić Višnjić, Miroslav Maksimović, Milovan Marčetić, Milica Mićić Dimovska,
Svetlana Velmar-Janković and Mileta Prodanović, one of whose paintings adorns
the book’s cover. I am also grateful to Ivana Nikolić of the National Library of
Serbia who has given freely of her time when I had to locate books, journals and
other materials. Finally, my special thanks are reserved for Vladislava Ribnikar who
read excerpts more times than I can remember as the manuscript took shape. Her
advice and support have, as always, been invaluable. Of course, any mistakes and
shortcoming in the book are entirely my own.
d.a.n., Nottingham, November 2015

CHAPTER 1
❖
Politics of Literature in
Socialist Yugoslavia
Introduction
Serbian literature in the last two decades of the twentieth century was haunted by
the spectres of history and war. The ghosts of past traumas and more recent periods
of crisis kept returning to the present, representing unhealed wounds from events
which could not be given their proper place in a coherent narrative structure.
History and war have long been linked themes in literary studies. Stories about the
past often include reference to periods of armed conf lict since an interest in historical
themes invites an examination of tense and critical times associated with war, while
fictions about war encourage looking back to uncover the broader context leading
to the disruption of the present. The circumstances and incidents of historical
belligerence are stepping stones in the production of a national narrative, events
imbued with mythological status giving them a semantic surplus overshadowing
the ordinary rhythms of contemporary, seemingly pedestrian, realities. The first
part of this period in Serbian literature was focused on revisiting events from the
Second World War and the foundation of socialist Yugoslavia; the second part
shifted attention to the more recent Wars of Yugoslav Succession signalling the end
of that country, rapidly followed by another conf lict involving Serbia and NATO
in 1999. The difference in literary production between the two parts was marked by
the greater emphasis on the conventions of historical fiction in the 1980s and on the
traditions of war literature in the 1990s. It would be more accurate to say that the
output of both decades faced the challenge of adapting conventions and traditions
to suit new circumstances, to express in literary language something more than an
account of events or a fictionalized version of history. In their novels and stories,
writers explored the construction of the myths generated by history and war. Such
ambitions were less concerned by the recovery of a distant or recent past and more
concerned by excavating the paths along which different narratives negotiated their
right to be heard. Their goal was to unearth and examine the claims to legitimacy
of those who spoke about events, picking through the competing claims of those
involved to hold the authority to narrate the past. Hence, many of the narrative
fictions in this period were written in the style of discovered manuscripts or
hidden memories providing details of painfully traumatic experiences. Such literary
exhumations, however, also constituted a process which released ghosts and other
2 Politics of Literature in Socialist Yugoslavia
uncanny figures to haunt the representations of history and war in recent Serbian
literature.
For ease in presenting the different emphases between the depiction of history
and war, this study is divided into two parts. The first part refers to the literature
of the 1980s when writers in Serbia took a critical look at many of the assumptions
about the nature of Yugoslav society, its historical roots, and the role of the state’s
founding myths. Turning to the conf licts of the past, they explored these issues,
extracting memories which were all but forgotten and questioning the traditionally
positive views of Partisan heroism in the Second World War. Serbian authors
created a new historical fiction, reinvigorated by the pain of history and the hurt of
war, in which traces of past conf licts were given fresh significance with haunting
and grotesque images. They animated the spectres of the past by exploring the
making of memory and the writing of history, examining how the stories of the
past no longer met the demands of the present. As historians and others also began
re-examining old certainties, gaps of omission and of distortion in the official
state narrative were revealed. As belief in the orthodox historical record turned to
suspicion, the cracks multiplied opening the way for the ghosts of the past to return
and haunt the sites on which the Yugoslav state and its socialist future were built.
The second part of this study concerns the literary response to the deepening chaos
of the following decade seen in the wake of a contemporary conf lict, the Wars of
Yugoslav Succession 1991–95. The evocation of war in the literary imagination
produced an uncanny effect akin to the unsettling representations of history from
the previous decade. To be sure, the haunting images of this phase gave rise to
different semantic features, but there was a continuity of deploying ghostly motifs
which was revived again with another experience of armed conf lict, NATO’s
short but highly intensive air campaign against Serbia in 1999. My claim is not that
Serbian literature at the end of the second millennium was undergoing a radical and
comprehensive Gothic revival. Rather, my claim is simply that such motifs were
introduced in some works of narrative fiction to accompany the portrayal of the
collapse of old assumptions and the formation of new perspectives on the world.
The present, in such moments of crisis, is caught in a web of anxiety between
its unknowable past and its unknown future when haunting images characterize
cultural production. This study is not a history of Serbian literature at the end of
the twentieth century, rather it is an analysis of a certain range of literary structures
and motifs and their effects on narrative fiction from the period.
The present chapter provides a context for my discussion on representations of
history in the literature of the 1980s in which I examine cultural policy towards
literature pursued by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) after the Second
World War. Official policy sponsored a narrative founded on the exploits of the
wartime Partisan resistance movement, led by the CPY, emphasizing only a positive
portrayal of their achievements, the inevitable forward march of the socialist
revolution, and the creation of a new state for all the peoples of Yugoslavia. Cultural
policy between 1945 and 1990 underwent numerous reforms, but there were also
consistent demands to ensure the continuity of a singular version of the historical
narrative. The consistency of these demands throws into relief the huge shift in
Politics of Literature in Socialist Yugoslavia 3
literary conventions visible in the new historical fiction of the 1980s. Chapter 2
concerns the writing of historical fiction in Serbia during this decade. Scholars have
tended to examine the narrative fiction of this period with reference to political
events and the emerging discourse of nationalism leading to Yugoslavia’s collapse
and the outbreak of civil war. My argument follows a different tack, linking the
models for new historical representations in Serbian narrative prose of the 1980s to
new historical fiction appearing at roughly the same time in the West. My approach
combines representations of history with the function of the uncanny in European
literature during periods of great social, intellectual, and cultural change.
In Chapter 3, I provide a detailed analysis of the function of the ghost as an
unsettling figure bringing the violence of the past into the present, while in
Chapter 4 I focus on the construction of an uncanny and sublimely terrible history
typical of literature in this first phase. These representations of fractured history
are followed by an exploration of an equally traumatic but differently conceived
and articulated series of ruptures in the second part of this study. In Chapter 5, I
turn from the memory of a brutal conf lict to the articulation of a current war in
the 1990s, opening with a discussion about the reasons for writing war literature
generally and isolating those factors most relevant to recent Serbian prose fiction.
In Chapter 6, I focus on uncanny motifs in literature about the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession, while in Chapter 7 I examine the unearthing of more ghosts and
fantastic figures in stories about NATO’s attack on Serbia in 1999 and the semantic
shift effected by the introduction of ghosts and uncanny motifs in the representations
of history and war over this period. During the 1980s and the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession, the depictions of spectral and fantastic figures evoke fear and images
of death, serving as reminders of pain, violence, and hurt. In the last phase, with
reference to NATO’s attack, they have the appearance of a release from the past
seeking to ease the burdens imposed by history. NATO’s phantoms communicate
a haunting laughter at whatever fate has in store for them, exhibiting a defiant face
to the resolutely pitiless onward f low of history.
Establishing the Function of Literature, 1944–1952

The CPY came to power at the head of the Partisans, defeating foreign occupying
forces and internal enemies. There were two main hostile groups, regarded as
traitors after the war: the Croatian fascists, the Ustashas, were collaborators fighting
alongside the occupiers; while the Serbian royalists, the Chetniks, were committed
to supporting the Karađorđević dynasty and as such were opponents of the Partisan
aim to establish a socialist state in Yugoslavia. Large amounts of military equipment
and aid were delivered by the Allies, especially the British, while liaison officers
maintained contact between the Partisans in the field and their own headquarters
abroad. Communist leaders in Yugoslavia welcomed the support of the Soviet
Union on ideological as well as pragmatic grounds, but were wary of being too
reliant on foreign help. The Partisans liberated Belgrade, the capital city, in October
1944 in a joint military operation with the Red Army, after which Soviet armed
forces withdrew from Yugoslavia. The CPY was left alone to remove the remaining
German troops and to take control of all important government functions. It was
of utmost importance that the Partisans won in Yugoslavia thanks to their own
efforts and organization; in contrast to other communist governments in Eastern
Europe who owed their commanding position to the military success and political
inf luence of the Red Army as it advanced against German forces. The CPY’s
position, its sense of independence earned rather than given, shaped its vision of
the future state as both socialist and Yugoslav and is an essential prerequisite to
understanding what happened next.
The Yugoslav constitution of 1946 was modelled on that of the Soviet Union,
with the country divided into six Republics and two Autonomous Provinces,
leaning heavily towards Moscow. The CPY ensured tight control of government
in the new system with great authority concentrated in the hands of their wartime
leader, Josip Broz Tito, as Fred Singleton points out: ‘There was a close interlocking
of party and state functions, symbolised at the summit by Tito’s position as head of
government, of the army and of the party.’1 Yugoslavia featured as one of the most
enthusiastic actors in the emerging Soviet sphere of inf luence, although things took
a sudden turn in 1948, which Zoran Milutinović describes:
Then, quite unexpectedly, Stalin decided that he had had enough of the
Yugoslavs and moved to expel them from the Cominform, the successor to
the by then defunct Comintern. His motives have been sufficiently explained:
Tito and his closest associates, as leaders of a large movement which achieved
liberation and revolution without any significant Soviet assistance, believed that
they deserved a special place in the family of communist parties, and behaved
accordingly.2
Stalin insisted on reining in the leadership of the CPY and their independent
attitude. Consequently, the ‘Yugoslav party was openly invited to rid itself of its
leadership’.3 There is no doubt that Broz’s opposition to Soviet demands met with
popular support around the country: ‘The majority of Yugoslavs, whether Party
members or not, stood by Tito. His wartime reputation as a Partisan leader and
his obvious determination to stand up for Yugoslavia’s rights in the face of Soviet
pressure ensured his survival.’4 Aware of Stalin’s methods, the CPY initiated a
purge of those who might back Soviet demands, sending suspects for rehabilitation
to the prison camp on the island of Goli Otok in the Adriatic Sea. The choice was
presented between a struggle to preserve the integrity of the country won after years
of hardship or submit to foreign rule from Moscow. This was not simply a patriotic
rallying call to unite the citizens of Yugoslavia, but an ideological commitment to
build a new kind of community based on the independence and equality of the
Yugoslav peoples within a federal structure. The link between the CPY’s concept
of Yugoslavia and its allegiance to revolutionary socialism now crystallized; the
Party and the state were an indissoluble whole. This unity in which one was
unimaginable without the other remained at the centre of the official history of the
new Yugoslavia until historians and writers, in their different ways, began digging
at the bedrock of this narrative in the 1980s, exposing the cracks and fissures in what
became regarded as its unreliable and controversial structure.
The authorities realized that building a new Yugoslavia was not just a matter
of laws and governance, but of winning hearts and minds, getting the people to
commit themselves to their vision of the future:
In order to realize that vision party leaders knew they must change not only
their country’s political and economic system but its citizens, their values,
morals, goals, aesthetics, and social behaviour. Among the tools by which the
CPY hoped to produce those changes was culture, including literature, theater,
film, music, dance, and the fine arts.5
It was important that the Yugoslav communists turned their attention to exercising
their control over the country’s cultural institutions at an early stage: ‘Već u julu
1945. postavljaju se organizacioni temelji aparata koji treba da usmerava ukupan
kulturni život i da onemogući delovanje onih snaga koje ispoljavaju drukčije ili
suprotne interese u odnosu na hegemona revolucije’ [The organizational foundations
of a structure were already established in July 1945 which was to direct all cultural
life and to prevent the operation of those forces which demonstrated different or
contrary interests in relation to the leaders of the revolution].6 The main feature
of this organization was the Section for Agitation and Propaganda, or Agitprop,
whose head was one of the foremost members of Tito’s inner circle, Milovan
Djilas, and its creation even preceded the election for the constituent assembly of
the new state which did not take place until November that year. Members of the
Agitprop committee were given responsibility for different branches of art and
culture, with Radovan Zogović holding the portfolio for literature. Zogović, like
Djilas, was a member of the Communist Party before the Second World War and
held unequivocal views on the potential of art’s contribution to social change. His
views echoed the basic principles of Soviet Socialist Realism which required that
literature play its role in the making of a new society, contribute to its ideological
transformation, and inform the general population about the need to adopt a
socialist perspective. It is easy to believe that Yugoslavia was slavishly adopting
Soviet practices since an Agitprop committee was founded in the Soviet Union
in 1920 with the same remit as the Yugoslav version. However, the reality was
that the CPY, as in other areas of public life, was willing to borrow structures and
frameworks from Moscow as vessels in which to pour their own ideas based on
but not identical to Soviet models. The Yugoslav brand of socialism showed local
variations in response to the post-war conditions of a small country, recently driven
apart by nationalist and ideological differences, which had by its own hand freed
itself from foreign occupation.
In his speeches and writings after the Second World War, Zogović frequently
underlined the social function of literature and the responsibility of the writer
to celebrate the war effort. The Partisans’ victory represented the unifying
symbolism of the resistance movement in which all the nationalities of Yugoslavia
had participated. It also provided the justification for the right of Yugoslavia’s
communists to assume the monopoly of political power in the country. Their
victory was not only a military achievement, but also an ideological breakthrough,
considered to be the calendar equivalent of the Soviet Union’s October Revolution
of 1917. Shortly after the liberation of Belgrade, in an article of December 1944 ‘Za
mač i za pero!’ (‘For Sword and for Pen!’), published in the Party newspaper Borba,
Zogović emphasized that it was the patriotic and revolutionary duty of the artist to
celebrate their success:
Ne zaboravimo da ni jedan pjesnik, ni jedan umjetnik u ovoj zemlji nije
platio svoj dug Prvom proleterskom korpusu . . . Voljeti svoju domovinu, biti
svjestan značaja slobode, služiti istini, slušati svoje srce, biti ratnik demokratije
i napretka — po ideji, patriot po ustremljenosti, realist po umjetničkom stilu,
udarnik po stilu rada, — to je sve!7
[Let us not forget that no poet, no artist in this country has paid his debt to
the First Proletarian Brigade . . . To love one’s homeland, to be aware of the
significance of freedom, to serve the truth, to listen to one’s heart, to be a
warrior for democracy and progress — in idea, a patriot in intention, a realist in
artistic style, a shock worker in the style of one’s labour — that is everything!]
His exhortation to realism was a reminder that literature was to be direct, unaffected
and accessible in its projection of its patriotic message; it was certainly not to be
distracted by modernist aesthetic practices confusing the clarity of meaning with
formal textual innovations.
In his later speech ‘O našoj književnosti, njenom položaju i njenim zadacima
danas’ (‘On Our Literature, Its Place and Its Tasks Today’) delivered to the first
Congress of Writers of Yugoslavia held in Belgrade 17–18 November 1946,
Zogović again fused orthodox socialist rhetoric with a specific supplement aimed
at reinforcing the Yugoslav content of the new literature:
Naša savremena književnost nalazi se, prije svega, pred zadatkom da umjetnički,
široko i živo, odrazi našu savremenu istoriju, njena teška i slavna poglavlja,
naše društvo, savremenog čovjeka. To praktično znači da je književnik stavljen
pred zadatak da ocijeni velike i prelomne događaje i činjenice četiri godine
Narodno-oslobodilačke borbe, narednih godina obnove i izgradnje zemlje,
obnove jednog i rasula drugog čovjeka. 8
[Our contemporary literature, above all, finds itself facing the task of expressing
artistically, broadly and vividly, our contemporary history, its difficult and
glorious chapters, our society and contemporary man. That practically means
that the writer is stood before the task of evaluating the great and crucial events
and facts of the four-year National Liberation Struggle, of the renewal and
reconstruction of the country in the following years, the renewal of one kind
of person and the downfall of another.]
The official narrative of the war extolled the CPY’s tactical decision to pursue
armed resistance against the enemy and its leading role in the final liberation of
the country. The Partisans were portrayed as heroes of a military campaign against
an enemy superior in technology, equipment, and numbers. Foreign troops seized
Yugoslav territory, supported by the Ustashas and Chetniks, who were often
depicted as more brutal and savage than German or Italian soldiers. In Partisan
iconography of the war the Ustashas and Chetniks, ‘between whom there was little
difference according to the new regime’, were totally discredited.9 The Partisans,
on the other hand, were an army of volunteers drawn from all the nations of
Yugoslavia committed to rid the country of its enemies and, at the same time, to
engage in a revolutionary struggle for the creation of a just society in which the
working people in towns and villages would emerge as masters of their own future
under the leadership of the CPY.
The aim of the new government was to promote popular remembrance of certain
aspects of the conf lict and forgetting of other events which did not coincide with
their version of history. Their version was written in historical records and school
textbooks, inscribed on public monuments, and celebrated on days of commem-
oration. The portrayal of events in popular fiction was a crucial element in sustaining
a consensual memory shared by the majority of the population through the constant
reminders of Partisan heroism pitted against a ruthless enemy. Ironically, Zogović
himself fell from power in 1948 for allegedly taking Stalin’s side, or at least for less
than a full rejection of all accusations against the leadership of the CPY. In his
memoirs, published many years later, he recalls the excesses of that time and how
dangerous those times were for all involved, no matter what their public office.
Zogović cautiously remarked to Djilas that in the letters from the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union criticizing the Yugoslav leadership ‘ima i tačno uočenih
naših grešaka, koje bi valjalo iskreno priznati’ [there are some precisely noted
mistakes of ours which ought to be sincerely recognized]. This was the first such
incident about which Djilas later spoke at a meeting of Agitprop, ‘“Zogović govori
takve blasfemije, od kojih se meni diže kosa na glavi.” ’ [‘Zogović commits such
blasphemies, that cause the hair on my head to stand on end’].10 It was not long
before he was ostracized by his former comrades and lost all positions of authority.
Djilas too fell from power in 1954 when ‘he criticized the party and the government
and called for less bureaucracy and more democracy’.11 Although the circumstances
were different in both cases, the fates of Zogović and Djilas were symptomatic of
the very dangerous times for ordinary citizens as well as political figures.
Whatever Zogović thought about the social function of literature, Socialist Realism
was hardly ever practised. The literary theoretician Aleksandar Flaker acknowledges
that, following its public adoption, the Soviet doctrine was not particularly effective
in Yugoslavia ‘gdje se socijalistički realizam nije uspio ni razviti u zasebnu stilsku
formaciju’ [where Socialist Realism did not succeed in developing as a specific
stylistic form].12 Flaker shows that no formal literary markers of the language or
style of Socialist Realism were imported and little thought was given to identifying
its place in Yugoslav literary history. The CPY’s only real interest was the doctrinal
demand that literature be subordinate to the Party’s needs in its struggle to build
socialism, and their adoption of the Soviet literary model was nothing more than
a response to immediate political needs. They were willing to entertain patriotic
writers who were not necessarily communists. Ivo Andrić, awarded the Nobel
prize for literature in 1961, was co-opted after the Second World War by the CPY
as a leading figure in its cultural apparatus. Among his other functions, he became
the first President of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia in 1946. As an author
with a distinguished pre-war reputation, the authorities used him to legitimize
their own views and pronouncements in the sphere of literature and culture. In
a lecture delivered in winter 1945 or spring 1946 to the Association of Writers of
Serbia, he spoke of Socialist Realism as a characteristic peculiar to Russian literary
development, the logical heir to Russian nineteenth-century literature and its trend
in social criticism, saying, ‘Posve je prirodno da je književnost u zemlji ostvarenog

socijalizma prešla od kritičkog realizma na socijalistički realizam’ [It is completely
natural that literature in the country where socialism was achieved passed from
critical realism to Socialist Realism].13 After 1948 the Yugoslav communists
searched for a new image by which they might distance themselves from the Soviet
cultural models and rhetoric with which they had been closely associated in the
early years. The change was an important step alongside reforms in economic and
social policy, in order to gain much-needed support from the Western powers now
they were isolated from their former allies in Eastern Europe.
Two important speeches at the end of 1949 set the tone for what was to come.
Edvard Kardelj, the CPY’s chief ideologue, spoke in the Slovene Academy of
Sciences and Arts against ‘partijnost’ in the arts and sciences, by which he meant
the subordination of systems of knowledge and representation to the demands of
the Party’s role in the vanguard of the revolution to build socialism.14 It is indicative
that the CPY began the process of defining the nature of literary and creative
freedom after deciding it had to reject the Soviet model on pragmatic grounds.
While terminology remained largely unchanged, there was now a transformed
emphasis in cultural policy, such that literature was no longer considered an arm
of Party policy but part of a broader political strategy in which ‘umjetnost treba da
služi društvenom progresu’ [art should serve social progress].15 The second speech
was Petar Šegedin’s address to the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia in Zagreb titled
‘O našoj kritici’ (‘On Our Criticism’) in which he sketched out a vision recognizing
that literature should remain socially engaged and that only the CPY could approve
the legitimacy and limits of this engagement. At the same time, he appealed for
this literary enterprise to include ‘totalitet čovjeka ili “ljudski smisao” ’ [the totality
of man or ‘his human meaning’]. Šegedin spoke cautiously, maintaining the
old terminology and only articulating his concerns following Kardelj and other
political figures. Nevertheless, it was an important address in the post-war period
as Stanko Lasić remarks in his study of the debates about literature and the left in
Yugoslavia: ‘Bio je to događaj bez presedana’ [It was an unprecedented event].16 It
marked the beginning of an approach whereby the scope of creative freedom was
widened so long as literature and the other arts did not oppose the fundamental
aims and achievements of the socialist revolution.
The early debates about a fresh direction culminated in a speech by the Croatian
writer Miroslav Krleža, one of Yugoslavia’s most prominent leftist intellectuals
from before the war. He was brief ly ejected from the Party in 1945 for what were
regarded as his Trotskyite revisionary opinions on the importance of literary
creativity and its role in building socialism expressed during debates in the 1930s.17
He was also viewed with some suspicion in some quarters of the CPY for staying
in Zagreb during the war: ‘Međutim, u danima pobedničkog slavlja položaj
najznačajnijeg pisca sa predratne levice, Miroslava Krleže, nije nimalo zavidan,
delom zbog njegovog neodlaska u partizane, a delom zbog predratnog sukoba na
književnoj levici’ [However, in the days of the victors’ celebration, the position of
the most important writer from pre-war left-wing circles, Miroslav Krleža, was
not at all enviable, partly because of not joining the Partisans, and partly because
of the pre-war conf licts on the literary left].18 His way back to official favour was
assured following his important speech to the congress of the Union of Writers
of Yugoslavia in 1952 held in Ljubljana. Writers who were communists were still
expected to undertake actions in order to prove their loyalty to and fulfil the
expectations of the CPY leadership and its policies in the arts. His speech continued
to mark official policy towards literature with a less dogmatic stance than before
but not one advocating complete freedom of expression. Literature, in Krleža’s
words, remained bound by a functional duty: ‘Naša socijalistička književnost ima
da brani južnoslovjenski socijalistički status quo, jer time brani naš socijalistički, a
prema tome logično i naš narodni i kulturni opstanak’ [Our socialist literature has
to defend the South Slav socialist status quo, for by that it also defends our socialist,
and by logical extension, our national and cultural survival].19 He repeated the
central plank of CPY thinking about literary engagement dating back to 1945: that
it must be both socialist and Yugoslav.
The lasting damage of Krleža’s public stance, supported by his reputation as a writer
and intellectual of independent views, was to endorse the link between the creation
of the new Yugoslavia and the commitment to a socialist future, since that bond
could only be assured by the Party as an administrative mechanism. Like Šegedin,
he advocated a way for the Party to distance itself from the Soviet Union without
surrendering its ultimate control over the production and circulation of meanings
in literature and the arts. Krleža himself teasingly referred to the possibility that
he was under pressure from the CPY to deliver his address some years later in an
interview when he said, ‘“Referati su nemoćni, trajno nemoćni. Pa i taj ljubljanski
referat nije moj, nego je proizvod jednog kompromisa.” ’ [‘Speeches are ineffectual,
abidingly ineffectual. And that Ljubljana address isn’t mine, rather it’s the product of a
compromise’].20 Nick Miller aptly describes Krleža’s speech as a significant moment
orchestrated from above: ‘Miroslav Krleža’s headlining and party approved speech
to the writers’ congress attacked orthodoxy in culture and served finally to declare
an end to the rigors of socialist realism.’21 The ideas which he advanced in his
speech do not represent a radical turning point but a rearticulation of the function
of literature in socialist Yugoslavia after 1945. There was no break in the essential
continuity of the political doctrine behind Yugoslavia’s version of Socialist Realism
as a mechanism for controlling the production and circulation of literary meanings,
although there were changes to the style in which that control was to be exercised.
The regime became more tolerant, allowing subjects other than the celebration of
the Partisan war effort and development of socialism in Yugoslavia. Writers were
freed to experiment with literary forms, while Western literary inf luences appeared
as the country opened its borders and looked elsewhere for political support and
cultural models.
In his study of literature in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, Thomas
Eekman writes: ‘It was an enormous relief when it became increasingly clear, between
1949 and 1954, that the Party (now transformed into a League of Communists)
would no longer enforce political-ideological directives upon literature and other
art forms.’22 The CPY renamed itself the League of Communists of Yugoslavia
(LCY) in 1952 as part of its public commitment to transforming its image. Eekman’s
view of the new cultural policy is overgenerous. Tentative steps were taken towards
a less dogmatic stance in cultural policy while confining discussions on such matters
to the institutions and structures established by the CPY. There remained a tension
in cultural policy between the regime’s public promotion of greater artistic freedom
and its need to defend the goals of socialist revolution. Both aspects of policy
appealed to the Party’s political self-interest in that, on the one hand, the cultivation
of a liberal approach to the arts helped differentiate Yugoslavia’s decentralized brand
of Self-Managing Socialism from the Soviet Union’s rigorously state-run system,
while attracting Western economic and political support. On the other hand, the
LCY, like the CPY before it, had no intention of relinquishing its monopoly of
power in the country at large. To this end, the control of images about the struggle
against internal and external enemies remained a vital element in the creation of
a post-war Yugoslav mythology and in the construction of cultural memory. It
became even more important with the passage of time, as the historical experience
of the war faded, leaving behind only its textual representations:
What is known about a war, a revolution, or any other event which has been
turned into a site of memory, therefore, seems to refer not so much to what
one might cautiously call the ‘actual events,’ but instead to a canon of existing
medial constructions, to the narratives and images circulating in a media
culture.23
Hence, the central significance of fictional narratives persisted alongside all other
types of public discourse in supporting a consensual memory of the Second World
War and the attention paid by the authorities to these constructions.
The Partisan war novel continued to tell an epic story of heroic fighters locked
in battle against an unscrupulous enemy. Partisans are depicted as brave in battle,
conscious of their revolutionary struggle for a better life for all the peoples of
Yugoslavia and caring for the non-combatants in whose interests they are fighting.
From an early stage, narrative demands for greater subtlety in exploring character
motivation without upsetting the ideological thrust of the national-liberation war
are incorporated in novels such as Dobrica Ćosić’s Daleko je sunce (Far Away Is the
Sun, 1951), Branko Ćopić’s Prolom (The Breakthrough, 1952), and Oskar Davičo’s
Pesma (The Poem, 1952). The novel Far Away Is the Sun is one of the most popular
Partisan stories and typical for the genre. It contains many descriptions of military
action, dialogues, and internal monologues laced with ideological commitment to
the future communist state. The peasant Gvozden is a communist and second-in-
command of the Partisan detachment who, having witnessed the actions of the
enemy against the civilian population in reprisals for attacks on them, proposes
that the unit disband in order the save the suffering of the local people. The author
puts to the reader a moral question as yet unasked in such works: ‘Da li se vredi
boriti po svaku cenu?’ [Is it worthwhile to fight at any price?].24 The question is
justified, but for the unit to demobilize even temporarily is counter to CPY policy
and Gvozden is executed on the orders of the unit’s political commissar, Pavle. At
the end of the story, Pavle is criticized for allowing Gvozden’s execution when he
could have been useful to the new regime after the war. The novel closes with an
optimistic image of Pavle and his men climbing a hill, having escaped German
attempts to annihilate them, marching upward in the certainty of final victory. The
Party has shown its compassionate side in admonishing the political commissar but,
in the context of the story, its reaction serves to increase a sense of justice and moral
victory brought in the wake of war. Although, from today’s distance, the plotting
and characterization in these novels appear simplistic, they are psychologically and
ethically more complex than similar literary works aimed at promoting the state
narrative sponsored by mono-party regimes in Eastern Europe remaining under the
Soviet umbrella.
It has become a common argument that Yugoslav cultural policy substantially
changed direction in the early 1950s. My argument is that while methods of
control became less oppressive and authoritarian, and the arts became more open to
Western inf luences and to formal innovations, mechanisms of constraint continued
to exist. The LCY did not give up its monopoly of political authority. Its propensity
to exercise control over the production and circulation of undesirable messages
in the public domain was undiminished, although its field of semantic interest
was significantly narrowed. Branka Doknić comments on the new mechanisms
available to the authorities in cultural policy in her study of the subject:
Nepunu deceniju posle dobijanja vlasti komunistička oligarhija definitivno je
postala jedina vlast, što joj je omogućilo da se u svom radu oslanja na pravne
propise, a ne, kao što je bilo do tada, na sistem direktiva i podobne ljude na
mestima gde se odlučuje.25
[Almost a decade after taking power, the communist oligarchy definitely
became the only authority, which allowed it to rely in its work on legal regu-
lations, and not, as was the case up to then, on a system of directives and on the
right people in decision-making positions.]
Unlike their colleagues elsewhere in Eastern Europe, writers and artists in Yugoslavia
were liberated from state brutality, but literature and the other arts continued to be
exploited in order to reinforce the dominant presence of the CPY’s narrative of the
founding of the state and the socialist nature of Yugoslav society. How this freedom
was managed is the subject of the next section in this chapter.
Same Policy, Different Methods, 1952–1984

Prose writing in Yugoslavia of the 1950s and 1960s developed with a multiplicity
of styles among younger authors, raising polemical questions and experimenting
with literary form. Writers born in the 1930s such as Danilo Kiš, Borislav Pekić,
Mirko Kovač, and Dragoslav Mihailović established their names in the 1960s, to
be followed in the following decade by a newer generation born in the 1940s such
as Milisav Savić, Vidosav Stevanović, Miroslav Josić Višnjić, and Radoslav Bratić.
Some of the works of these authors were contentious, sailing close to the limits
of what the regime found acceptable. When it came to the war novel, other types
of stories began to appear so long as they did not contradict the basic Partisan
narrative. Kiš published a very different story about the war, Bašta, pepeo (Garden,
Ashes, 1965). Based on his own childhood experiences, it tells the first-person story
of a young boy’s experiences with his Jewish father and Montenegrin mother. They
live in northern Yugoslavia, an area incorporated into the fascist state of Hungary
during the war, where they suffer anti-Semitic attacks from their neighbours and
the unwanted attentions of the authorities. The novel is composed from a network
of vividly recalled images pulled from the narrator’s memory of those times.
The narrator’s father becomes the central focus; a f lamboyant, deluded figure,
idolized by the boy, the author of a vast integrated travel timetable underpinning
his image as the archetypal wandering Jew. The father is eventually taken away
to a concentration camp and never seen again, except that the narrator thinks he
may have glimpsed him in later life but the sighting is not certain. Although his
novel appeared just fourteen years after Far Away Is the Sun, Kiš keenly felt that
his generation had a different approach to writing about the war. Speaking in an
interview from 1973 about writers of his generation, he highlighted one of their
common features:
Mogu samo da ponovim, što se sličnosti tiče, ili makar analogija, ono što sam
već tim povodom govorio: u našim prozama kada se govori o ratu menja se
ugao gledanja, što će reći ne govore više učesnici nego svedoci, a to bitno menja
stvar. Rat postaje, dakle, metafora, ili siže, ili kulisa.26
[I can only repeat, as far as similarities are concerned, or at least analogies, what
I have already said on the matter: in our fiction the point of view is changed
when the war is in question, which means that it is not participants who are
speaking any more but witnesses, and that fundamentally changes the situation.
The war becomes, thus, a metaphor, or a plot-line, or a backdrop.]
Kiš’s description of the war as a literary device is interesting but does not translate
into a direct challenge to the orthodox portrayal of the Partisan resistance
movement. He added another possible narrative layer to meet the demands of his
generation who were observers to the war, unlike older writers such as Ćosić who
were participants in its events. The passage of time demanded new approaches to
appeal to a new readership and keep the media construction alive. The more inclu-
sive attitude towards the portrayal of the war in literature is also sanctioned by the
growing inf luence of film, which overtook the written word as a popular form.
From the beginning, the new government was conscious of the heightened
effects which moving visual images could make on an audience and in the late
1940s decided to put resources into film production: ‘This period also witnessed the
establishment of a basic infrastructure in the areas of film trade, film production,
and film distribution upon which an independent national cinema could be built.’27
Their success in promoting the portrayal of the Partisan myth on the screen has been
compared to the western genre which provided the United States with its imagined
national narrative. History as related in the western emphasized the creation of a
new country from a wilderness, from virgin territory, where American settlers had
to struggle to make their farms and build their towns, to tame geography, to fight
for their land against Native Americans and overcome great adversities in order to
realize the birth of their new country. Greg DeCuir notes similarities in historical
recreation between the western and the Yugoslav war film:
Just as the Hollywood western mythologized the early formation of the United
States of America (and in some senses became the prototypical American film
genre) the Partisan war film did the same for the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia, while sharing conventions and iconography such as simplified
good/evil dichotomies and conf licts, wide open rural spaces, horses, guns and
gunfights.28
Yugoslav film directors borrowed from the Hollywood genre, highly popular at
home, and had great success ‘s partizanskim vesternima’ [with Partisan westerns].29
Budgets increased, films became longer and blockbuster epics became the order of
the day. In 1969 the most expensive film ever made in Eastern Europe, Bitka na
Neretvi (The Battle of Neretva) directed by Veljko Bulajić, was released in Yugoslav
cinemas. It centred on a real event from the Second World War when the Partisan
army came close to a disastrous defeat. Alongside the leading Yugoslav actors
of the day, the film featured a cast of foreign stars including Yul Brynner, well
known for his role as the gunslinger in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Return of
the Magnificent Seven (1966), and Curt Jürgens, one of the stars of the Hollywood
war epic The Longest Day (1962) about the D-Day landings in 1944. The film was
designed to appeal to domestic audiences and to add to the allure of the war in
Yugoslavia as an event of global reach by inscribing the story in an international
cinematic framework. Greg DeCuir remarks: ‘This lavish production signified
the importance the League of Communists placed on celebrating its legendary
historical sagas and it transformed the Partisan war film, ironically enough, into a
commodity spectacle.’30 There was no irony or paradox in the effect of the film’s
circulation since commodity spectacles were an effective way to communicate
with a mass audience used to Hollywood productions. The international aspect
of The Battle of Neretva was intended for domestic consumption, maintaining the
mythic status of Partisan heroes in a simplistic and crude representation of history’s
complexities. A series of expensive Partisan films were made to satisfy changing
audience demands and maintain the effect of the Partisan myth, including Sutjeska
(The Battle of Sutjeska, 1973, dir. Stipe Delić) with Richard Burton dubbed in Serbo-
Croat playing the role of Josip Broz Tito.
The beneficial effects of greater freedom of literary expression in Yugoslavia
have to be viewed alongside the continuing pressures which the CPY would bring
to bear when it deemed necessary in order to safeguard its socialist legacy. When
the CPY changed its name to the LCY, the interlocking functions of Party and
state gave way to a more disparate yet effective network of institutional links in the
Yugoslav Self-Management system maintaining central authority over the country’s
political, economic, and cultural structures. LCY members were dispersed
throughout the institutional framework across all sectors of the economy at local,
republic, and federal levels of government. Their roles in the workplace or political
assembly, their impact on events and domination over policy-making on all levels,
rested on their loyalty to the tenets of Yugoslav socialism and the totality of their
presence for propping up every corner of their inf luence. The LCY’s strict internal
discipline was the oil lubricating the wheels of state. As Singleton says, members
were ‘to play an active part in all socio-political organisations’.31 In culture, the
LCY found leverage through a number of channels that avoided the heavy-handed
mechanism of state censorship. Agitprop did not survive the reform period of the
early 1950s and was disbanded, but the Associations of Writers on the republic level
and the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia remained. Indirect pressures continued in
a ‘širok sistem mera’ [broad system of measures] which relied on rejecting some
manuscripts, planting unfavourable reviews, inviting writers to interviews with
the police, creating difficulties when applying for a passport, refusing employment
opportunities, withholding the offer of a bigger or better f lat.32 The threat of
indirect measures gave rise to instances of self-censorship, but there were also
examples over the years of more direct intervention.
The reception of Western inf luences in Yugoslavia began to be felt in the 1950s
when plays such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof were mounted in Belgrade, Western films were screened, and the
English sculptor Henry Moore held an exhibition of his works. Milutinović points
to this trend: ‘Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was staged in Belgrade in 1956, three
years after its premiere in Paris, and his fiction regularly translated.’33 However,
this was not an easy path, and the first attempt to stage Beckett failed. In January
1954 rehearsals of Waiting for Godot began in the Belgrade Drama Theatre. The
play’s articulation of hopeless nihilism and complete lack of social and individual
purpose did not correspond to the regime’s demand for art to serve the creation of
a better, socialist future. Krleža, on a visit to Belgrade, attended a rehearsal and left
his negative opinion of the work. It was then decided that the play be performed
just once, behind closed doors, for the theatre company only, in what was probably
an act of self-censorship, as Predrag Todorović remarks following his interviews
with those involved:
Danas svi, počev od direktora, opovrgavaju da su baš oni doneli tu odluku o
zabrani. Ipak, jasno je da ju je, budući da je malo ljudi sa strane videlo probe,
mogao doneti samo neko unutar pozorišta, upravo posle nenajavljene Krležine
posete. Autocenzura? Cenzura? Danas je to, čini se, nevažno. Bitno je da se sled
događaja preokrenuo.34
[Today, everyone, beginning from the director, denies that they were the ones
to take the decision to ban the play. Although it is clear that, as few people
outside the theatre saw the rehearsals, only someone from the inside could have
taken it, straight after Krleža’s unannounced visit. Self-censorship? Censorship?
Today this does not seem important. What is significant is that the course of
events was reversed.]
Self-censorship was a convenient tool for the regime as it leaves few traces and has
limited public resonance. High-profile individuals like Krleža would rarely have to
make overt comments to sow the seeds of doubt in a system in which it was well
known that benefits available from the artists’ Associations were controlled by LCY
members.
In contrast to this case, the later dramatization of Dragoslav Mihailović’s novel
Kad su cvetale tikve (When the Pumpkins Blossomed) attracted direct intervention. The
novel was received with critical acclaim in 1968 for its frank portrayal of post-war
urban youth and references to the first years of socialist Yugoslavia. The narrator,
Ljuba from Belgrade but now living in Sweden, speaks of the dance halls he used to
frequent with his friends, their girls and fights with rival gangs, and his career as a
boxer, which brought him into contact with an unscrupulous local Party hack. At
the time of the Tito–Stalin dispute in 1948, Ljuba’s brother is arrested and sent away,
echoing the fate of many others who were arrested and imprisoned on the prison
island of Goli Otok. The narrator has to do his military service and while away
from home he hears of his sister’s rape and subsequent suicide. Carefully planning
his revenge on her rapist, one of the leaders of the local gangs in Belgrade, he uses
his skills as a boxer to beat him to death. Shortly afterwards, fearing arrest, he
leaves for Sweden, from where he tells his story. The dramatized version, with none
of the distancing devices of narrative fiction, augmented the impact of political
elements now made visible by actors on stage playing, for example, the arrested
brother or other characters associated with the Communist Party and portrayed in
a negative light. The premiere was held on 6 October 1969 to a full auditorium in
the Yugoslav Drama Theatre. However, not everyone in the audience was happy
with the production: ‘Primećen je odlazak visokog partijskog funkcionera Kire
Gligorova za vreme pauze’ [The departure of the high-ranking Party functionary
Kira Gligorov during the interval was noted].35 The theatre’s director, Bojan
Stupica, immediately became involved: ‘Bojan Stupica je 7. oktobra, navodno,
otišao u Gradski komitet Saveza komunista Beograda (GK SK) na “razgovor”.’ [On
7 October Bojan Stupica ostensibly went to the City Committee of the League of
Communists of Belgrade for a ‘chat’].36 Further pressure was put on LCY members
in the cast to call for changes to the script and a meeting was arranged between
Stupica and Edvard Kardelj to remove the play from the repertory. The next step
was definitive when Tito gave a speech in the town of Zrenjanin: ‘Josip Broz je u
Zrenjaninu, 25. oktobra, osudio predstavu i autora’ [On 25 October, in Zrenjanin,
Josip Broz condemned the performance and its author].37 The LCY was not above
reclaiming its right to defend itself against what it felt to be attacks on its record and
its reputation and by utilizing the implied threat of state action in the case of those
undermining Yugoslavia’s socialist achievements.
The Serbian critic, Sveta Lukić, in his book Contemporary Yugoslav Literature,
emphasized the end of the 1960s as a period of renewed censorship, pointing to
the broader context of the time: ‘After the 1968 Belgrade University riots and the
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, new forms of interference reappeared in
Yugoslav literary life.’38 The LCY was faced with other events at home threatening
the status quo with the nationalist Croatian Spring movement of 1971 and the rise
of liberal elements in the leadership of the Serbian League of Communists, which
also required urgent attention. The Party acted fast to remove those who were
considered opponents from inside the LCY to ensure the total loyalty of the political
apparatus and to re-establish control of the means of producing representations and
meanings in all areas of culture and education. Most instances of censure were
low-key and passed unnoticed by the public, as the LCY mobilized its membership
across whole swathes of the committees and quasi-independent bodies active in
administering the artistic and literary world. Their actions were not dramatic or
brutal, as the West had come to expect from socialist regimes in Eastern Europe,
but they were effective: ‘U vremenu 1968–1976. zabranjeno je više dela nego u
celom periodu 1945–1968.’ [Between 1968 and 1976 more works were banned than
in the whole period 1945–68].39 The LCY galvanized and used the legal framework
of Self-Managing Socialism to stif le creative output during those eight years more
than had been done in the first twenty-three years of socialist Yugoslavia. One such
example is Miroslav Josić Višnjić’s novel Pristup u svetlost (Approach to Light).
Josić Višnjić had his first literary success with his collection of short stories Lepa
Jelena (The Beautiful Helen, 1969). His reputation grew rapidly and in 1975 the literary
journal Književnost began publication of his novel Approach to Light in instalments.
The story concerns the sensitive topic of the 1968 student demonstrations in
Belgrade and it was well received by the journal’s editorial board and critics.
Svetlana Velmar-Janković drew attention to the multi-layered nature of the work
incorporating events of the immediate present and the more distant past.40 The
book was due to be printed in 1976 by Prosveta, the same publisher responsible for
the journal Književnost. Following an unfavourable review in a student newspaper
commenting on its social criticism, the novel’s release was held up by a series of
meetings at which the editorial board of the journal was called to account for its lack
of vigilance in failing to prevent the publication of material attacking the principles
on which Yugoslav society was founded. The workplace organization of the LCY
in Prosveta, the local branch of the LCY and the Belgrade City Committee of the
League all put pressure on the journal. Josić Višnjić offered the manuscript to other
major publishing houses in Belgrade but it was rejected by all of them. He managed
to publish the novel at his own expense ‘u džepnom formatu 12x7,5 santimetara, u
tiražu od 425 primeraka, meseca oktobra 1980. godine’ [in a pocket edition of 12 x
7.5 centimetres, a print run of 425 copies, in October 1980] and it finally appeared
in the imprint of a major publisher in 1993.41 The incident reveals the efficacy of
the efforts of LCY members spread across a range of institutions to act in concert
as a mechanism to control literary production. The decisions taken by apparently
independent bodies gave the whole process a veneer of democratic action and
commercial justification.
The final bout between writers in Serbia and those in the LCY still intent on
managing the content of literary production took place in the early 1980s. A new
type of prose fiction about the Second World War began to appear after Broz’s
death in 1980. The Serbian League of Communists followed a more relaxed attitude
towards artistic production than elsewhere in Yugoslavia, less concerned by fictional
narratives countering official memorialization of the events of the past. The policy
caused disquiet in other Republics and the Central Committee of the League of
Communists of Croatia commissioned a report on recent examples of anti-socialist
literature in Yugoslavia and particularly in Serbia. The report was completed in
1984 with the title O nekim idejnim i političkim tendencijama u umjetničkom stvaralaštvu,
književnoj, kazališnoj i filmskoj kritici, te o javnim istupima jednog broja kulturnih stvaralaca
u kojima su sadržane politički neprihvatljive poruke (On Some Ideological and Political
Tendencies in Artistic Creativity, Literary, Theatrical and Film Criticism, and on Public
Statements by a Number of Artists Containing Politically Unacceptable Messages). The
report, containing 237 typewritten pages, was generally referred to as Bijela knjiga
(The White Book). It was a confidential document for circulation only within the
LCY, except that after the Serbian League received a copy its contents were leaked
to a variety of interested parties including the Association of Writers of Serbia. The

report’s authors devoted attention to the activities of individuals with quotations
from literary works, criticism and reviews, interviews given in newspapers and on
TV by well-known public figures from the world of culture. They referred to films
and plays from the period 1982–84 in order to illustrate the growing anti-socialist
and anti-Yugoslav stance expressed by some writers, critics, and others in the art
world. They claimed that the purpose of this dissident group is ‘da ocrni naše
društvo, ospori mu gotovo sve socijalističke i humanističke tekovine i perspektive,
negira socijalistički, demokratski i humani karakter svih ranijih etapa kroz koje je
ono prošlo, nudeći alternative koje se u biti svode na restauraciju građanskog društva’
[to blacken our society, deny almost all its socialist and humanist achievements and
perspectives, negate the socialist, democratic, and humane character of all its earlier
phases through which it has passed, offering alternatives which can be reduced
in essence to the restoration of bourgeois society].42 The authors demonstrated
their proximity to the spirit of Zogović’s demands, reiterated by Krleža, for the
social engagement of literature to promote socialism and, by logical extension, the
integrity of Yugoslavia. By reference to outside forces at work, implying a similarity
with 1948, they invoked the same need for a patriotic response to defeat foreign
powers which would otherwise destroy Yugoslavia. They focused on a number of
themes from recent works which highlighted the Stalinist measures taken to protect
Yugoslav independence in 1948, criticized basic tenets of the socialist state and the
figure of Tito, promoted this or that nationalism in opposition to the brotherhood
and unity binding Yugoslavia together. In their concluding remarks they drew
attention to the revisionary interpretations of the Second World War: ‘U dijelu
literarne produkcije izjednačava se jedna i druga strana u NOV-i: revolucionari,
partizani, komunisti, s ustašama, četnicima, bjelogardejcima, fašistima’ [In some
literary works both sides in the War for National Liberation are equalized:
revolutionaries, Partisans, communists, with Ustashas, Chetniks, White Guardists,
and fascists].43 The authors refer to the same founding myths which characterized
the defence of the socialist system and the Yugoslav state repeated since the end of
the Second World War.
Both the Serbian and the Croatian Leagues of Communists could assert that they
acted in accordance with the traditions of Yugoslav cultural policy. After Broz’s
death, the Republic governments competed to outdo one another in claiming
to be the true heirs to the legacy of the Tito era. Their rivalry was prompted by
the adoption of the slogan ‘Posle Tita — Tito’ [After Tito — Tito], affirming the
intention to follow the path marked out during the preceding thirty-five years. The
Serbian League could rightly claim that their approach showed their adherence to
the principle of freedom of expression, promoted in the more liberal reform period
after the split with the Soviet Union. The Croatian League, with equal justification,
could claim that their action was a response to the need to defend revolutionary
socialism against forces which would destroy Yugoslavia. Formal changes in the
political system and the real decentralization of decision-making processes did
not deter the last attempt by some in the LCY to manipulate the social function
of literature in their publication of The White Book. Yugoslavia did not disappear
because of the LCY’s cultural policy, but its inability to change fundamentally
its approach to literature was a sign of its institutional inf lexibility, which might
otherwise have allowed it to adapt and respond more rapidly and coherently to the
country’s needs at the end of the twentieth century.
The official story of brave Partisans fighting for the future of a united and
socialist Yugoslavia while facing an unscrupulous and cruel enemy was deeply
embedded in the national narrative. For decades the Party’s single-minded pursuit
to reinforce the link between its version of socialism and Yugoslav identity guided
its policies towards the arts. Literature, like cinema and painting, was to serve
the state’s founding myths and thereby maintain a consensual memory of the
past, central to post-war political unity. Writers in the 1980s certainly wanted
to broaden the base, to challenge the received stories, and to experiment with
alternative narratives. The search for a new language in which to articulate their
reinterpretations of ossified histories coincided with other challenges to the LCY’s
authority, including the return of memories which were half-forgotten of events
which did not correspond to official histories. At the same time, writers of fiction
were aware that the artistic organization of literary prose required more than just a
retelling of what happened, which is the task of historiography or another academic
discipline. Literary meanings explore other avenues in addition to the surface level
of plot development and cannot be judged according to their ref lection of historical
fact, which is only ever in tangential relationship to the fictional world of a novel.
Around the same time that Serbian writers were undoubtedly inf luenced by the
highly charged political atmosphere at home, they were also aware of changes in
the literary world with the advent of new types of historical fiction written abroad.
Serbian writers were not proposing alternative truths, but exercising a critical
approach to constructing the past as narrative and tying their work to literary trends
of the day, an approach analysed over the next three chapters.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. Fred Singleton, A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 211.
2. Zoran Milutinović, ‘“Yes, but . . .”: Institutionalization and De-institutionalization of Socialist
Realism in Serbia’, Ricerche slavistiche, 12 (2014), 295–321 (p. 307).
3. Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans: Twentieth Century, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), p. 326.
4. Singleton, A Short History of the Yugoslav Peoples, p. 222.
5. Carol S. Lilly, ‘Propaganda to Pornography: Party, Society, and Culture in Postwar Yugoslavia’,
in State–Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945–1992, ed. by Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and
Carol S. Lilly (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 139–62 (p. 139).
6. Ratko Peković, Ni rat ni mir: Panorama književnih polemika 1945–1965 (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić,
1986), p. 17. All translations from Serbian and Croatian are by me unless otherwise stated.
7. Radovan Zogović, ‘Za mač i za pero!’, in Na poprištu: Književni i politički članci, književne kritike,
polemike, marginalije, ed. by Radovan Zogović (Belgrade: Kultura, 1947), pp. 109–13 (p. 113).
8. Zogović, ‘O našoj književnosti, njenom položaju i njenim zadacima danas’, in Na poprištu, pp.
182–204 (p. 198).
9. Dejan Djokić, ‘The Second World War II: Discourses of Reconciliation in Serbia and Croatia
in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s’, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 4 (2002), 127–40 (p.
132).
10. Radovan Zogović, Postajanje i postojanje (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1993), p. 129.
11. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, p. 388.
12. Aleksandar Flaker, Stilske formacije, 2nd edn (Zagreb: SNL, 1986), p. 309.
13. Quoted in Ratko Peković and Slobodan Kljakić, Angažovani Andrić 1944–1954: Društveni rad,
govori, predavanja, članci, putopisi, reportaže . . . (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012), p. 63. This
little-known lecture was found in the archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and
is given in its entirety in the book Angažovani Andrić, pp. 60–64.
14. For more discussion on this topic see Dušan M. Bošković, Stanovišta u sporu: Stanovišta i sporovi o
slobodi duhovnog stvaralaštva u srpsko-hrvatskoj periodici 1950–1960 (Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački
centar SSO Srbije, 1981), pp. 1–5.
15. Stanko Lasić, Sukob na književnoj ljevici 1928–1952 (Zagreb: Liber, 1970), p. 276.
16. Ibid., p. 278.
17. Peković and Kljakić, Angažovani Andrić, p. 79.
18. Peković, Ni rat ni mir, p. 20.
19. Miroslav Krleža, ‘Govor na Kongresu književnika u Ljubljani’, Republika, 8 (1952), 205–43 (p.
238).
20. Quoted in Peković, Ni rat ni mir, p. 151.
21. Nick Miller, The Nonconformists: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism in a Serbian Intellectual Circle,
1944–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), p. 24.
22. Thomas Eekman, Thirty Years of Yugoslav Literature (1945–1975) (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic
Publications, 1978), p. 12.
23. Astrid Erll, ‘Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory’, in Cultural Memory
Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 389–98 (p. 392).
24. Jovan Deretić, Istorija srpske književnosti (Belgrade: Nolit, 1983), p. 624.
25. Branka Doknić, Kulturna politika Jugoslavije 1946–1963 (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2013), pp.
137–38.
26. Danilo Kiš, ‘Doba sumnje’, in Homo Poeticus, ed. by Mirjana Miočinović (Sarajevo: Svjetlost,
1990), pp. 254–87 (p. 259).
27. Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience, 1945–2001, rev. edn. (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 3.
28. Greg DeCuir Jr, Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Film Center Serbia, 2011), p. 28.
29. Radina Vučetić, Koka-kola socijalizam: Amerikanizacija jugoslovenske popularne kulture šezdesetih
godina XX veka (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2012), p. 140.
30. DeCuir, Yugoslav Black Wave, p. 33.
32. Kosta Nikolić, Srdjan Cvetković, and Djoko Tripković, eds, Bela knjiga — 1984: Obračun sa
‘kulturnom kontrarevolucijom’ u SFRJ (Belgrade, Službeni glasnik, 2010), p. 17.
33. Milutinović, ‘“Yes, but . . .” ’, p. 309.
34. Predrag Todorović, ‘Beket u Beogradu’, Književna istorija, 45 (2013), 467–82 (p. 473).
35. Aleksandar Novaković, Kako je Tito razbijao ‘Tikve’ [Istorija zabrane pozorišne predstave ‘Kad su
cvetale tikve’ Dragoslava Mihailovića ( JDP, 25. X 1969)] (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga/Alfa, 2004), p.
26.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 27.
38. Sveta Lukić, Contemporary Yugoslav Literature: A Sociopolitical Approach, ed. by Gertrude Joch
Robinson, trans. by Pola Triandis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 182.
39. Nikolić and others, eds, Bela knjiga, p. 24.
40. See Miroslav Josić Višnjić, ‘Letopis prvoga zgloba (Hronologija, činjenice i citati)’, in Pristup u
svetlost (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1993), pp. 293–316 (p. 296). This article is the author’s own history of
the affair surrounding his novel.
41. Ibid., p. 307.
42. Nikolić and others, eds, Bela knjiga, pp. 63–64.
43. Ibid., p. 247.
CHAPTER 2
❖
Historical Fiction, Haunted Fiction
Literature and the Challenge to Yugoslavia’s Socialist Narrative

Many fiction writers took up historical themes during the 1980s, particularly relating
to the Second World War. The initial challenge to the LCY’s official, mythological
version of history originated among Serbian scholars. Ivo Banac emphasizes fresh
historical scholarship and, without agreeing with all their conclusions, he cites a
few early works including Vladimir Dedijer’s Novi prilozi za biografiju Josipa Broza
Tita (New Contributions for Josip Broz Tito’s Biography, 1980), Branko Petranović’s
Revolucija i kontrarevolucija u Jugoslaviji (1941–1945) (Revolution and Counter Revolution
in Yugoslavia 1941–1945 , 1983), and in the same year the study published by Vojislav
Koštunica and Kosta Čavoški Stranački pluralizam ili monizam: Društveni pokreti i
politički sistem u Jugoslaviji 1944–1949 (Party Pluralism or Monism: Social Movements
and the Political System in Yugoslavia 1944–1949), as important academic publications
raising hitherto unimaginable questions. He compares the atmosphere among
Serbian intellectuals with that of their counterparts in Croatia:
Unlike the Croat intellectuals, whose spirits were cowed, Serbian intellectuals,
historians especially, whether Communists or noncommunists, became increa-
singly more daring in their publications. They were not intimidated by the
drones of the historical establishment and their ideological warnings at the
Eighth Congress of Historians of Yugoslavia (Arandjelovac, October 1983).1
Banac confines his discussion to the implications of scholarly output, its wider
inf luence among the academic community, and its impact on the writing of history.
He laments the turn towards nationalist narratives during the 1980s and concludes
that Yugoslav historiography ‘could not survive the notion that there were different
truths, negotiated by professional historians’.2 In the end, the Party did not survive
the decline of its officially promoted depiction of the past as a basis for a coherent
and consensual social narrative, and with it the state would also disappear.
Research and commentary on historical fiction in Serbia of the 1980s tends to
place it in the general context of the non-literary, historical revisionism of that
decade. New interpretations of the past based on evidence and memories of events
previously ignored or suppressed now surfaced telling stories at odds with those
promoted as part of official celebrations of state remembrance. The LCY sustained
a narrative in which not everyone had an equal investment, as Wolfgang Hoepken
comments:
Historical Fiction, Haunted Fiction 21
It was therefore a highly selective memory, one that excluded parts of the
society from official remembrance and produced a gap, perhaps even a conf lict,
between what some of the society remembered in private and what was
officially remembered in public.3
The fact that not everyone shared these memories stood in stark contrast to the
definitive status accorded to them as emblems of collective identity. They repre-
sented a community narrative which excluded those whose familial or personal
memories include the ‘unmarked burial sites’ of those victims killed in the
massacres of the interethnic conf lict in the Second World War.4 Memory, like
history, is a constructed site which can be used by political elites to inf luence the
formation of social and cultural identities by controlling the circulation of images
and master narratives about the past. Robert Hayden describes the slow rise to the
public surface of alternative, repressed histories:
Thus, in Yugoslavia in the 1980s and early 1990s, we can see the invocation and
manipulation of hidden and oppositional memories from within and without
the state socialist power structure. In both cases, ‘private knowledge’ that had
long been suppressed was used to challenge the versions of events that had been
carefully constructed and officially approved during the communist period.5
Personal and familial memories provide a source of knowledge now used to
challenge the official version of events. The communists in Yugoslavia established
such a process in formal areas of state ritual and, more importantly, in other areas
which are less formal but represent a persistent presence in everyday life such as
literature.
The combination of professional historiography and the exhumation of forgotten
memories, returning like ghosts to the present, were aspects of a wider interest
in alternative narratives. Denich refers to the wider reaction in Serbia during the
1980s in the following terms: ‘an outburst of art, literature, and scholarship on
national themes portrayed the Serbian history of statehood as a succession of losses
that began with the defeat of the medieval kingdom by the Ottoman Empire’.6
Dejan Djokić concurs with this general assessment by also drawing attention
to the appearance of new versions of the historical narrative: ‘The last years of
Yugoslavia witnessed an upsurge of historical revisionism which took the form
of a heated debate between writers, poets, artists, politicians and eventually even
academic historians.’7 Literary fiction is mentioned alongside other discourses,
equalizing the impact of documentary and imaginative sources, but without giving
due consideration to the differences in the semantic patterns which result from
this diversity of language types. Academic studies on historical revisionism in
Serbia have been written by scholars in the West interested primarily in the causes
of the break-up of the Yugoslav federation and the Wars of Yugoslav Succession
during the 1990s. Looking at the growth of extreme nationalist politics in the
1980s, these scholars highlight Serbian prose fiction as a space of public discourse
offering reinterpretations of the past which, in their view, are linked to later
political and military events. Some researchers make reference to literary works
although their focus is quite clearly on the history of political developments such
as Susan Woodward in her Balkan Tragedy and Robert Thomas in his Serbia under
22 Historical Fiction, Haunted Fiction
Milošević.8 Dobrica Ćosić, author of the Partisan novel Far Away Is the Sun, later
became disillusioned with the direction socialist Yugoslavia was taking. He became
associated with Serbian nationalist politics and was for a period in the early 1990s
President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Woodward makes reference to his
historical novels, linking their ref lections on Serbian history to scholarly treatises
by Vladimir Dedijer, Kosta Čavoski, and Vojislav Koštunica.9 Thomas mentions,
amongst others, Gojko Djogo’s collection of poetry Vunena vremena (Woolly
Times, 1981), the novel Nož (The Knife, 1982) by the writer-turned-politician Vuk
Drašković, and Danko Popović’s Knjiga o Milutinu (The Book about Milutin, 1985),
linking them and their literary works to wider political themes. Other researchers
give more attention to the role of Serbia’s intellectuals and the cultural politics of
this period such as Sabrina Ramet, in her Balkan Babel, and Jasna Dragović-Soso,
in her ‘Saviours of the Nation’, legitimately taking account of a variety of discourses.
There is no reason not to include discussion of public engagement by writers of
fiction, giving due attention to evidence for any claims relating to inf luence their
work may have had on social action. Events in the fictional world, although of a
different ontological order from those in the historical world, are not divorced from
effects in history, and there are appropriate theoretical models offering a framework
for exploring the manner in which works of literature are received which may help
to elaborate on the links between texts and their readership. This is not to say that
I agree with all the conclusions reached by these scholars, and in some instances I
take issue with their methodological apparatus for analysing fictional texts.
Sabrina Ramet writes about the problems faced in Yugoslavia after Broz’s
death:
It started with the writers. At first, of course, one was struck by the sheer
diversity of themes taken up by Serbian writers. But always the themes of World
War II, of victim psychology, of suffering, recurred, played now one way, now
another.10
She is concerned by the potential inf luence which the consumption of fictional
texts has on broader political events when writers come to the ‘reassessment of
World War II literature from the standpoint of national suffering’.11 Her discussion
of this topic centres on a small number of writers, some of whom, such as Vuk
Drašković and Dobrica Ćosić, actually held public office during the 1990s when
their major inf luence on public opinion was directed through their political role.
War literature focuses on suffering in which the role of the victim is shared by
civilians and military personnel alike. This is particularly the case in European
fiction of the twentieth century. Novels about the First World War drew attention
to the horrific experiences of military conf lict. Literature in the Soviet Union
about the Second World War insisted on the epic depiction of the heroism of the
people standing against the German military machine. However, Arnold McMillin
points out that in the more liberal times of the Thaw, Soviet authors portrayed
combatants ‘in situations of a desperate and even hopeless kind’.12 German soldiers
returning home from the front in 1945 found their cities and towns bombed into
ruins. Heinrich Böll and other German writers were criticized for depicting war’s
effect on the defeated nation:
While Böll and his literary generation were not held responsible for the war and
its wreckage, held against them was the fact that they wrote of what they saw:
of men, women and children sick and injured, of black marketeers and their
victims, of graveyards and cities that resembled graveyards.13
Feature films about the Vietnam War reveal the same trajectory as literary fiction,
setting individual characters against a larger historical frame, with films such as
The Deer Hunter (dir. Michael Cimino, 1978) which ‘emphasized the suffering
of the veteran and offered a closure to the trauma of American defeat’.14 Critical
studies show that the victims’ perspective as individuals and as representatives of
their wider community is one of the general characteristics of war literature. My
argument in this book follows from Ramet’s initial comment on thematic diversity,
exploring the strategies adopted by Serbian literature to articulate the suffering
caused by armed conf lict and the memories of war.
Ramet closes her discussion with reference to Danko Popović’s novel The
Book about Milutin. The book was the most popular novel of the 1980s, selling
some 188,000 copies, 50,000 more than its nearest rival from that period.15 It is a
sentimental novel about a poorly educated Serbian peasant recounting the story
of his life and its many trials from the First World War to the period just after
the Second World War. Ramet writes: ‘What Popović’s novel contributed was an
overt populist dimension, and the incredible popularity of this novel could have
provided a clue to observers that Serbia was ready for a populist takeover.’16 The
alliterative force of the sentence omits precise evidence relating to the structure
of the work or its reception which might demonstrate the link connecting the
eponymous Milutin’s fictional narrative to political events in the non-literary
world. The use of the modal auxiliary ‘could’ exposes the statement as a theoretical
possibility rather than a conclusive acknowledgement; equally, and without grounds
to the contrary, the popularity of the novel may prove nothing of the kind. Other
scholars also discuss the role of fictional narratives in the context of historical
revisionism. Andrew Wachtel promotes the responsibility of writers in the break-
up of Yugoslavia, claiming that ‘the actual work of dismantling Yugoslav unity
was carried out primarily in the cultural arena’.17 He discusses novels portraying
the sacrifice of the Serbs in the twentieth century in liberating other South Slavs,
including Popović’s The Book about Milutin, and their implicit message that the
Serbs are rewarded for their efforts by being stabbed in the back by those same
South Slavs. He concludes that during the wars of the 1990s such works ‘helped to
create an atmosphere in which the indiscriminate massacre of Moslems and Croats
could be seen as an act of self-defense rather than one of aggression’.18 The same
modal verb used by Ramet again indicates the speculative nature of his conclusion.
Both Ramet and Wachtel scratch the surface of an important issue which
really requires thorough analysis of the reception of these literary works in the
given culture.
In her thorough and extensive study of the rise of nationalist politics amongst
Serbian’s intellectual, cultural, and political elites during the 1980s, Jasna Dragović-
Soso discusses the extent of historical revisionism in Serbia. She details the combined
effect of both literary and documentary discourses:
As new histories and memoirs began to challenge the official founding myths
of Yugoslav communism, both literary and historical endeavours increasingly
became focused on three main themes: the brutality employed by the Party
against domestic opponents, during both the communist revolution and the
1948 break with the Cominform; the leadership’s wartime decisions, which
laid the foundations of the Yugoslav federation and its internal borders; and the
Party’s factional struggles, its relationship with the Comintern and its approach
to the national question in the interwar years.19
Dragović-Soso is quite right in isolating the topics which were scrutinized in
historical research and formed the point of thematic interest in many literary works.
However, the complexities produced by the specific narrative elements used to
construct fictional plots differentiate literary works from the explanatory frame-
works typical for academic discourse corresponding to the requirements of scholarly
exposition. The tenor of Ramet’s, Wachtel’s, and Dragović-Soso’s approach suggests
that the novels to which they refer exercised a political function. That function is
considered and examined based on an approach to literary criticism which assumes
that the semantic levels of the fictional texts in question are to be understood
according to a mimetic code of representation, offering an unproblematic version
of the national narrative; unproblematic in the sense that little attention is actually
given to the manner in which the structure of a literary text produces meanings.
In a paper delivered at a Belgrade conference on the historical novel in 1990, the
critic and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Predrag Palavestra
posed a question about the revival of historical fiction:
Naš zadatak na ovome skupu je dosta jasan i određen: treba da utvrdimo da li
je obnova istorijskog romana, i istorijske teme uopšte, koja se danas dešava pred
našim očima i daje jak pečat savremenoj srpskoj književnoj kulturi, jedna opšta
univerzalna, svetska književno-estetska pojava, svojstvena manje-više svim
književnostima savremenog doba, ili je u pitanju jedna izdvojena, regionalna
pojava, sa veoma izrazitim uticajima na stilske, žanrovske, tipološke i tematske
odlike samo jedne književnosti i kulture.20
[Our task at this conference is quite clear and defined: we should confirm
whether the renewal of the historical novel, and of historical themes in general,
which is happening today before our eyes and gives a powerful stamp to
contemporary Serbian literary culture, concerns a general, universal, global
literary-aesthetic phenomenon, a characteristic more or less of all modern
literatures, or whether it concerns an isolated, regional phenomenon, with
very pronounced inf luence on the stylistic, generic, classificatory and thematic
features of just one literature and culture.]
Palavestra does not explicitly answer his question, whether the Serbian case is an
isolated example of the resurgence of the historical novel in the late twentieth
century. He includes an explicit European dimension to the development of the
historical novel as he conceives it, referring to canonical literary works, such as
Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and citing the names of
European thinkers who have inf luenced modern understanding of the historical
novel and historical consciousness. He also insists that Serbian literature has a
specific interest in historical fiction which may or may not be present elsewhere:
‘Današnja pojava srpskog istorijskog romana zato je prvenstveno kritička i

demistifikatorska, više vezana za ideje epohe nego za događaje, zaplete ili fabulu’
[The phenomenon of the Serbian historical novel today is thus primarily critical and
aimed at demystification, more connected to the ideas of the age than to events,
plots, or a story].21 He emphasizes that Serbian literature turns to history precisely
in order to challenge the dominant narrative which the LCY has fostered and
handed down. Palavestra develops the term ‘kritička književnost’ [critical literature]
as a term to embody the modern literary idiom and postmodernism’s demand
for an end to history’s grand narrative: ‘Pluralizam stilskih, idejnih i stvaralačkih
opredeljenja bitna je odlika književnosti postmodernizma’ [The plurality of stylistic,
ideological, and creative orientations is an essential characteristic of the literature
of postmodernism].22 Later, in an essay from his collection Književnost — kritika
ideologije, he writes: ‘Svoj kritički odnos prema ideologiji današnja književnost
ostvaruje kao jednu od alternativa postmodernizma’ [Literature today realizes its
critical relationship to ideology as one of the alternatives of postmodernism].23 His
thinking crystallizes around Serbian literature as a discourse challenging the LCY’s
ideological commitment to the onward march of history towards the single goal of
achieving socialism.
Serbian commentators also draw attention to historical interpretation as the
crucial feature of prose fiction from this period, to the political function rather than
the literary aspect of historical fiction. They emphasize how narrative fiction plays
an active role in retelling the recent past distorted by the demands of the communist
authorities. According to the critic and literary historian Tihomir Brajović, writers
created an ambivalent type of fiction with elements of both imaginative and
historical discourses in which the historical element is regarded as a necessary
corrective to the official interpretations of past events. He describes this kind of
historical fiction as ‘bujnu novomemoarsku literaturu osamdesetih godina prošlog veka’
[the profuse literature of new memory of the 1980s].24 Discussing many of the works
which are the subject of the present study, he points to Broz’s death as a significant
factor in stimulating the literature of new memory. He considers that the authors
of such works are trying ‘da pronađu uzroke aktuelnog “događanja istorije”.’ [to
discover the causes of the actual ‘happening of history’].25 The ‘happening of
history’ was a phrase used at the time to refer to the revival of interest in historical
themes generally, both in fictional and in non-fictional discourses. The critics and
supporters of new trends in historical fiction see it as a mimetic revalorization of
historical events, a new window on the past affording truthful glimpses of what
happened in contrast to the distorted official historical narrative.
Slobodan Selenić, himself an acclaimed author of many novels of historical
fiction from this period, proposes a similar role for literature in its obsession with
themes about the past: ‘The historical and political considerations are so aggressively
present in our literature because the genuine historical research remained suspended
for such a long time. For decades, the powerful ideological institutions only allowed
official versions of historical events.’26 Writers of literary fiction took over the role
of university historians because the discourse of academic history became ossified
in its constant repetition of the Party line and no longer able to articulate new
interpretations of the past. This view is disputed by the findings of Ivo Banac on
Serbian historians from this period who were challenging dominant assumptions in
their work. It also does not chime well with the creative output of Selenić himself
for whom the difficulty of writing narrative about the past is a frequent theme in
his novels. However, historical narratives and fictional narratives, although closely
related in terms of narrative structure and employing similar types of narrative
units, remain distinct in their relationship to the world outside the text.
Historians write about worlds which existed, having the task to communicate
a description of that world which is well grounded, reliable, based on known
evidence and open to corroboration. Although the narrative form is similar to
that of historical fiction, with a narrator employing a particular point of view and
describing actors and their actions, the status of events is quite different. Events
described as part of a sequence in history are supposed to have happened and the
accuracy of the narration is verifiable. There may be cracks in the record but ‘they
are epistemic, determined by the limitations of human knowledge’.27 When the
story is straightened out or a new set of documents found, the next generation of
historians can correct and supply the new information to support their view of
what really happened. Even when history is invented as a deliberate act motivated
by the desire to spread the lies of political propaganda for the sake of current
political needs, the invented history is held to be true until such a time when the
intentional lacunae may be corrected. However, gaps in literature are never of such
a nature, as Lubomír Doležel comments: ‘The fiction writer is free to vary the
number, extent, and functions of the gaps; his choices are determined by aesthetic
(stylistic) and semantic factors.’28 The fictional status of the literary creation is such
that it is pointless to refer to events in a novel as being either true or false. The
significance of fictional stories may change in relation to actual history, but that
does not make them redundant as works of fiction. Partisan novels and films from
earlier decades are republished and shown on television in Serbia in the twenty-first
century even though they no longer correspond to an accepted historical narrative.
Fictional narratives exist in a more f lexible semantic relationship to the social
imaginary than, say, narratives based on historiographical research or memoirs of
people actually involved in real events from the past. Hence, in this study, they
are discussed as a specific category of texts existing in a variable and open field of
meaning production.
It is an accepted point in the study of literary texts that when a story includes
reference to actual events or personages, once the details are put in the context
of a fictional world they adapt to the limits of their new environment. Historical
references are just another linguistic layer contributing to the overall meaning of
the text. Fictional narratives may look like the unfolding of historical events, but
they are a representation of an imaginary past. Any analysis of such texts has to take
account of the function allotted to narrative devices in any particular instance. The
semantic aspect of a complex piece of narrative fiction develops at the intersection
of a number of different textual planes. When texts refer to the non-literary world,
this type of reference is oblique, often relying on metaphor or other linguistic devices
to suggest a richness of semiotic links beyond the immediate significance of words.
Novels also rely on an internal logic of plot development or symbolic function,

which may reside on a purely linguistic level or be in character traits projecting
broader fields of signification, to support the construction of the fictional world.
Stylistic questions concerning the dominant principles of aesthetic organization of
the text in question are also embedded in the operation of a text’s semantics, as are
those features employed to reinforce the authenticity of the fictional world. These
factors are taken into account in the examples used to illustrate the arguments
presented in this book both in the literature of the 1980s and in examining later
developments in the 1990s. This study focuses on the formal features of fictional
narratives, how texts produce meanings, their characteristic structural features, and
their dominant motifs.
Why Haunted Serbia?

The challenge to the politically orthodox understanding of the past mounted in the
public discourse of the 1980s is one context in which to place Serbian fiction of the
decade. By disinterring the bones of the past, literature offered reinterpretations of
what had happened in crucial phases of the national narrative. At the same time,
it was exploring a fresh narrative form in which to view historical experience and
mould a new understanding of the past. If it is assumed that the task of historical
fiction is to reiterate a version of what happened, literary material is then forced
into a straitjacket of mimetic representations of the past. However, there is another
context in which to view new historical prose, alongside contemporary Western
literary inf luences and theoretical frameworks for fictional representations of
history. In this approach, literature’s socially symbolic space is a far stronger
instrument than one of simple ref lection. The literary activity of the 1980s was
important for introducing into the public domain hitherto forgotten or dormant
narratives of what happened and indicating other possibilities of how the present
may be linked by numerous polyvocal strands to the past. This second context, and
the one more relevant to the aims and arguments of this study, is based on analyses
of the formal structures of literary texts and on exploring semantic levels as they
refer to more general issues of historical representation and the relationship between
fictional narrative and historical discourse. From the beginnings of modern Serbian
literature in the eighteenth century, writers were exposed to and learnt from the
works of foreign authors. Such echoes gathered pace during the nineteenth century
as Serbian authors consciously followed literary models from the West, assimilating
new stylistic tendencies, adapting thematic currents, and, in the early twentieth
century, regarding themselves as part of the European cultural family. After a brief
period in which the CPY strongly discouraged the reading of Western literatures
after the Second World War, the Yugoslav cultural space was opened to the impact
of foreign authors once again so long as their effect was not to oppose the CPY’s
and later LCY’s mythic narrative. In her extensive study of Serbian postmodernism,
Ala Tatarenko remarks on the number of modern authors whose work was read
and known in Serbian literary circles in the 1980s, citing the names of Jorge
Luis Borges, John Barth, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Umberto Eco, Thomas
Pynchon, among others.29 Literature continued in this direction by articulating the

challenges presented by the return of memories which were formerly considered
to be settled. The literary imagination fashioned these memories into the ghosts
haunting the 1980s.
The authors listed by Tatarenko often feature in studies of new historical fiction
by, for example, Linda Hutcheon, Robert Holton, David Price, Amy J. Elias and a
book of essays on British fiction edited by Richard Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip
Tew.30 These studies, covering a variety of authors with different literary styles
and poetics, analyse the representation of history in modern fiction. The disputes
and contrary claims of these scholars are mixed with broad areas of consensual
agreement. Areas of agreement often coincide with trends in Serbian historical
fiction: that the portrayal of events from the past in fiction is valorized for what it
says about the problems of narrating the past rather than for an accurate depiction
of events from the past. Less emphasis than in the traditional historical novel is
placed on history as an unfolding of episodes in a chronological or causal chain.
New historical fiction is much more interested in the space between the ability of
narrative to recreate the accuracy of what happened and to explore the significance
of the traces of past events for the present day. The discussions in studies of Western
literatures about narrative strategies in relation to the difficulties encountered in
trying to narrate the past manifest some significant similarities and some significant
differences between new historical literature in the West and in Serbia.
The overlapping concerns in the West and Serbia should not be over-emphasized,
but neither should they be dismissed in favour of highlighting the obvious
differences. Western and Serbian new historical fiction draw attention to the con-
struction of historical knowledge, to a vital need for the rediscovery of the meaning
of the past and to the place of history in our lives. Linda Hutcheon focuses on a
particular type of novel which she terms historiographic metafiction: ‘By this I
mean those well-known and popular novels which are both intensively self-ref lexive
and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages: The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, Midnight’s Children, Ragtime, Legs, G., Famous Last Words.’31
Commentators in Serbia have noted the popularity of historical novels there too
and their tendency towards admitting authentic historical events and personages.
It is also the case that narrators in Serbian historical fiction self-consciously supply
details of how they learn of what happened and how they intend to communicate
that knowledge to others. It would be better to say of Serbian literature that a more
appropriate emphasis would be gained by reversing Hutcheon’s words: that new
historical writing in Serbia lay claim to historical events and personages and became
increasingly self-conscious about narrating the past along the way. Hutcheon roots
her study of new historical fiction in postmodernism, a cultural activity which she
describes as ‘fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably
political’.32
Brajović resists any overlaps between Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction
and Serbian literature of new memory, a literature which he considers more
didactic and without any fundamental paradox between reference and language,
signified and signifier. He is correct to the extent that the writers of new historical
fiction are rarely interested in radically subverting all literary traditions. However,
the problem arises from the general view in Serbian literary history which
overemphasizes postmodernism’s non-mimetic and anti-realist side, overturning
narrative conventions and introducing experimental stylistic notes. Tatarenko
observes this feature in the second phase of her chronological development of
Serbian postmodernism during the 1980s and early 1990s: ‘“Mlada srpska proza
osamdesetih” nasledila je od prethodnika pažnju prema formi i inovativne narativne
strategije’ [‘Young Serbian Prose of the 1980s’ inherited from its predecessors
an attention to form and innovative narrative strategies].33 All too often, overt
experimentation with linguistic form and literary convention is understood to be
the prerequisite for innovative narrative strategy; whereas, for Hutcheon, post-
modernism is not just about formal experiments. On the contrary, she asserts that
postmodernist works ‘mark the “return” of plot and questions of reference’ unlike
more outlandish attempts ‘to explode realist narrative conventions’.34 These novels
are best-sellers precisely because they are ‘still committed to telling a long and
involving story, full of believable characters, which can be enjoyed by the reader in
the manner of nineteenth-century realism’.35 Of course, such works simultaneously
undermine the same conventions, but by working within the narrative frame
offered by these traditional forms. This is the fundamental contradiction of
historiographic metafiction to which Hutcheon refers as it focuses attention on
the literary construction of historical knowledge. In the Serbian case, as in other
literatures, innovative strategies for representing history do not have to be linked
to postmodernist or other experiments.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, an end-of-millennium desire was
growing to look back and take stock of the important events. On the one hand,
the modern world experienced forward movement in technological and scientific
progress, economic well-being for a sizeable proportion of the population, and
greater social stability. On the other hand, the century which began with the
carnage of the First World War did not learn any lessons and it was followed by
another horrific conf lict two decades later. Advances in technological, economic,
and social fields supported the building and equipping of military machines to
fight more effectively and with more destructive power than before. Ideological
demands created the Holocaust, concentration camps, the gulags, and the Cold
War. Conventional histories producing narratives to frame and explain events were
found wanting in the face of such occasions which went beyond the frames of
reference of those who suffered and those who came later to observe and categorize
the past. Amy J. Elias sees the swing towards postmodern historical fiction as a
result of the struggle to confront this history of terror and chaos. History cannot
be known and narrated as smoothly as thought since events evade our attempts
to impose sense and order on them as manifestations of our comprehension and
mastery over the past. Rather, such attempts themselves stand to mark our coming
to terms with the enormity of the past. Contemporary historical fiction follows
this same sceptical route towards constructing what we might know about the past,
as Elias says: ‘In literature, the turn to history at the end of the twentieth century
signals this desire to rediscover meaning, to make sense of the Void, in a way that
potentially avoids the mistakes of the past.’36 The reasons engendering this impetus
towards a new literary poetics emerge from changes in the political and intellectual
climate affecting personal and social sensibilities of the time. And, rather like an
echo to Hutcheon, Elias terms this kind of postmodern fiction the metahistorical
romance and insists on communication through storytelling when she says of the
metahistorical romance:
Its critical, and postmodern, historiographical position stems as well from what
the text itself says about history or implies about it through the story it tells.
Metahistorical romances that look very conventional ‘on the surface’ may, in
fact, say fairly radical things about history.
Such works are not wedded to merely formal innovation, to simply telling ‘a
tale in a weird and avant-garde way’.37 Serbian writers express similar feelings
of angst at the horrors of the twentieth century and, while writing works which
may be considered conventional on the surface, also articulate a vital need for the
rediscovery of the meaning of the past, a past which was largely suppressed under
the weight of official versions of history.
Others follow Hutcheon and Elias in observing a change in the literary poetics
of historical fiction, but without an insistence that this is necessarily linked to
postmodernism however defined. In their introduction to a collection of essays on
contemporary British fiction, Richard Lane and Philip Tew discuss a change in
public discourse about history and myth coinciding with a new government elected
in the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher in 1979. This period in cultural
history was strongly inf luenced by the radical shake-up in the social and political
consensus which dominated post-war Britain; an effect not unlike that of the post-
Vietnam effect in the United States. In these circumstances, writers were affected by
the shift in the political landscape and the accompanying fresh approach to literary
precedents. Lane and Tew describe the literary reaction: ‘The place of history in
our everyday lives, its literary recovery and the question of its status recur in a
variety of contemporary British fictional texts.’38 They present works by a number
of novelists who, for example, radically engage with patterns of social history
(Graham Swift’s Waterland, 1983) or experiences of the First World War (Pat Barker’s
Regeneration trilogy, 1991–95). They propose that such literary works both question
what history is and what it does or what it might do, closing their introduction with
the statement: ‘History is both interrogated and becomes interrogative.’39 David W.
Price in his book History Made, History Imagined also proposes the advent of a new
kind of thinking about history and writing of historical fiction at the end of the
twentieth century, urged on by our approach towards ‘the end of the millennium’.40
In his view, this kind of literature is not fettered by the epistemological conventions
of the discipline of history and is free to combine reference to particular events
with the universalizing conditions of their importance on the broader scale of
humanity: ‘The novelists examined here also often employ the poetic imagination
as a means of questioning history, which, in turn, produces a countermemory or
counternarrative to the popular and uncritically accepted referent that we take to
be the historical past.’ 41 These scholars all point to the advent of a new type of
historical fiction, one which is concerned with rediscovering the meaning of the
past, rather than recreating images of past events, and investigating the issues which
hinder or even make impossible the narration of the past, while giving credit to the
plurality of cause and effect relations which give history its multi-stranded realities.
The literary climate of Serbia in the 1980s was equally disturbed by the challenge
of turbulent change and, even if the rupture with the past had a different cause, the
result was the realization of the place of history in shaping everyday life.
The overlaps and coincidences drawing together the interest in new historical
fiction in Serbia and the West at a particular moment in the latter part of the
twentieth century sit alongside their differences. New historical fiction wants to
rescue from oblivion those stories of neglected minorities which dominant forms
of discourse have shunted aside as unimportant actors on the stage of political and
social history. Characters from the social margins, whether they be considered as
such because of class, gender, sexual, or racial identities, are often given voices and
a role to play in works by representative writers of new historical fiction such as
Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. They offer stories about
those whose existence has been among the dispossessed, the politically weak and
culturally silent members of the collective. Hutcheon reminds us that in order
to recentre such groups, historiographic metafiction does not efface the border
between history and literature, but exploits intertextual possibilities and parodic
readings to underline the contradictory relationship between them: ‘The past really
did exist, but we can “know” that past today only through its texts, and therein
lies its connection to the literary.’ 42 The ontological distinction between the two
worlds of history and literature remains, but there is a point of connection where
fiction resembles reality and that point provides the ideological implications of
the literature she describes, making it ‘overtly and resolutely historical — though,
admittedly, in an ironic and problematic way that acknowledges that history is not
the transparent record of any sure “truth” ’.43 The interplay between the orders of
literature and history is present in Serbian literature, and authors are at pains to
show that ‘history is not the transparent record of any sure “truth” ’, but in a more
critical and less ironic mode.
Serbian literature of the 1980s took up themes about the Second World War
and events detailing the means by which the CPY established a government and
consolidated their hold on political authority in Yugoslavia, debunking prior
mythic structures and questioning them in prose fiction. It offered an unsettling
and provocative representation of revived memories, traumatic histories of the
national past, and possibilities for the reintegration of past and present in the face
of new challenges. Novels and stories in their articulation of a fictional world and
reference to the real world ‘create new models of memory’, as Birgit Neumann says.
She continues to argue that such works ‘combine the real and the imaginary, the
remembered and the forgotten, and, by means of narrative devices, imaginatively
explore the workings of memory, thus offering new perspectives on the past’.44 The
discontinuities of history and the traumatic experience of past conf licts are often
combined in Serbian narrative fictions of this period and reinforce one another as
narratives of transition offering new models of how we might imagine the past, the
present and the links between them. Prior assumptions are in the process of being
eradicated along with the worlds which they represent. It is a literature not only
of new memory, but also of the struggle to find sense where there is no apparent
meaning, to articulate the frightening terror of the immediate present and memory
of the past. In their search for a new language in which to express this confrontation
with the past, fiction writers often introduce a note of the uncanny. The uncanny
here is understood broadly as something out of the ordinary, something not quite
right with the world, something which suggests that the narrative steps outside the
usual frame of reference. The uncanny is linked to ghostly, grotesque, and fantastic
images indicating a rupture in the unfolding of time or events, which cannot be
accounted for by ref lecting on the logical development of events or thoughts. The
chain of signification has been interrupted and there is no way back to the safe,
known world of accepted beliefs.
Images of the uncanny, and its associated fields of the grotesque and fantastic in
literature, have often been linked to specific moments of historical, political, and
cultural transition. Wolfgang Kayser, examining the appearance of the grotesque in
literature, finds that the concentrated artistic function of such forms coincides with
times when old certainties about the world disappear; for example, in the sixteenth
century with the gradual loss of the divine medieval universal order. In relation to
the appearance of grotesque artistic and literary forms in the twentieth century, he
writes:
The modern age questions the validity of the anthropological and the relevance
of the scientific concepts of the nineteenth century. The various forms of the
grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of
rationalism and any systematic use of thought.45
The grotesque, which Kayser defines as ‘an attempt to invoke and subdue the
demonic aspects of the world’, exceeds the boundaries of the rule of rational order
and logical effects in a changing world.46 Exploring fantastic literature, Rosemary
Jackson begins her study of the modern period from the late eighteenth century,
which she characterizes as ‘the point at which industrialization transformed western
society’. She continues: ‘From about 1800 onwards, those fantasies produced
within a capitalist economy express some of the debilitating psychological effects
of inhabiting a materialist culture.’ 47 In other words, she points to the inf luence of
the industrial revolution on ways in which people could imagine their world. Both
Kayser and Jackson discuss how radical social transformations demand changes to
habits of thinking and feeling, thus discarding old perceptions and bringing about
new ways of seeing the world. The uncanny, grotesque, or fantastic in various forms,
according to José B. Monleón, reveals ‘an epistemological question relating to an
uncertainty about or questioning of the nature of some events’.48 The appearance
of the uncanny in literature and art accompanies a period of disturbance in which
reality is being questioned and reassessed. Such imagery offers an alternative view
to that of the accepted cultural order ‘for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to
illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value
systems’.49 The uncanny functions as a literary strategy because it offers a glimpse
of something which is otherwise lacking in the dominant order, it makes visible
that which is absent, that which is unknown or still not real but is in the process of
becoming real. Serbian society found itself in the midst of radical transformations
at the end of the twentieth century, forcing a critical rethinking of the past and of
cultural identities in the present in ways similar to the transformations discussed by
Kayser and Jackson.
What is preserved as a record of the past is not the residual truth of what
actually happened, but the constructed organization of events with their causes
and consequences established in narrative patterns to provide an interpretative
framework in which the current state can plausibly rest. All that is contrary to this
framework is omitted by a process of social amnesia, or by an engineered removal
of history, or by a combination of both voluntary and forced measures in order to
ensure the distancing of painful memories. Whatever mechanism is at work, the
complications of the past do not disappear. They remain as shadows giving rise to
new knowledge in different circumstances and with unknown effects. Haunting
is what happens when this other knowledge begins to make itself known, when
the certainties of the present begin to waver because the breaks and apparent
absences supporting the edifice generally known as the here and now fill with new
substances and emotional colouring. The shape of the contemporary world is being
transformed. Avery F. Gordon in her study of the effects of such an approach to
haunting offers an opinion of what is at stake, saying:
Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed,
although it usually involved these experiences or is produced by them. What’s
distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed
or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly,
sometimes more obliquely.50
The particular status of haunted memories, according to Gordon, rests on an
‘unresolved social violence’ which returns them to the present. Recollections of past
wars, of histories erased for being contrary to orthodox opinion, acts of brutality
sanctioned by the state against its own citizens, are all examples which constitute
social violence and which were articulated in Serbian narrative fictions in the 1980s.
Haunted narratives represent a mediation between the self and history; rather than
being a return to history they bring the past into the present and make it available
once again. It is the same process which ties individual experiences to socially
symbolic codes allowing them to be communicated and shared. Thus, haunting is
not an escape into another realm, but as Gordon argues: ‘To be haunted is to be tied
to historical and social effects.’51 Serbian narratives in the 1980s frequently expanded
on the unsatisfactory ending of past injustices, real or imagined, only in the 1990s
to be faced with further acts of social violence in the Wars of Yugoslav Succession
and the NATO attack on Serbia and Montenegro in 1999.
Forms of the uncanny, especially instances of haunting, the appearance of ghosts
and other spectral figures, have been examined in twentieth-century literature.
Bianca Del Villano, among references to Gordon’s work, makes the simple point,
‘In short, the ghost dramatises the presence of an absence, making what lies beneath
come to the surface.’52 The ghost is what comes back; what was thought to have
been settled intrudes on the present once more demanding attention. Renée L.
Bergland discusses the appearance of two types of ghost; one type functions as a
sign of inner and personal demons, while the other type declares social and public
transgression. The former, psychologically grounded apparitions are generally held
to be a more modern type, while the latter belong to an older species:
Murder, disturbed graves, and unlawful distribution of property — these are not
private issues. To this I would add that pre-Enlightenment ghosts often protest
unlawful transfers of political power. Think of Shakespeare’s ghosts in Hamlet,
Macbeth, Richard III, and Julius Caesar. They decry their own murders to be sure,
but they also decry the usurpation of sovereignty — stolen kingdoms!53
This ghost, a public figure representing the return of the socially repressed, is also
to be found in twentieth-century literature as in Toni Morrison’s work Beloved. The
novel is set in nineteenth-century America, spanning the years before and after the
Civil War. The slave woman Sethe escapes from her master and finds refuge where
she gives birth to a baby daughter. In great fear that she and her baby are about to be
caught and returned to slavery, highly distraught and out of her mind, she kills her
own baby so she would not know the degradation of living as a slave. The memory
of the event lingers on and the daughter survives in Sethe’s imagination known
only by the adjective placed on her tombstone, Beloved. Years later, a strange young
woman turns up who may or may not be the ghost of her daughter. The moment
of hesitation regarding the return of Beloved maintains the indistinct relationship
between Sethe’s present anguish and the historical trauma behind the killing of her
daughter. The novel recuperates the lost voices of American slaves and reanimates
a history which is otherwise forgotten. The past is still alive and cannot be erased
despite existing on the margins of dominant voices in American history in which
the slave experience is pushed aside. Haunting is the recovery of ‘a repressed or
unresolved social violence’ making itself known and assaulting the present.
Beloved is a public ghost: in some ways similar to Hamlet’s father on the castle
walls at night and Banquo haunting his killer’s banquet. They represent the past
which has been stolen, while the present is haunted because the rule of law has
been usurped by tyranny and despotism. The point of division between past and
present is a shifting line produced by different semantic planes in various narrative
plots crossing and diverging in their competing versions of the past. The past
keeps invading the present and as it does so it resurrects the ghosts of unburied
memories. This kind of ghost in modern literature is a communal image of both
dispossession and recuperation. The haunting shadow from the past depicts a
bereavement, a physical loss and a socially significant form of removal. It persists
as a present absence; it is physically no longer there but continues to exist as a
lingering memory or trace. Kathleen Brogan refers to its appearance in the present
as ‘cultural haunting’, stories of which ‘record the struggle to establish some form of
historical continuity’, reconnecting past and present once again in an uninterrupted
narrative.54 These theoretical frameworks provide the methodological basis for the
first part of this study, which are continued in the second part when I move from
consideration of historical fiction, largely conditioned by memories of a past war, to
consideration of fiction about a present war in Serbian literature of the 1990s.
The first part of this book is a study of motifs and narrative structures charac-
teristic of those Serbian novels at the end of the twentieth century concerned with
representations of history. By the end of the 1980s, the myths connected to the
Second World War and the founding of the state were no longer adequate to the
task of contributing to social, political, and cultural cohesion in Yugoslavia. The
attempts to rewrite history were accompanied by new fictional models subverting
and reworking outworn narrative patterns, injecting the past with new meanings.
These works, with their stories about the past returning to trouble the present once
again, sometimes produced unexpected results as writers struggled to find appropriate
narrative solutions capable of conveying such experiences. In such conditions, the
links holding together the past and the present became fragile and incapable of
providing easy explanations or narrative solutions. Thus, for the purposes of this
study, novels and stories from the 1980s are framed by general debates in literary and
cultural studies on the narrativization of the past and the representation of history in
fiction. They incorporate uncanny, grotesque, or ghostly motifs in order to express
the persistent, disturbing effects of painful histories which haunt the characters and
their world. In the next two chapters I shall focus on ghostly memories, uncanny
motifs, and the struggle for the legitimacy to narrate the past, illustrating my
argument with reference to selected works of narrative fiction. In Chapter 3, I
take examples of the appearance of ghosts and their effect on the semantic level of
the prose works in which they appear, applying Gordon’s comment that haunting
is a sign of the return of unresolved social violence. My discussion in Chapter 4 is
focused on the link between the construction of history in new historical fiction
and the uncanny as Elias describes: ‘Portraying the past as sublimely different and
deferred, the metahistorical romance often constructs the border between the past
and the present not as the archival fact but as the uncanny, a place revisited.’55
These narrative fictions question not only official views but also the very capacity
of narrative to convey truth or to recreate the past. The book is above all about the
ways in which narrative fiction represents the changing relationship between past
and present in times of crisis.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Ivo Banac, ‘Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia’, The American Hist-
orical Review, 97 (1992), 1084–1104 (p. 1098).
2. Ibid., p. 1104.
3. Wolfgang Hoepken, ‘War, Memory and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of
Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Societies, 13 (1999), 190–227 (p. 202).
4. Bette Denich, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of
Genocide’, American Ethnologist, 21 (1994), 369–90 (p. 370).
5. Robert M. Hayden, ‘Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime
Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in Memory, History, and Opposition under
State Socialism, ed. by Rubie S. Watson (Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp.
167–84 (p. 168).
6. Bette Denich, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia’, p. 371.
7. Djokić, ‘The Second World War II’, p. 131.
8. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington DC:
Brookings Institution, 1995); Robert Thomas, Serbia under Milošević: Politics in the 1990s (London:
Hurst, 1999).
9. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 75.
10. Sabrina Petra Ramet, Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to Ethnic
War, 2nd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 197.
11. Ibid., p. 198.
12. Arnold McMillin, ‘The Second World War in Official and Unofficial Soviet Prose’, in The
Second World War in Literature: Eight Essays, ed. by Ian Higgins (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic
Press, 1986), pp. 19–31 (pp. 24–25).
13. David Williams, Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 5.
14. Mark Taylor, The Vietnam War in History, Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2003), p. 5.
15. Dragan Žunić, Nacionalizam i književnost: Srpska književnost 1985–1995 (Niš: Prosveta, 2002),
p. 196.
16. Ibid., p. 200.
17. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in
Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 198.
18. Ibid., p. 225.
19. Jasna Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of
Nationalism (London: Hurst, 2002), p. 80.
20. Predrag Palavestra, ‘Obnova istorijskog romana’, in Istorijski roman: Zbornik radova, ed. by
Miodrag Maticki (Belgrade: Institut za književnost i umetnost; Sarajevo: Institut za književnost,
1992–96), pp. 87–92 (p. 87).
21. Ibid., p. 91.
22. Predrag Palavestra, Kritička književnost: Alternativa postmodernizma (Belgrade: Vuk Karadžić,
1983), p. 19.
23. Predrag Palavestra, Književnost — kritika ideologije (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1991), p.
343.
24. Tihomor Brajović, Kratka istorija preobilja: Kritički bedeker kroz savremenu srpsku poeziju i prozu
(Zrenjanin: Agora, 2009), p. 70.
25. Ibid., p. 84.
26. Slobodan Selenić, ‘History and Politics as a Fate’, in Responsibility of Contemporary Science and
Intelligentsia: Symposium Organized by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Swedish Royal
Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, ed. by Predrag Palavestra (Belgrade: Srpska akademija
nauka i umetnosti, 1992), pp. 227–31 (p. 228).
27. Lubomír Doležel, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 38.
28. Ibid., p. 37.
29. Ala Tatarenko, Poetika forme u prozi srpskog postmodernizma (Belgrade: Službeni glasnik, 2013), p. 16.
30. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge,
1988); Robert Holton, Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of History (New
York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994); David W. Price, History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary
Literature, Poiesis, and the Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Amy J. Elias, Sublime
Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001); Richard
J. Lane, Rod Mengham, and Philip Tew, eds, Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2007).
31. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 5.
32. Ibid., p. 4.
33. Tatarenko, Poetika forme u prozi srpskog postmodernizma, p. 31.
34. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. xii.
35. Brian Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2009), p. 99.
36. Elias, Sublime Desire, pp. 47–48.
37. Ibid., p. 71.
38. Lane and others, eds, Contemporary British Fiction, p. 11.
39. Ibid., p. 12.
40. Price, History Made, History Imagined, p. 1.
41. Ibid., p. 3.
43. Ibid., p. 129.
44. Birgit Neumann, ‘The Literary Representation of Memory’, in Cultural Memory Studies, ed. by
Erll and Nünning, pp. 333–43 (p. 334).
45. Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. by Ulrich Weisstein (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 188.
46. Ibid.
47. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 4.
48. José B. Monleón, A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 18.
49. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 4.
50. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. xvi.
51. Ibid., p. 190.
52. Bianca Del Villano, Ghostly Alterities: Spectrality and Contemporary Literatures in English (Stuttgart:
ibidem-Verlag, 2007), p. 2.
53. Renée L. Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2000), p. 8.
54. Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 9.
55. Elias, Sublime Desire, p. 64.
CHAPTER 3
❖
Restless Ghosts
Ghosts as representatives of unresolved social violence burst their way into corners
of consciousness as traces and consequences of events which have happened and not
yet been accommodated to the schemes of settled and known narratives. They force
memory to return and dwell on the edge of that period in time when the outrage
occurred and, thus, prevent reconciliation with historical traumas allowing those
who suffered to move on. Being caught in the past in this way is as much a social as
an individual issue. Ernst van Alphen traces the connection between individual and
social experience since all experience in order to be recognized becomes integrated
into discourse ‘in the terms and positions provided by the symbolic order’, with
the result that: ‘Although experience is subjectively lived, it is at the same time
culturally shared.’ By the same token, he proceeds to extend his description of the
circulation of experience to the circulation of memory as a logical sequel:
Memory is not something we have, but something we produce as individuals
sharing a culture. Memory is, then, the mutually constitutive interaction between
the past and the present, shared as culture but acted out by each of us as an
individual.1
The action of memory bringing together past and present, forcing confrontation
with that past, bears similarities with definitions of ghosts as entities giving shape to
events and experiences which have been repressed and hidden, or, as Bergland puts
it, as ‘things that we try to bury, but that refuse to stay buried’.2 Ghosts are socially
constructed reactions associated with the painful memories of history.
Unresolved social violence making its presence felt once more among restless
memories assumes the shape of a ghost linking past and present, linking identifiable
individuals seeking some form of closure to a particular place associated with the
traumatic event. Such ghost stories go further than recreations of historical occur-
rences and assume an active function as exercises in cultural memory. The term
‘cultural memory’ is used here to refer not only to the collective nature of these
memories ‘as shared social frameworks of individual recollections’, but also to refer
specifically to their existence as stories repeated in familial surroundings and as part
of neighbourhood history.3 Cultural memory is not only about what is remembered
but in particular is concerned with the manner and shape in which the past
circulates as ‘cultural forms available for use by people to construct their relations
to the past’.4 The memories of past traumas are inextricable from the language and
symbols of the stories in which they are preserved. Literature in its evocation of
Restless Ghosts 39
a fictional world lies on an ontologically different plane from the real world but,
in its narrative motifs and structures, reveals the processes by which memories of
individual events articulated through the depiction of ghosts are part of a broader
network of other memories and events which mutually interact and contribute to a
community’s understanding of its self and its history. The very status of literature’s
fictionality makes it an apt tool in this regard, since all forms of uncanny, fantastic,
grotesque, supernatural, or supposedly real happenings exist on the same level of
fictionality in relation to the world outside the text. Literature offers an opportunity
for giving substance to and exploring the consequences of the return of social fears
and communal anxieties not afforded by other forms of discourse.
In this chapter, I examine examples of communal ghost stories, instances of
cultural haunting as Brogan has it, as a manifestation of the new historical writing in
Serbia of the 1980s. These stories expose the complex narrative patterns and socially
constructed symbolic codes by which the ghosts are framed and from which they
derive their meanings. They are not confined only to the generation which suffered
the historical pain, but later generations also feel the presence of the same ghosts
as memories are passed down in stories shared by a family and a community. Such
memories are passed on in the search for some kind of closure. The resolution may
come in a variety of forms: the ghosts are finally given proper rest in a secondary
burial; the hurt which has been caused begins to fade with the passage of time; the
past is probed and examined to recuperate the sense of what took place. The literary
fictions for analysis here, on the one hand, formulate symbolic resolutions to these
problems and, on the other hand, avoid final closure by maintaining the link with
the infinite variations comprising the open historical context of which they form a
small part. The texts which are the subject of this chapter are taken from Serbian
narrative fictions which appeared at the beginning of the 1980s containing ghostly
figures which variously contribute to the formation of the semantic aspect of the
story and react with it in different ways. The stories relate to the lingering and
difficult relations between past and present, their ghosts leaving, returning to, or
staying close by their haunted place.
Ghosts Leaving
In the same year that Broz died, Jovan Radulović (b. 1951) published his collection of
short stories, Golubnjača (Dove Hole, 1980), in which the spectral trace of a traumatic
memory from the Second World War is suggestively re-enacted. The stories are
linked thematically and by the time and place of action. They are set in a small
Serbian village in the Dalmatian hinterland of Krajina during the 1950s and early
1960s, a district with a mixed population of Serbs and Croats who rarely interact
with one another. During the war, Ustasha forces attacked the village, killing many
of the inhabitants and throwing their bodies into a nearby pit or jama. The pit is a
deep pothole, a natural cave found in limestone areas and caused by water erosion
but with a vertical shaft rather than a horizontal tunnel entrance and common in
these karst regions of Croatia. This particular cave was traditionally used by the
villagers as a place to dispose of dead or dying animals. The word golubnjača is a
40 Restless Ghosts
generic term in Krajina for such caves perhaps, as is the case in Radulović’s work,
on account of the many birds found nesting just below the rim, safe from the prying
hands of local children; golub being ‘pigeon’ or ‘dove’ in Serbian/Croatian.5 Others
who have written in English about Radulović’s book have translated the title as The
Pigeon Cave, Pigeonhole, or The Pigeon Pit.6 The research of these scholars, driven
in the main by their interests in history and the social sciences, is centred on the
development of nationalist movements in former Yugoslavia during the 1980s and
is less concerned with the semantic potential of expressive literary language than is
the case in the present study. However, Radulović’s title in the context of his stories
is a deliberate play on the ambiguity created by the contrasts between the symbolic
connotations of the dove, for example in the phrase ‘the dove of peace’ (golub mira
in Serbian), the natural nesting habits of the birds around the cave, and the historic
associations with the place where a massacre was carried out.
The stories in Dove Hole are narrated by Lukica Gombać, who recalls events
from his childhood with his friends from the village, in particular Mićuka. He and
Mićuka often find themselves in different scrapes and adventures which involve
other children and the adults from the village: Lukica’s parents, Mićuka’s father
(his mother died giving birth to him), the village school teacher, the church sexton
Kuzman, the priest and an eccentric Partisan veteran, Damjan, who is known to all
as Pale Damjan. Occasional comments demonstrate that some period of time has
elapsed between the events and the time of their narration. Remembering a tree
which grew against the wall of their house and its berries, Lukica says: ‘Na usta mi
pođe slina čim se sjetim njihove sočnosti, rumenila i gorčine’ [The saliva begins
to f low in my mouth as soon as I recall their juicy, red bitterness].7Another time,
Lukica and Mićuka hide in Damjan’s stable loft in order to watch him as he returns
with his donkey, having heard rumours of strange goings-on between him and
his beast. The narrator says, in most unchildlike language: ‘na domaku smo velike
tajne’ [we are on the verge of a great mystery].8 But, nothing happens; Damjan
feeds his animal and leaves. This story, like many others they hear about Damjan,
turns out to be false, and Lukica comes to the conclusion that much of what they
heard about him was simply not true. Sometimes, Lukica compresses stories he has
been told, giving just a summary of them, for example on the importance of wells
and the difficulties in maintaining a reliable supply of clean water in their isolated
district. He begins this section with an episode about the Austrian Emperor Franz
Josef who visited their area as a young man and could not quench his thirst because
the water was not fit to drink.9 These ref lections on his memories and compositions
about the past uncover a temporal distance, time in which the young boy has
matured and deliberated on images and stories from his childhood.
The narrator does not indicate the precise point in time from which he is narrating
and gives no clue for his motivation for remembering these details. Most of the
time he narrates as if directly recording scenes as he witnesses them, maintaining
the illusion that there is no temporal gap between the time of events and the time
of narration. This illusion is significant for the semantic level of the work as a
whole. Despite being retold from some point in the future, the rationalizing adult
perspective in Lukica’s recollections is largely absent. His memories are dominated
Restless Ghosts 41
by the immediacy of a child’s unquestioning point of view on events as they unfold

around him. He simply reports the sights, sounds, and experiences of his world
without comment. Many of these distressing episodes are remembered as games
which the children play. He and Mićuka accompany their fathers one day to help
dig up the bones of Partisans who fell in battle in the surrounding countryside for
interment under a new monument in the village. They hold the empty cement
bags while their fathers work: ‘Kopali su, zapinjali za grabove i hrastove žile, sjekli
ih, znojni kleli, prstima birali kosti, dodavali nama, mi se takmičili čija će vreća
biti punija. Sitnije kosti nismo kupili, prevrnute sa zemljom, ostajale su razbacane,
pržilo ih je sunce’ [They dug, they struck at the roots of hornbeams and oaks, they
cut them, sweating they cursed, they picked the bones with their fingers, gave them
to us, we held a competition whose bag would be the fuller. We didn’t collect the
smaller bones, covered over with earth, they remained scattered, the sun roasted
them].10 This passage is typical of the author’s fragmented narrative style in which
he describes scenes with a staccato effect of halting verbs in quick succession, like
a film being shown a few frames at a time. The result is that the narrator invests
greater significance in his memories by introducing elements of what the Russian
Formalists called defamiliarization, to make objects or events appear unfamiliar, as
Viktor Shklovsky states:
And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one
feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation
of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of
art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an
aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.11
Describing the action as a number of unrelated, incongruous events, Radulović
underlines the immediacy of the child’s point of view, while the games which the
children play contrast with the shocking reality surrounding them. The semantic
complexity of the stories as a whole is deepened by his reworking of memories,
related by Lukica as an adult but from the point of view of Lukica as a child, in
which he avoids clarification and contextualization.
The defamiliarized world of the adults seen through the games of children begins
to deepen the potential of the most innocent sentences, lending them associations
from the unfolding thematic focal points of the work. One day, Lukica helps the
sexton, Kuzman, to clear a path which has become overgrown with weeds. Kuzman
goes first, cutting the undergrowth while Lukica follows close behind, listening to
him as he talks. Addressing the grass and branches in their path, Kuzman says: ‘“Šta
ću ti ja što si na pogrešnom mjestu izraslo. Svi se oda te češu. Bolje da te nema.” ’
[‘What can I do for you when you’ve grown up in the wrong place. You’re in
everybody’s way. It would be better if you were not here’].12 The action of clearing
the path and the sexton’s remark are innocent enough, but in the context of the harsh
world in which Lukica is growing up and the frequent instances of defamiliarization
bringing together incongruous elements, these words also relate to the boy and all
the other children born in the district. Their childhood is hard as they face a past
without pity and ‘surovost gladne, oskudne, i iluzijama opterećene svakodnevnice’
42 Restless Ghosts
[the severity of a hungry, meagre, everyday life burdened by illusions].13Lukica’s

father disowns his two-month-old daughter when the little girl falls sick and is
treated in hospital. He comments to his wife who asks why he has not been to see
her, ‘“Nek umre kad nije za život.” ’ [‘Let her die when she’s not for living’].14 The
challenges and tasks of the children growing up in a world over which they have no
control but which is shaping in some unknown way their knowledge of the world
is one of the major thematic fields of the work as a whole. The children in these
stories have been born in a particular world which is constantly visible as part of
the larger metaphoric structure suggested on the semantic level of the stories. There
exists a pervasive sense of fear and dread which permeates the natural environment
and the community’s place within it. Past and present are as one with the nature
around the village, cold and barren as the karst mountains, a malevolent network
of negativity affecting each successive generation. Lukica’s specific point of view
provides the cultural memory of the community with a narrative framework in
which to include the massacre from the Second World War.
The Dove Hole of the title occupies a central role linking together the different
semantic planes of the stories as the site most associated with the wartime atrocity.
After the brutal attack on their village, the survivors treat Dove Hole, now
the makeshift burial ground for their murdered neighbours, with veneration in
commemoration of their dead families. Dove Hole is inscribed in the general
store of cultural memory but is also set apart since the story of the massacre is too
recent for its gory details to have been fully assimilated as part of local folklore,
leaving the atmosphere of atrocity and the traumatic effects of the event to haunt
the community. One day, people from a nearby village intend to throw a half-dead
horse down the shaft of the cave but are stopped by others from Lukica’s village
calling out, ‘“Polovina nas je dolje u jami, a drugo pola ovo ođe što vidite.” ’ [‘Half
of us are down in the pit, and the other half here what you see’], adding ‘“Ono što
je i valjalo — dolje leži.” ’ [‘That which was worth anything — lies down there’].15
The reaction of the older generation evokes a traumatic relationship to an event in
which the survivors contend with feelings of guilt that they did not share the fate
of their family and neighbours, which then feeds back into the structure of enmity
and hatred typical of the relations between the two communities in the district. The
potential for the repetition of further atrocities in a cycle of violence based on this
overwhelming guilt is reinforced in the community construction of Dove Hole as
a traumascape; a term used by Maria Tumarkin ‘to describe places across the world
marked by traumatic legacies of violence, suffering and loss’ ensuring that ‘people
have to live with the past that refuses to go away’.16 The cave contains the ghosts
of the community’s dead, killed by the Ustashas, but which remain unburied and
alive in local memory.
Lukica relates the story of what happened during the war, explaining how
everything that he is about to tell he has learnt from Kuzman, from the village’s
current Orthodox priest Damjanović, from lessons in school, from his father, and
from Mićuka’s father. The narrative, which he has distilled from the community’s
memory of the massacre, contains some events for which there were no witnesses
and many details which could not be known by those who were not present.
Restless Ghosts 43
Three men come to Lukica’s village in a car, which they park behind the church
in the shade of a walnut tree. The priest, Dragutin, is conducting a service, which
he quickly finishes when he realizes that the men have come for him. The men
accompany Dragutin to his house and tell him to dress in his best church robes to
meet with someone from the new local authorities. The priest sits in their car and
they drive off, but the vehicle breaks down at the edge of the village. Lukica then
takes up Kuzman’s words to describe what happens next. While the men try to get
their car started again, ‘pop im je na ledini čuvao puške’ [the priest looked after
their guns on the waste ground]. Then, he helped them to push the car ‘a kako je
snažan bio, njegovom zaslugom su i krenuli dalje’ [and as he was so strong, with
his help they set off again].17 Kuzman’s version of events has the ring of a colourful
addition, a local myth embellishing the priest’s role in his own abduction.
Dragutin is now alone with the three men in the car. When they turn off the
main road the priest tells them they have made a wrong turn but they just laugh
at him. They stop the car when they meet Markelija Vidović, one of the leading
members of the local Croat community. Seeing the priest in the car, he puts his
hand through the open window and pulls his beard. The four men torture the priest
by the side of the road. The following day, the local miller, Špiro, discovers the
priest’s robe f loating in the river by his mill and fishes it out. At this point in the
account, it is revealed that it is not known exactly how the priest died. Špiro thinks
that the robe is the dead body of the priest, drowned, ‘ali on je već bio, vjerovatno
preklanog grkljana, u bezdanu Golubnjače’ [but he was already in the chasm of
Dove Hole, probably with his throat slit].18 The miller is the only one able to give any
kind of account of what happened next. Hiding in a tree for fear that the Ustashas
might come for him too, ‘Špiro je jedini polusvjedok Velikog pokolja izvršenog
u Golubnjači’ [Špiro is the only half-witness to the Great Massacre executed in
Dove Hole].19 The miller, watching from a concealed place, re-enacts the scene
when Lukica and Mićuka observed Damjan in his stable for reasons which proved
to be ill-founded or illusory. No-one actually sees the atrocity itself and Lukica’s
narrative of the event finishes with the following sentence: ‘Nijedan pucanj se nije
čuo, niti jauk, Špiro je vidio samo povremeni bljesak džepne baterijske lampe —
Golubnjača je zobala i zobala!’ [Not a single shot was heard, nor cry, Špiro saw just
the occasional glimmer of a pocket torch — Dove Hole munched and munched!].20
The narrator demonizes the cave, endowing it with animate characteristics by
applying the verb zobala, usually used of horses chewing oats. As an act of cultural
memory, the event is preserved in the form of a fantastic children’s story, Dove Hole
devouring its victims like some monster from another world.
The manner of the narration of the massacre, which no-one witnesses, in the
shadow of which the village has lived ever since, destabilizes the status of the
memory of the event. Such ambiguities return the analysis of the narrative to the
fundamental question of the purpose of the story. There is an echo of a similar trace
of ambiguity in the memory of a witness recorded in the book on testimony and
trauma by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. They note the testimony of a survivor
from Auschwitz who was an eyewitness to the uprising which took place in the
camp. She recalls seeing four chimneys on fire during the short-lived rebellion, a
44 Restless Ghosts
number which is historically incorrect because only one chimney was blown up.
Her evidence of what happened was not accepted because of this mistake, since: ‘It
was utterly important to remain accurate, least the revisionists in history discredit
everything.’ 21 However, Felman and Laub take a different approach to evaluating
the purpose of the woman’s testimony. They conclude, ‘She had come, indeed,
to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the
affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death.’ 22 Inaccuracies in
her narrative do not indicate that the event did not happen but that the retelling of
the story is not concerned with the preservation of a historical record. It is a sign of
her survival, and of the status of memory which has not been assimilated into the
experience of what actually happened. In the case of the story about the atrocity in
Lukica’s village, inaccuracies and embellishments also show the narrative to be an
affirmation of survival and demonstrate that the event has not been assimilated and
put to rest, the ghosts of the past have not yet been buried and their effects continue
to haunt the village. Radulović offers a symbolic shape to the interplay between the
living and the dead: first, by focusing his story on the murder of the priest, an act
related with details which no-one could possibly know, the source of the trauma
retains both an individual (death of a known person) and a communal (the priest as
the village stand-in) identity; second, by a process of defamiliarization the massacre
becomes part of a fairy story in which the event itself is enhanced as a devilish deed,
an evil terror outside of history but still active in the lives of the villagers.
As the victims of the wartime massacre have not received a proper burial, it is
decided that the bishop should come to Dove Hole in order to perform a funeral
service and give a blessing for those whose bodies are still there. Lukica hides near
the pit, listening to the priests’ intoned and solemn voices, watching them in their
robes standing around the edge of Dove Hole, with the heavy smell of burning
incense in his nostrils. The bishop pronounces the names of the dead, dropping their
photographs into the shaft of the cave. The boy hears the name of his grandfather
and sees him f luttering through the smoke of the censers and then, caught in a
gust of wind, falling to the ground by a bush close to the cave. The breeze catches
other photographs, blowing them out of Dove Hole to join his grandfather. The last
victim he sees is Dragutin, the murdered village priest, who hovers above the priests
for longer and higher than the others, his bright church robes f lashing in the sun.
Then, to Lukica, he seems to come alive: ‘Do mene sad dopire samo Dragutinov
glas, ozbiljan i strog’ [Only Dragutin’s voice, serious and stern, reaches me now].23
Oblivious to everything else, the boy sees Dragutin seize the censers and, now
augmented to the proportion of a gigantic spectral vision, he swings the censers and
f licks the smoke from them until it covers the mountains. The first victim to enter
the pit, according to village lore, is the last to leave. Against the background of the
priests’ incantations, the sweet smell of incense, and the heat of the day, Lukica’s
senses seem to be lulled into seeing the ghosts of the past released: ‘Vjetar, onaj mlaki
i nejaki, zaćarlija od Dinare i ne pokvari ovu sliku kod Golubnjače — zaravanak je
tijesan, prazni se Golubnjača, kreće narod svojim starim, prijašnjim kućama’ [The
wind, light and weak, blows gently from the mountains and does not spoil the scene
around Dove Hole — the terrace is cramped, Dove Hole is emptying, the people
Restless Ghosts 45
are setting off to their old, former homes].24 The victims have languished without
proper burial, neither dead nor alive, restless spirits haunting the survivors of the
massacre and the next generation, but who are now released by a secondary burial
as Brogan describes in her study of cultural haunting and community ghosts:
Most stories of cultural haunting are set during this intermediary period of
haunting and move toward a final burial that, to varying degrees of success,
puts the dead to rest. While final burial reasserts the boundary between the
living and the dead, the ritual transforms the dead from menacing ghosts to (at
least potentially) beneficent ancestral spirits and renders them safely accessible
rather than inaccessible.25
Radulović’s cycle of short stories is a classic example of cultural haunting and its
resolution through secondary burial. The ghosts leave their tormented grave in
order to return home as ancestral spirits.
Evidence of the cathartic effect of the funeral service is found in the story
‘Doček proljeća’ (‘Spring Welcome’). Lukica and his school friends are taken on an
excursion to meet up with other children from the nearby Croatian village for a
joint picnic to welcome the arrival of spring. They go to the bend in the river by
Špiro’s mill, where the children eat and play. Mićuka and Lukica go off on their
own when they come across one of the Croatian boys. Mićuka draws a knife and
attacks him, forcing him into the water. The boy is afraid and cries but Mićuka is
merciless and continues his assault. The boys have just seen some soldiers close by,
although they are invisible now. The whole event suggests a return to the night
of the massacre of the villagers which Špiro half-witnessed from this same place.
Lukica is suddenly afraid and thinks that the Croatian boy will find renewed
strength and they will be helpless against him. Fearing the return of the desire for
revenge passed down from his parents’ generation, he throws the Croatian boy his
clothes and shouts to Mićuka, ‘“Bježimo, idu učitelji!” ’ [‘Let’s run, the teachers
are coming!’].26 The narrator breaks the cycle of hatred and violence which has
characterized the life of the community since the war. Radulović’s stories perform a
symbolic resolution which corresponds to the function of other memory discourses
discussed by Andreas Huyssen in his study Present Pasts: ‘For it is precisely the
function of public memory discourses to allow individuals to break out of traumatic
repetitions.’27 Radulović’s story suggests that the fears and anxiety contained in the
memory of the past have been surmounted and overcome, the villagers’ demons are
buried, and reconciliation is now a possibility.
A specific memory from the war has been tamed, but it is not the end of all the
consequences of past conf licts surrounding the village. In the last story, Mićuka
is accidentally killed by an unexploded German grenade in a grove where he is
tending sheep. His father, having no decent clothes in which to bury his son,
comes to Lukica’s father. They enter the narrator’s bedroom at night to see if there
is something in his wardrobe in which to dress the dead body of his friend. Lukica
is not asleep and he spies them, remarking, ‘U ruci jednog od njih sinu baterijska
lampa’ [A pocket torch shone in the hand of one of them].28 His comment links this
final episode with the two boys spying on Damjan and with Špiro’s half-witnessing
of the massacre during the war when he too saw only the occasional glimmer of
46 Restless Ghosts
torches from his hiding place in the tree. Memories of one event keep returning
and reinforcing the memories of other events in tight circles of remembrance,
adding to the weight of cultural memory as repeated motifs in a narrative form.
Lukica’s memories are his ghosts, the return of those members of his family who
were brutally killed, representatives of repressed unresolved social violence. Ghosts,
like memories, are not only personal but the result of social effects, as Gordon
comments, ‘The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure,
and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make
social life.’29 Lukica’s memories represent a combination of varied semantic planes
constructed from memories and stories, events, and symbolic patterns, resurrecting
a compact site where past and present meet. The ghosts of the massacre are exorcised
but not all traces of the past are erased entirely. Mićuka’s death from an unexploded
grenade left from the war serves as a reminder that it is not possible to resolve all
the consequences of past violence.
Ghosts Returning
Radulović’s short stories are characteristic for the ghostly new historical fiction in
Serbia of this period, which unpacks the restless memories animated by the presence
of spectral figures, their integration into the processes of cultural memory and
consequent lack of closure on the subject of unresolved social violence. Different
works emphasize diverse elements of these topics. In his novel Pismo/glava (Heads
or Tails, 1982), Slobodan Selenić (1933–95) not only deepens this thematic base but
also links the ghost literature of the 1980s with the preceding history of cultural
policy in socialist Yugoslavia. Selenić’s first novel, Memoari Pere Bogalja (The Memoirs
of Pera the Cripple, 1968), was awarded the prestigious October Prize and is one of
the celebrated examples of new Serbian prose of the 1960s known for their aesthetic
innovations and critical stance towards Yugoslav social questions. Writing about
this new Serbian prose at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, the critic
Ljubiša Jeremić remarks how the younger authors such as Selenić were reproached
‘da nisu dovoljno realisti i da prikazuju periferne i atipične pojave’ [that they were
not realists enough and they portray peripheral and atypical occurences].30 The
reproach concealed disquiet at their depiction of the shortcomings of Yugoslav
socialist society. Selenić’s narrator lost both his legs in the war as a boy, and his
family were rewarded for fighting with the Partisans and for their political loyalty
to the post-war regime. The family members are portrayed as grotesque figures,
peasants out of place in the urban environment of the ruling class of which they
are now a part. His next novel, Heads or Tails, focuses on events surrounding
state-sponsored violence against those who expressed loyalty to Stalin against the
Yugoslav Politburo in 1948.
Heads or Tails was due to be published a few years after The Memoirs of Pera the
Cripple. The author described what then happened in an interview given to the
journalist Miloš Jevtić: ‘Pismo-glava sam završio i predao “Prosveti” 1971. godine.
Roman je bio štampan. Nije bio povezan. Imam kod sebe 2 ili 3 primerka, koja sam
uspeo da izvučem iz štamparije . . . Tada je došla gužva oko smenjivanja Nikezića
Restless Ghosts 47
i Latinke’ [I finished Heads or Tails and gave it to Prosveta in 1971. The novel was
printed. It was not bound. I have two or three copies in my possession which I
managed to get from the printer’s . . . Then there was that mess over replacing
Nikezić and Latinka].31 . . . When the Prosveta publishing house accepted Selenić’s
manuscript, the LCY found itself facing a nascent critical opposition agitating
for reform to open up the economy even more to market forces. The ‘economic
modernizers’ in the Serbia League of Communists, Latinka Perović and Marko
Nikezić, were purged from public office in 1972.32 Robert Thomas goes further
to suggest that they were regarded as a bigger threat: ‘Their concentration on the
independent internal development of Serbia was deemed by Tito to be a threat to
his own position at the centre of the Yugoslav state.’33 Consequently, it was decided
that this was not an opportune moment for a novel about politically sensitive events
in the early years after 1945. The work was eventually published in 1982 along with
other novels about the purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Radmila Gorup
comments on the taboo status of the topic:
One topic which remained a tacit taboo for many years was the fate of inmates
in Tito’s gulags established after 1949. Once the events of 1948–55 and beyond
could be safely aestheticized as a distant past after Tito’s death in 1980, writers
could finally approach the topic with more ease, and attack the taboo directly.
Starting in 1981, there was a whole avalanche of literary works addressing the
prison camps and the hideous effect they had on the people incarcerated in
them.34
She refers, amongst others literary works, to Selenić’s Heads or Tails, which was
heavily criticized in The White Book in 1984, the report sponsored by the Croatian
League of Communists. The hurt committed against those suspected of supporting
the Soviet Union in 1948 produces haunting memories, as Oskar Greunwald com-
ments in an article about Yugoslavia’s prison literature: ‘In the Yugoslav context,
camp and prison literature represents the ghost of the nation’s past.’35
The novel’s central character and narrator is a young man, Maksimilijan
Dimitrijević, called Maki by his family and friends. He is born into a well-to-
do Belgrade family living in a large f lat in the centre of town before the Second
World War. He is a diabetic and has to inject himself regularly with insulin. His
father, Vojin, is rich and a communist sympathizer, a fellow-traveller. The family
is augmented by the arrival of two more children, adopted by Vojin and his wife
Guga. The first is Zlata, the daughter of Guga’s sister, who leaves her behind when
she follows her lover to Switzerland. Taken care of at first by her grandmother, Zlata
gradually comes to spend more time in the home of the Dimitrijević family until
she moves in permanently before Maki is born. She is Maki’s cousin although they
are brought up as brother and sister. The second child to be adopted is Radiša, son of
Bogosav Prokić, a peasant who delivers milk, cheese, and eggs to the Dimitrijevićes’
f lat but sometimes is too drunk to work. On learning that Radiša is ill, Vojin takes
in the child on the understanding that this is a temporary measure until he recovers
when he will return home. Like Zlata, the boy also becomes a permanent member
of the family owing to Vojin’s sense of social conscience. Maki and Radiša are
opposites in their constitution and nature and do not get on well together. Maki is
48 Restless Ghosts
small, frail and sickly, well-educated and good in his schoolwork; while Radiša is
strong, his speech ref lecting his peasant childhood, and in possession of a practical
intelligence. He will never become a member of the traditional urban elite, but his
class background will help him to climb the ladder in Yugoslavia’s socialist society.
The contrast between the two boys represents a clash of civilizations, a portrayal of
Otherness, which is one of the key themes running through Selenić’s literary opus.
Vojin dies in mysterious circumstances when he joins the Partisans during the war
and the son becomes a communist like his father whom he adores.
After the war, Maki is arrested for supporting the Soviet declaration against the
CPY. He dies in prison on 5 July 1949 from his brutal treatment at the hands of the
authorities, who deny him access to his regular dose of insulin. The novel opens
twenty-two years later, in 1971, on the anniversary of his death when Maki returns
to Belgrade as a ghost. The author highlights his ghostly function within the
novel by presenting him in what appears to be the realistic description of historical
events from before and after the Second World War, as suggested by the critic Petar
Džadžić:
Kao što Makija vadi iz groba da bi nadletao Beograd i kao iz satelita video sliku
grada i poslednje sekvence iz života svojih bližnjih, tako Selenić još jednom
nerealističkom slobodom (u inače realističkom postupku) moguće i verovatno
prebacuje s one strane mogućeg i verovatnog.36
[ Just as he takes Maki from his grave that he might f ly over Belgrade and as
if from a satellite see a picture of the city and the last scenes from the lives of
those closest to him, so Selenić once more by his non-mimetic freedom (in his
otherwise realistic method) transfers what is possible and probable beyond the
limits of the possible and the probable.]
Maki’s restless spirit comes back to visit those who were involved in the events
leading to his arrest and death, but his bodiless presence suggests broader levels of
meaning than the historical chaos of which he was a victim.
The narration of the novel is organized to emphasize the connections between
past and present, between the memories of the different characters, adding to the
density of the narrated material. The novel is narrated by four separate voices
alternating in its nine chapters: Maki, Zlata, Radiša, and Svetozar Slišković, also
known as Champion. He is a larger-than-life character, a man who appears too big
for his body, a grotesque figure. As a member of the pre-war illegal CPY, he spent
some time in prison and occasionally stayed with the Dimitrijević family using
their f lat as a safe house before the war. He is a revolutionary, committed to the
violent overthrow of the bourgeois order and to the socialist future for Yugoslavia
and the rest of the world. In him Maki found someone to admire as his own
ardour for the socialist cause grew. At the beginning of the novel, Maki’s ghost
arrives at Champion’s cramped and miserable accommodation in 1971. It seems that
Champion is expecting him. It is early morning and, making himself an omelette
with his back to his guest, he says: ‘“Sedi tu, ja ću na krevet.” ’ [‘Sit here, I’ll sit on
the bed’].37 Maki has heard Champion utter these same words once before and his
words remind him of the time when he first saw him in their family home before
the war and he said the same thing to his father when entering his room.38 In the
Restless Ghosts 49
next chapter, Zlata is in her f lat on 5 July, waiting for Radiša, now her husband,
to leave. When he is gone she begins the same ritual that she carries out every year
on this day. She injects herself with insulin in memory of Maki, the one true love
in her life, carefully repeating the same dose of insulin which Maki used to take,
bringing herself closer to his presence in her memory, wiping out the gap in the
years between his death and the present. The insulin which she injects in her body
has the same effect on her, a healthy person, as not taking his insulin would have
on Maki, a diabetic. She says: ‘Sa različitih razloga — zbog prevelike količine šećera
u njegovoj krvi, zbog naglog pada šećera u mojoj — posledice su iste: počinjem da
osećam glavobolju i nervozu u celom telu, žeđ, prvo veliku uznemirenost, pa potom
potpunu bezvoljnost’ [For different reasons — because of the great quantity of sugar
in his blood, because of the sudden fall of sugar in mine — the consequences are the
same: I begin to get a headache, I feel nervous in my whole body, I feel thirsty, at
first I feel a great sense of unease, and then complete apathy].39 In this listless state
she addresses Maki directly with the words: ‘Ne brini, Maki, ništa ne brini. Tu sam
ja, uvek; tvoja mršava devojčica; tvoja Zlata sa dugačkim zlatnim kikama’ [Don’t
worry, Maki, don’t worry about anything. Here I am, always; your thin little girl;
your Zlata with long golden pigtails].40 Radiša in his narrative also addresses the
dead Maki. The past and the present are inextricably linked in Selenić’s novel by the
return of Maki’s ghost to Belgrade, and the story focuses not so much on the terms
of state-sponsored violence but on the memories which haunt the characters.
From the beginning of the novel, the narrators insist that they remember
everything and that they will reveal everything. Maki in the first chapter, recalling
his father, says: ‘Otkada pamtim, a sve govori da je moje sećanje sačuvalo i vrlo rane
utiske, Vojin je bio bez kose’ [For as long as I can remember, and everything suggests
that my memory has retained my very early impressions, Vojin has been without
hair].41 Champion begins the fourth chapter in mid-sentence with the words, ‘. .
. sve, sve po redu ću ti ispričati, jer ovo je priča za tebe, mili Maksimilijane, priča
o prosvećenju Svetozara Sliškovića, raba božijeg, priča o mučnom putu koji mu je
Gospod odredio’ [. . . everything, I’ll tell you everything in order, because this is a
story for you, my dear Maximilian, the story about the enlightenment of Svetozar
Slišković, God’s servant, the story of his tortured path which the Lord defined for
him].42 Not only do the narrators repeat how well they remember what happened,
how they knew for certain that such was the case, they also call on Maki to
remember with them and corroborate the truth of what they recall. However, the
past is not so easily available to precise recall and is an illusory storehouse of truth.
Each relates their story about the past in their own way, drawing nearer to their
involvement in Maki’s arrest and subsequent death. Maki’s decision to side with the
Soviet declaration against the Yugoslav Communists happens after a conversation
with Champion who wants him to persuade Radiša, by then an officer in the state
security system, to support them. Maki approaches Zlata, knowing of Radiša’s
attraction to her, to gain Radiša’s support. That night, Maki is arrested and taken
for interrogation. Champion is also arrested and sent to Goli Otok from which he
returns a sad and broken figure, his commitment to revolutionary socialism now
replaced by an equally fanatic commitment to Orthodox mysticism. The novel
50 Restless Ghosts
explores how the characters live with the remembrance of such events. Faced with
the significance of their role in history, they not only talk about the past but also
comment on how the past and present are aligned in history and memory.
Zlata, under the inf luence of the insulin injected in her leg, feels a strange
sensation of passing into a different state, like ice into water, day into night, from a
girl to a woman, from the living into the dead; finally she feels that she becomes one
with Maki, experiencing all that he felt when denied his insulin. In her heightened
state, she seeks absolution and says: ‘Ja hoću, Maki, da doznam šta je istina, kako bih
znala da li sam časno postupila’ [Maki, I want to learn what was the truth in order
to know if I behaved honourably].43 The characters are all forced to remember, but
Zlata asks herself if there is any point in remembering the ugly events of the past
which cannot be changed, especially as what we recall may not actually be a true
ref lection of what happened. As she says,
Naša naknadna međusobno različita objašnjenja samo su udaljavanja od istine u
suprotnim pravcima; ode jedno tumačenje ulevo, drugo zaošija udesno, a ona,
istina, stoji nepomeriva između njih i tajno trune u mojim mislima bez obzira
na reči, truje me neprimetno, ali uporno svojim sramnim sadržajem.44
[Our later explanations, mutually different, are just distances from the truth
in opposite directions; one interpretation goes to the left, another turns to
the right, and the truth stands unmoveable between them and secretly goes
rotten in my thoughts regardless of the words, it poisons me imperceptibly but
stubbornly with its shameful content.]
She questions the validity of interrogating the past which has been lost, which is
under pressure from new experiences and new explanations which build up and force
memory to see events differently from the way they were. She cannot remember
the exact order of events as they passed between her and Radiša when she went to
speak to him on Maki’s behalf. Her memories do not disclose the truth which she so
desperately wants. Champion also comments on the weakness of memory over time
when he says that he can remember things both clearly and indistinctly: ‘jasno kao
slike iz neke odavno zaboravljene slikovnice, mutno kada mrtvu uspomenu hoću da
pokrenem iz njene konačnosti, da je življe povežem sa onom koja sledi’ [clearly like
pictures from a long-forgotten picture book, indistinctly when I want to animate
the dead memory from its definitive state, to connect it vividly with what came
next].45 He can recollect individual scenes clearly, but the clarity disappears when
he tries to put them in sequence and see their continuity and wider context. He, like
the others, knows when important events happened, but their meaning eludes him.
Champion is convinced that the world revolution would be best supported by
siding with the Soviet Union and persuades Maki to his way of thinking. Radiša
realizes that Maki’s decision, outlined to him by Zlata, is dangerous for them
all and that he has to betray Maki in order to save Zlata. Champion and Radiša
ref lect on the events of 1948 and their consequences. In contrast to the dilemmas
of personal memory, Champion describes the advantages of revolution as he saw
them when he became a communist. He did not become a communist from a
desire for social justice as in Vojin’s case. Revolution promised him a life spared the
emotional turmoil of determing what is right since his life became committed to
Restless Ghosts 51
the destruction of capitalism because it was essentially evil. He was convinced that
if it was in the interests of the happiness of mankind two thirds of people should be
killed ‘da bi preostala živela kao što treba’ [that the remainder live as they should].46
This logic created Goli Otok where Champion was sent and the prison where Maki
died. But revolution and history once enacted cannot be reversed and Champion,
himself destroyed by the logic of the system he once supported, rejects his earlier
beliefs in revolution and turns with the same unquestioning conviction to Orthodox
mysticism. Radiša also ref lects on that time, but from a different perspective. He
remarks that he and others like him faced a stark choice in 1948 when it was a case
of choosing between them or us, freedom or slavery. Driven by patriotic fervour,
he recalls how they arrested and beat those who would betray their country,
sentenced them to confinement on Goli Otok, and did worse things but from a
sense of historical justice. Now, from the vantage point of 1971 in Yugoslavia’s
consumerist society, Radiša admits, ‘Pogledam ponekad oko sebe, pa pomislim da
smo četres osme sa prljavom vodom i dete iz korita izbacili: slobodu smo sačuvali,
ali socijalizam, izgleda, nismo’ [I sometimes take a look around me and think that in
forty-eight we threw the baby out with the bath water: we saved our freedom but,
it seems, we did not save socialism].47 Yugoslavia, having forgotten its revolutionary
path, could not go back to reclaim it, while Champion and Radiša lost what they
were trying to preserve. Maki’s ghost serves as a reminder of the incomprehensible
movement of history in which they took part.
Extra material is added at the end of each chapter which reinforces the links
between characters, their actions, and the broad historical context in which they play
a slight role. This material adds to the density of the processes of cultural memory as
part of the novel’s thematic structure and includes: an article by Champion on the
Spanish Civil War published in the socialist journal Naša stvarnost in 1938; a well-
known photograph of a man hanging from a lamp post in the centre of Belgrade in
1941, executed by the German authorities; a letter written by Maki to Champion
in 1946 with the recipient’s notes about the young man; another article written by
Champion in 1947 in praise of Stalin on the occasion of the leader’s birthday; pages
from Borba, the CPY newspaper, detailing Soviet attacks on the Yugoslav leadership
in 1948; a drawing by Zlata’s and Radiša’s son when he was four years old; the front
page of the Politika newspaper reporting Khrushchev’s visit to Belgrade in 1955, the
first state visit since the Yugoslav–Soviet split; a photograph of a classical onion-
domed Orthodox church in Russia. Each image can be considered an illustration
of a stage in the development of the novel’s story from Champion’s early obsession
with revolution, the occupation of Belgrade, the relationship between Maki and his
older mentor, the changing relationship between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
as a matter of public record, the marriage of Zlata and Radiša, and Champion’s
final slip into paranoia and Orthodox mysticism. The narrative strategy of adding
postscripts serves as a graphic reminder of important instances in the characters’
memories. They are snapshots of unforgettable events, but with their significance
unrealized unless the images are placed in their contextual sequence with other
events to enlargen the picture in order to give the meaning of each lived moment.
The characters comment on the pale residue which remains in their disjointed and
52 Restless Ghosts
fading memories of what was a fuller experience in life. Maki’s final sentence hangs
unfinished, avoiding closure, his violent death no longer important in 1971:
Gledam, pa vidim zatvor u kome sam umro, i u kome više nije zatvor koji je
sad na drugom mestu, vidim neke ljude koji hrču dole, vidim neke trupe koje
se spremaju da osvoje neke zemlje, vidim da stvar i nije u odgovorima, vidim
da su naša pitanja bila pogrešno postavljena, vidim . . .48
[I look, and I see the prison in which I died, and in which there is no longer a
prison which is now somewhere else, I see people snoring below, I see soldiers
preparing to take other lands, I see that the issue is not in our answers, I see that
our questions have been wrongly put, I see . . .]
He looks down on the chaotic kaleidoscope of events, both large and small, in
which the sense of the past is lost as the right questions were not asked.
Selenić’s novel juxtaposes different discourses of personal memories and historical
record with characters’ comments on the interaction of memory and history. His
novel, as suggested by the title, Heads or Tails, evokes an image of a spinning coin
which lands on one side or the other, either personal recollections or the public
record; however, both sides are part of the same coin. The thematic structure of the
book shifts from a focus on discovering the truth of what happened to a testament
about testimony, focusing attention on the construction of truth and ultimately the
relationship which links narrative and narrating with personal and cultural memory.
Maki’s ghost is not a private memory but a historical figure in communication with
those implicated in his death, part of wider historical events which refuse to be
buried but return to the present. His ghost is a seething presence, a dense site of
other lives, the consequences of historical events and the people whose beliefs filled
out the broad picture of the era in which they lived. Serbia’s ghost stories of the
1980s go beyond Brajović’s assertion that such works are concerned with revisions
of official history, uninterested in problems of how to narrate the past, ‘naklonjeniji
pripovednim konvencijama i proverenim prosedeima kao prečici do širokog čita-
lačkog horizonta razumevanja i prihvatanja’ [more inclined towards narrative
conventions and tested procedures as a shortcut to accessing a wide field of reader
reception and understanding].49 The narrative strategies of new historical fiction
are precisely concerned with showing how narrators, events, and the traumatic
consequences of history are inscribed in wider schemes of cultural memory in an
effort to recuperate the lost sense of the past.
Ghosts Staying
The ghosts from the massacre in Dove Hole are put to final rest with their secondary
burial and leave the realm of the living. Maki returns to Belgrade and the
people who were involved in the events leading to his arrest and brutal end. The
characters in the collection of short stories Dorćol: Imena ulica (Dorćol: The Names of
the Streets, 1981), by Svetlana Velmar-Janković (1933–2014), are ghosts who stay to
haunt the places of their suffering. Each day, they walk through the streets of the
Dorćol district of Belgrade, a residential area in the city centre, close to the city’s
Kalemegdan fortress. The fortress, with the town fanning out behind, was built on
Restless Ghosts 53
a hill overlooking the conf luence of two rivers, with one slope leading down to
the river Sava and the other down to the river Danube. The main street running
through the centre of the old town, Prince Mihailo Street, runs along the top of
the ridge connecting the two slopes. Dorćol sits on the Danube side and used to
be known as the Turkish Town (turska varoš ), being mostly populated by Turks at
the time when Belgrade was an important outpost in the Ottoman Empire. Dorćol
had all the appearance of an Oriental town, a chaotic maze of small streets and
alleyways. Many important dignitaries had their residences in the district, which
had been built in typical Balkan architectural style with large overhanging eaves
and verandas looking onto gardens enclosed by high walls. Shops lined some of the
streets by the side of artisans’ premises, mostly occupied with supplying the needs
of the garrison and administrative offices in the city. When the Sultan’s political
representative, the Pasha, and his garrison left the city in 1867, Dorćol was massively
redeveloped. The old Ottoman buildings were demolished and new houses were
built in a European style of architecture. Streets were planned in a grid system with
a series of them running horizontally across the slope from the edge of the old town
to the Turkish fortress of Kalemegdan above the point where the Sava f lows into
the Danube. Other streets crossed them going in a vertical axis down the slope from
the ridge towards the river. These urban changes happened very quickly and the
district soon became the centrepiece of modern Belgrade, capital of the independent
Kingdom of Serbia from 1881. Many of these new Dorćol streets were named after
important figures from the nineteenth century. Some of them were military leaders
who fought in the rebellions against the Turks while others contributed to the
commercial or cultural development of the country.50
Velmar-Janković includes a note at the beginning of her collection of stories
explaining that the word Dorćol comes from Turkish dort-jol meaning ‘four roads’ or
a ‘crossroads’. The fourteen stories in her book are each named after one of Dorćol’s
streets and all of them, except for the first and last, are the names of historical
figures from the nineteenth century. The first story, ‘Francuska ulica’ (‘French
Street’) takes its name from the road marking the outer limit of Ottoman Belgrade,
built on the line of its defensive trench and palisade. The last story is ‘Stara čaršija’
(‘Old Town’), a street running down the slope at the other end of the district toward
the Kalemegdan fortress, on the site of the original Dort-jol crossroads which was
also an infamous place for public executions. Of the remaining twelve stories, the
first six are the names of streets which run across the slope in a horizontal axis, and
the next six are streets on the vertical axis crossing them at different points. Each
story features the ghost of the historical figure after which the street is named, thus
going further back in time than most of the works of new historical fiction from
this decade. The order of the stories traces the lines of the built environment from
the edge of the district to its old heart. The design of the book is an important
feature endorsing the thematic structure of the work. The shape of Velmar-
Janković’s narrative fiction overlays its semantic level and is associated with its
broader historical and geographic patterns. The consonance of forms on this level
reinforces her work’s thematic focus, giving sense to the meaning of history as the
point of origin for the present, much of which is obscured or ignored. Later events
54 Restless Ghosts
may conceal the traces of the past, but they cannot entirely eradicate them. These
traces exist as ghosts, not as active memories but as shadows which cannot be seen
or heard but whose continued presence offers a potential line of continuity between
then and now. The geographic juxtaposition of the stories is matched by a temporal
dimension following the progress of a day: the second story begins ‘pre podne’ [in
the morning]; the third story begins ‘oko podne’ [around noon]; and a later one ‘po
podne’ [in the afternoon].51 They are linked both to a planned urban construction
and to the course of a natural temporal cycle.
After the introductory story ‘French Street’, the second story, ‘Ulica Gospodar-
Jevremova’ (‘Lord Jevrem Street’), presents Jevrem Obrenović, brother of Miloš,
who was acknowledged by the Ottoman Empire as the first Knez, or Prince, of a
semi-autonomous principality Serbia in 1817. Jevrem was one of the leaders in the
rebellions against the Turks in the early nineteenth century: ‘Svakoga dana, u šetnji
od Kalemegdana do neba, Gospodar Jevrem projaše Ulicom Gospodara Jevrema’
[Every day, in his ride from Kalemegdan to Heaven, Lord Jevrem takes his horse
along Lord Jevrem Street].52 His ghost passes along the street built long after his
death where his name is inscribed in the city’s built environment, a reminder of his
earthly life and achievements. The story is typical of the others in the collection
and contains references to events and themes which are repeated and developed in
later stories. As he rides his horse, Jevrem recalls the events in which he took part,
contemplating the different roles he has played, his successes, and his failures. His
memories are limited to what he himself observed or experienced. As the stories
progress in the book, other points of view are added and gaps are partially filled
as many of the characters were involved in the same events but they remember
different details. He recalls the First Serbian Uprising against the Turks between
1804 and 1813 when the rebels captured Belgrade under their leader Karađorđe,
the Second Uprising between 1815 and 1817 led by his brother Miloš, the period of
Miloš’s rule and his fall from power in a coup instigated by his powerful political
opponent Toma Vučić Perišić. These milestones in Serbian history are intersected by
instances of treachery and betrayal. Miloš orders the murder of his rival, Karađorđe,
although the two rebel leaders were close friends and comrades-in-arms, and in a
gesture of his loyalty sends his head to the Sultan in Istanbul. Some years later in
1839, Miloš himself was the victim of another conspiracy when his wife, Princess
Ljubica, Jevrem, and Toma Vučić Perišić plotted against him and forced him to
abdicate. Miloš went into exile, followed by the remainder of his family three
years later when they too lost their positions, leaving in power Vučić Perišić, who
proceeded to instal Alexandar Karađorđević, son of Miloš’s murdered rival, as
Prince. Foreign powers were heavily involved in these power struggles, supporting
one side against another in order to serve their own interests. Serbian history is
not a narrative of heroic victories but a catalogue of treacherous conspiracies and
political assassinations.
Jevrem’s ghost senses that there was something which preceded his existence and
something which comes after him, tied to the history of the place that he haunts,
but beyond his reach. Captured by the Turks, Jevrem is imprisoned in a tower at
Kalemegdan. His prison is a cold and damp place of which the narrator says: ‘Tle se
Restless Ghosts 55
ljuljalo od talasa podzemnog Dunava koji je proticao, nadohvat ukočene Jevremove

ruke, ljuljalo se i od mraka istorije koja je tek doticala, nadohvat mnogih ruku, pa
ništa’ [The ground shook from the waves of the Danube which f lowed underground
close to Jevrem’s numb hand; it also shook from the darkness of history which just
f lowed in here, close to many hands, then nothing].53 He was not the first nor the
last to suffer in that place, but he has no contact with the ghosts of those who shared
his fate. The characters of the stories occupy isolated spectral vantage points and,
at the same time, they are surrounded by sights and sounds from different epochs.
Jevrem waits for a long time at the crossroads with one of the major streets going
down the Dorćol slope where, as now, there have always been numerous shops
which have since disappeared. He and his horse ‘posmatraju kako se trgovci, koji
su u dućanima baš na tom mestu, vekovima, prodavali svoju robu, talože u prah,
takođe u kolonama, u neverovatnoj izmaglici vremena’ [watch the traders who
have sold their goods in the shops at this very place for centuries, settle into dust,
also in rows, in the unbelievable mist of time].54 The commercial activity of the
urban environment is a constant presence, but Jevrem’s ghost can only watch the
shopkeepers from afar as they keep disappearing. Continuing his daily journey he
comes to the monument commemorating the attack made by Ottoman soldiers on
a Serbian boy, an event which took place after his own death and sparked a riot
leading to the removal of the Pasha and his garrison from the city five years later.
He fancies that he can hear musket fire: ‘Gospodar Jevrem se maši da uhvati bar
odjeke tih pucnjeva, ali odjeci izmaknu’ [Lord Jevrem reaches out to catch at least
the echoes of those shots, but the echoes slip away].55 Traces of the violence which
has accompanied the city’s history have not entirely disappeared, but the details of
its causes and consequences are closed to later generations who did not experience it.
All the characters wandering down their streets try to meet and communicate
with other historical figures of whom memories linger in certain places, but
always without success. Each day, Jevrem stops by the house where a former Prime
Minister, Nikola Pašić, used to live. As if wanting to consult with him he calls to
him. His voice goes unheard but the grey-haired head of the wily old politician
appears at a window. They look at one another, then Jevrem can no longer help
himself and asks Pašić what he has kept asking himself, ‘“Bez izdaje, da li se
može?” ’ [‘Can it be done without treachery?’], meaning is history possible without
betrayal. Pašić at first says nothing, but the narrator says that he probably recalls his
time as a politician during the reign of Jevrem’s grandson, King Milan Obrenović,
when he experienced many difficulties. A point of contact between the two men
seems to appear, but then the spell is broken. Instead, Pašić ‘odmahne rukom,
možda kaže a možda i ne kaže nešto kao “Koji ti ono beše”, vetar biva sve jači i
Gospodar Jevrem, odjednom osmehnut nad malim nesporazumom naraštaja, obode
konja i vine se u nebo’ [dismisses him with a wave, he perhaps says or perhaps
he does not say, something like, ‘And what’s your name’, the wind blows all the
more and Lord Jevrem, suddenly smiling at the little misunderstanding between
generations, spurs his horse and soars up to Heaven].56 The inglorious events of
national history are repeated, the same questions are asked, the attempts to discuss
them and arrive at answers are played out on the streets of Dorćol, but to no avail.
56 Restless Ghosts
Different generations pursue their own goals, replicating past mistakes and seeing
the same injustice. History unfolds without any purpose or direction.
The stories demonstrate coincidences and overlaps in history, but not of the
kind which explain or help to understand the course of events. A mention of
the city under attack provokes references to other times when the city has been
assaulted or taken, combining the experiences of bombing from different wars
in a single sentence. These attacks include the Turkish cannonade on Belgrade in
1862 following the incident of the attack on the Serbian boy, the shelling of the
city in the First World War, and the more devestating bombing campaigns of the
Second World War firstly in 1941 by the German air force and again in 1944 by
Allied bombers.57 Sometimes, the city appears to have retained some other trait of
continuity. The third story in Velmar-Janković’s Dorćol concerns Jevrem’s brother,
‘Ulica Gospodar-Jovanova’ [‘Lord Jovan Street’]. Every day, Jovan passes by the
building where Savka Kaljević used to have her pharmacy, but it is now an outlet
for a clothes manufacturer called ‘Budućnost’. He fancies that he can still see the
pharmacist’s face in the window, although those who pass by now find that instead
of Savka, ‘pozdravlja ih plastična lutka iz “Budućnosti”, u svetlom kišnom kaputu’
[a plastic dummy from ‘Budućnost’ greets them, in a light-coloured raincoat].58
Velmar-Janković’s book itself has gone through various transformations since its
first publication in 1981. In the 2006 edition, the author added footnotes or altered
the text to account for changes in the intervening twenty five years. The attacks
on Belgrade in the new edition now include reference to the year 1999, when
NATO launched its aerial assault on the city.59 There is also a footnote to point
out that there is no longer a shop here with the name ‘Budućnost’, a name which
in Serbian means ‘Future’: ‘To što prodavnice sa ovim imenom više nema, možda
može da znači da nam je i budućnost rasprodata, pa se ne zna kome to Gospodar
Jovan, u stvari, maše’ [That there is no longer a shop with this name perhaps may
mean that our future is also sold out, and it is not known to whom Lord Jovan, in
fact, waves].60 The future, like history, is an uncertain and fragile space in Velmar-
Janković’s fictional world.
The thematic focus on ghosts as sites of isolated historical density is ref lected
in the story ‘Ulica Vase Čarapića ili Vasina ulica’ (‘Vasa Čarapić Street or Vasa’s
Street’). Vasa was the commander of the Serbian rebels who in 1806 took the main
gate into Ottoman Belgrade, an action in which he was fatally wounded. A bronze
statue was erected in a small park at the head of the street bearing his name and
across the road from what is now the main square in the centre of town. This spot
also marks where the old gate stood against which he led his men in battle. There
is little to connect the man, the monument, and the urban environment in which
he now finds himself. The statue is of a warrior drawing his sword, in a decisive
gesture, firm in his resolve, but Vasa does not realize that his bronze likeness
contains much of the ‘umetnost socijalističkog realizma’ [art of Socialist Realism]
from the 1940s praising the heroes of socialist labour.61 He can still see the main gate
into Belgrade from his vantage point as a statue although it has been pulled down
and is invisible to passers-by today. However, he cannot cross the road to the spot
where it once stood since: ‘Zemlja pamti, kamen i cigla kao da pamte, ali asfalt ne
Restless Ghosts 57
pamti i Vasa, eto, ne može da kroči na kolovoz’ [The earth can remember, stone and
brick seem to remember, but asphalt does not remember and Vasa cannot step onto
the roadway].62 His story is central to the history of the city but his ghost cannot
move to places, now covered with modern building materials, where the city has
forgotten him. Similarly, Vasa looks at the modern cityscape but fails to understand
what he sees. He stands close to the point where pedestrians wait for the traffic
lights to change in order to cross the road: ‘U početku je Čarapiću bilo nejasno to
muklo sporazumevanje između ljudi i svetiljki; sad se navikao iako mu, ne retko,
izgleda da zavisnost ljudskog ponašanja od boje upaljene svetiljke skriva naboj
neke netrpelijvosti između čoveka i ulice’ [At first, Čarapić did not comprehend
the unspoken understanding between people and lights; now he was used to it
although, quite often, it seems to him that the dependency of human behaviour
on the colour of the lights conceals some tense hostility between man and street].63
The semiotic systems for the communication of meaning are in constant f lux and
captured only within the historical moment leaving the violence of history forgotten
or unresolved for Velmar-Janković’s ghosts. There is no hope for the redemption of
secondary burial in a world where past and present are isolated one from the other.
The concept of history which dominates the haunted world of Dorćol is a fragile
pattern of myriad memories recalling all the large and small happenings of human
experience confronted by an ever-changing present. The planes of remembrance
and of current events already being transformed into memories are no guarantee of
continuity, development and progress; rather they rarely meet in any meaningful
way and are more open to rupture, forgetting, and the repetition of mistakes.
The fictional world of Dorćol is created from a geometric pattern which is then
transformed into a multi-layered narrative investigating human agency in historical
movement from different angles. The ghost of Dositej Obradović exposes the
connection between geometric design and the semantic level of Velmar-Janković’s
collection of stories. Dositej was a leading figure of the Serbian Enlightenment and
first Minister of Education in the rebel government which took Belgrade from the
Turks at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In his story, ‘Ulica Dositejeva’
(‘Dositej Street’), he recalls his many travels to different parts of the world and,
poring over the maps of his many journeys, he discerns a pattern:
Onda mu se, u toj igri, u trenu razjasnilo da svako od tih putovanja, predstavljeno
linijama, u stvari čini trougao ili, češče, petougao. Osetio se nekako udaljen
od sebe samog i sposoban da sopstveni život smatra kao izukrštani sled
geometrijskih oblika čije su se strane, povremeno, sasvim podudarale. Pojmio
je da u tome sledu ima više smisla nego što je to ikada mogao da sluti: svako od
temena tih mnogobrojnih uglova bilo je znak kojim se obeležavalo jedno novo
njegovo iskustvo o razlozima postojanja.64
[Then it suddenly dawned on him, in his game, that each of his journeys, drawn
as lines, in fact made a triangle or, more often a pentagon. He felt somehow
distanced from himself and able to observe his own life as a criss-cross trace of
geometric shapes the sides of which, sometimes, would coincide completely. He
realized that in this pattern there was more sense than he could ever fathom:
the vertex at each of the many angles was a sign marked by a new experience
of his concerning the reasons for existence.]
58 Restless Ghosts
Velmar-Janković’s short stories are structured like Dositej’s journeys, trying to

give shape to something which cannot in the end be fathomed, only pointed
to, suggested, given shape in a fictional world which brings together human
experiences and the broad sweeps of history which affect them. Decisions taken
and plans considered on the basis of personal motivations, private thoughts and
feelings mingle with political and social forces giving unforeseeable results. There
is a delicate design, but its pattern is ghostly, present and absent at the same time.
The purpose which might explain the links among the different events, actors, and
anonymous forces moving them is even more spectral and available only beyond the
border of history itself. Dositej fancies that he catches a glimpse of the solution to
the vexing question of historical being: ‘U severnim krajevima, gde je dan nejasnije
odeljen od noći, tanušna međa između onog što jeste i onog što nije časkom bi se
maknula a onda bi se nebivanje pričinjavalo gotovo jednako razumljivo koliko i
bivanje’ [In the northern regions, where day is less distinctly divided from night,
the faint border between that which is and that which is not momentarily disappears
and then non-being can be imagined as equally comprehensible as being].65 In
those instances when the borders disappear it might be possible to intuit the total of
historical experience in a way which is not possible within history itself.
The stories emphasize two distinct but interlocked series of moments, one of
which develops a synchronic model of the narrative and the other expands as
part of a diachronic evolution. The thoughts and emotions guiding the actions of
characters offer a dramatic pattern to shape the overall structure of the moment.
At the same time, each action unfolds in a chronological sequence which is part of
a wider historical f low and also part of an ever-expanding series of other people’s
interests and planning. Each part of the synchronic pattern, each thought or
emotion of a character, is also open to its own chronological sequence; while each
moment within the diachronic evolution may be considered in the light of a larger
synchronic design of others’ thoughts and feelings. One of the two directions may
be followed, but hardly both at the same time. History is composed of both these
horizontal and vertical lines of development leaving its doubled complexity closed
to human comprehension. This is the essence of the delicate design which underpins
the narrative structure of each story in Velmar-Janković’s Dorćol and determines the
semantic level of the work as a whole. The structure of the collection of stories
itself follows a metaphoric pattern imitating this twofold movement, based on the
intersecting lines of streets along both the horizontal and vertical axes of the slope
on which Dorćol is built. Transferring the titles of stories to the map of streets offers
a graphic realization of the limits of human agency. The ghosts of the book inhabit,
animate, and construct the territory where the overlapping designs of narrative,
history, and social change meet and interact.
Velmar-Janković’s Dorćol offers a glimpse of memories and repressed histories over
a longer period of time than most other works of the 1980s, which more usually
concentrate on the Second World War and the turbulent years which followed. Her
historical characters were assimilated into official histories as soldiers fighting for
national freedom, but the details of the events in which they were involved were not
widely disseminated in comparison to the exploits of the Partisans. The authorities
Restless Ghosts 59
maintained a distance from national heroes of the past to avoid emphasizing partial
or national histories at the expense of constructing a Yugoslav version in which
all historical efforts were linked to the final battle for liberation fought by the
Partisans as champions of revolutionary socialism. The alternative potential of the
stories in Dorćol is not based on the recreation of the lives of national heroes, but
on the portrayal of history without purpose or direction; history takes unexpected
and unforeseeable turns without regard for individuals, ideological commitment,
or planned strategies. Real understanding of the orders of human experience and
history is beyond the reach of the figures in Velmar-Janković’s complex narrative.
The Politics of Haunting

Two of the writers in this chapter were figures with a political edge to their public
engagement. Jovan Radulović, a Serb from Croatia, took political office when
conf lict began between the Serb minority and the majority population in Croatia.
Appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first government of the Republic
of Serbian Krajina in 1991, he occupied the post for just a few months that year.
Speaking of this period in an interview given to the fortnightly magazine Duga in
1998, he notes that he accepted the appointment because they were difficult times
for the people of his district, although he was never asked if he actually wanted it.
He approached a Serbian politician from Croatia, Milorad Pupovac, to take up the
position in his place, but Pupovac declined. Radulović speaks of his disappointment
regarding the attitude of Belgrade’s political leaders to the situation in Krajina and
says ‘ja sam se iz toga izvukao i nikada nikakve zvanične kontakte nisam održavao’
[I withdrew from that and never had any kind of official contact again].66 His short-
lived political activity is one of the reasons why his work attracted the attention of
Western commentators, particularly to the political controversy surrounding the
dramatization of his collection of short stories Dove Hole.67
On their publication in 1980, Radulović’s stories were awarded an official prize
in Croatia, the Sedam Sekretara SKOJa, but two years later the play written by
Radulović on the basis of his narrative prose was withdrawn from the repertoire
of the theatre in Novi Sad on the grounds that the work promoted nationalist
tendencies. Radulović wrote of his intentions and the relationship between the
narrative and dramatic forms of Dove Hole: ‘Taj novi dramski i pozorišni oblik
treba da ima isto značenje, smisao i poruku kao i u prozi’ [That new dramatic and
theatrical form should have the same meaning, sense, and message as in prose].68
Many of the scenes in the play mirror events in the stories with particular attention
to the release of the restless spirits of the victims of the wartime massacre. At the end
of the play, the final scene is a film sequence projected on stage in which, according
to directions in the script: ‘Iz Golubnjače izlaze ljudi, žene, djeca, odlaze’ [Men,
women, children come from Dove Hole, they go away].69 Both versions of Dove
Hole contain a form of secondary burial and the end of cultural haunting by the
ghosts of that particular event. The long pause between the publication of his stories
and his activites in the early 1990s also make it difficult to provide sound evidence
of any link between the themes of his fictional work, including the scandal of the
play with the same title, and his brief period of political engagement.
60 Restless Ghosts
Slobodan Selenić was another writer whose public engagements and fictionalization
of taboo themes challenging official versions of the history of the Second World
War and Goli Otok brought him to the attention of scholars interested in the break-
up of Yugoslavia. He was the last President of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia,
resigning after a year in office when it was clear that there was no further desire for
a federal organization of writers in January 1990. He maintained a public profile
in opposition to the regime of Slobodan Milošević and was active in the coalition
grouping known as DEPOS, Demokratski Pokret Srbije (Democratic Movement of
Serbia), founded in 1992. He spoke about his reasons for joining DEPOS in a 1993
interview for Večernje novosti: ‘Pa, ja sam, kao i dosta mojih jednomišljenika, ušao
u DEPOS ne sa idejom da se bavim politikom, već da one koji se bave politikom,
ako je to moguće, povežem u koherentnu i dejstvujuću opoziciju’ [Well, like many
others like me, I went into DEPOS not with the idea to take up politics, rather, if
at all possible, to link together those who are involved in politics into a coherent
and effective opposition].70 Selenić soon became disillusioned with the Serbian
opposition and his political activity came to an end. His media interviews, collected
in the book Iskorak u stvarnost, are mostly connected to his books, plays, and literary
life in general, with his other activities as additional questions. In his remarks on the
role of the historical novel in modern Serbian literature, already quoted in Chapter
2, he wrote how literature had to take the place of historiography because genuine
historical research in socialist Yugoslavia was moribund.71 His point was that
novelists took over the function usually held by academic historians because of their
inability to fill the lacunae in the official narrative. However, an examination of his
own work in this chapter, Heads or Tails, demonstrates that as a writer he himself
was less concerned with filling in those holes than in presenting a complex narrative
performance of why testimony about the past is difficult and always compromised.
The spectral figure of Maki does not restore history’s missing material but remains
an ambiguously insubstantial ghost. Dejan Ilić, in his article on Selenić’s novels,
does not actually discuss Heads or Tails, but his general approach is more critical of
Selenić’s engagement with Serbian history than mine.72
There is a political side to the modern ghost stories of Serbia’s new historical
fiction of the 1980s, although it is not to be confused with streaks of political
activism. The meanings of these fictions are to be found in their dense narrative
structures and the strategic function of uncanny and fantastic motifs with the dead
leaving, returning to, or staying among the living. They often expand on the
methods, possibilities, and significance of stories about the past, taken from indi-
vidual memories or from written and other sources. The ghosts in the works of
Radulović, Selenić, and Velmar-Janković are communal ghosts offering an alter-
native voice, but their voice feeds into an overall narrative dilemma: narrators are
unreliable, sources are contradictory, and truth is elusive. Their literary concerns
are not about setting the record straight. If all that was needed was to discover what
really happened and put those events into some linguistic formulation, the task
would not bear the pain and hurt that emerges. Their political weight focuses on
the purpose of the past, or its lack of purpose, contrary to the assumed teleological
significance of history in Yugoslavia’s official communist ideology. In the modern
Restless Ghosts 61
version of haunted worlds the appearance of the communal ghost reveals the return
of an alternative voice:
Stories of cultural haunting differ from other twentieth-century ghost stories in
exploring the hidden passageways not only of the individual psyche but also of a
people’s historical consciousness. Through the agency of ghosts, group histories
that have in some way been threatened, erased or fragmented are recuperated
and revised.73
Brogan’s description of the function of the communal ghost in stories of cultural
haunting is an ideal culmination of what may be achieved, but there remains an
element of ambiguity with all ghosts whose presence will always cause anxiety
in different ways. Their presence may be desired as a sign that the breach in the
narrative between past and present has been recognized, that there is a rupture
which demands attention. If the ghost can be satisfactorily reburied then narrative
reconciliation is possible, past and present may be rejoined, but this can only be a
temporary measure until the past once more invades the present. Reburial, as in
Dove Hole, offers only qualified resolution and not an end to all the consequences
of social violence.
The modern community ghost story of cultural haunting also fixes on a shift
in the paradigm of the haunted house, as voiced by Del Villano: ‘If in traditional
ghost literature the favourite site of the ghost is the house, contemporary literary
production transposes the haunted house into a haunted “structure,” where the
structure is identified with social, historical and cultural contexts.’74 The ghosts of
the works examined in this chapter are bound to the network of memories, stories,
and events forming the structure of cultural memories. They continue to represent
a particular instance of unresolved social violence, but the violence has been of
such catastrophic dimensions when put in the context of the repressed causes and
traumatic consequences of which it is a part, that their appearance exceeds the
possibility for the recuperation of forgotten memories and revision of the historical
record. Maki in Selenić’s Heads or Tails is a sign of troubling anxieties which have
poisoned the lives of those closest to him. They are not individual concerns but
the products of historical forces acted out in Zlata’s commemorative ritual and
Champion’s adoption of Orthodox mysticism. They cannot be saved by Maki’s
presence and both die. The ghosts of the rebel leaders in Velmar-Janković’s Dorćol
cannot make the experience of history usable again, the past is closed and lost, each
ghost a sign of the continuing rupture between past and present, while the events
of history serve to widen the semiotic gap. While ghosts are a necessary form of
cultural revisionism, the examples in this chapter are also a reminder that the past
refuses to be reduced to just one spectral instance, limiting the ghost’s recuperative
powers. Their haunting presence at the intersection of cultural memory with social
life provides a tantalizing structure for political and historical revision, but without
the promise of personal redemption or national salvation.
62 Restless Ghosts
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Ernst van Alphen, ‘Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma’, in Acts
of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 24–38 (p. 37).
2. Bergland, The National Uncanny, p. 5.
3. Barbara A. Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003),
p. 4.
4. Ibid., p. 12.
5. Both pigeons and doves are members of the bird family Columbidae. In English, ‘dove’ tends
to refer to smaller species of the family, although this distinction is not applied consistently.
6. See Denich, ‘Dismembering Yugoslavia’, p. 367; Ramet, Balkan Babel, p. 199; Dragović-Soso,
‘Saviours of the Nation’, p. 105.
7. Jovan Radulović, Golubnjača (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1980), p. 78.
8. Ibid., p. 55.
9. Ibid., p. 72.
10. Ibid., p. 31.
11. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and intro.
by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp.
3–24 (p. 12).
12. Radulović, Golubnjača, p. 37.
13. Ljubiša Jeremić, ‘Pripovedač Jovan Radulović’, in Radulović, Golubnjača, pp. 107–16 (p. 114).
15. Ibid. p. 41.
16. Maria Tumarkin, Traumascapes: The Power and Fate of Places Transformed by Tragedy (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 2005), p. 12.
18. Ibid.; my italics.
19. Ibid., p. 38.
20. Ibid., p. 47.
21. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and
History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 60.
22. Ibid., p. 62.
24. Ibid.
25. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, p. 22.
27. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), p. 9.
29. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, p. 8.
30. Ljubiša Jeremić, Proza novog stila: Kritike i ogledi (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1976), p. 26.
31. Miloš Jevtić, Oči u oči sa Selenićem (Belgrade: D ‘87, 1991), p. 46.
32. Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997), p. 148.
33. Thomas, Serbia under Milošević, p. 33.
34. Radmila Gorup, ‘Representations of Trauma in Narratives of Goli Otok’, Serbian Studies, 21
(2007), 151–60 (p. 152).
35. Oskar Gruenwald, ‘Yugoslav Camp Literature: Rediscovering the Ghost of a Nation’s Past-
Present-Future’, Slavic Review, 46 (1987), 513–28 (p. 513).
36. Petar Džadžić, ‘Svet promene i vraćanja: Romani Slobodana Selenića’, in Slobodan Selenić,
Memoari Pere Bogalja, 3rd edn (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1999), pp. 239–68 (p. 258).
37. Slobodan Selenić, Pismo/glava, 2nd edn (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1983), p. 14.
38. Ibid., p. 28.
Restless Ghosts 63
39. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

40. Ibid., p. 70.
41. Ibid., p. 19.
42. Ibid., p. 114.
43. Ibid., p. 69.
44. Ibid., p. 256.
45. Ibid., p. 117.
46. Ibid., p. 134.
47. Ibid., p. 275.
48. Ibid. p. 360.
49. Brajović, Kratka istorija preobilja, p. 76.
50. For more on the history of Belgrade see David A. Norris, Belgrade: A Cultural and Literary History
(Oxford: Signal Books, 2008).
51. Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Dorćol: Imena ulica (Belgrade: Nolit, 1981), respectively p. 17, p. 33, p.
174.
52. Ibid., p. 17.
53. Ibid., p. 18.
54. Ibid., p. 19.
55. Ibid., p. 31.
56. Ibid., p. 32.
57. Ibid., see p. 15 and p. 54.
58. Ibid., p. 43.
59. See Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Dorćol: Imena ulica, expanded edn (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture,
2006), p. 39.
60. Ibid., p. 32.
61. Velmar-Janković, Dorćol: Imena ulica (Belgrade: Nolit, 1981), p. 61.
62. Ibid., p. 69.
63. Ibid., pp. 68–69.
64. Ibid., p. 206.
65. Ibid., p. 203.
66. Jovan Radulović, ‘Prošao zanos’, in Zrna iz pleve (Belgrade: Biblioteka grada Beograda, 2007),
pp. 151–63 (p. 160).
67. For a fuller analysis of the affair around the dramatization of Dove Hole, see David A. Norris,
‘Jovan Radulović’s Golubnjača (Dove Hole): Analysis and Context of the Stories and the Play
Which Was Banned in Yugoslavia (1980–1984)’, Slavonic and East European Review, 90 (2012),
201–28.
68. Jovan Radulović, Slučaj ‘Golubnjača’: Za i protiv (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 2008), p. 96.
69. Ibid., p. 72.
70. Slobodan Selenić, ‘Uspaljena gospođa i 6.000.000 mrtvih Srba’, in Iskorak u stvarnost (Belgrade:
Prosveta, 1995), pp. 174–77 (p. 176).
71. See Selenić, ‘History and Politics as a Fate’, p. 228.
72. Dejan Ilić, ‘Od Pigmaliona do golema’, in Tranziciona pravda i tumačenje književnosti: Srpski primer
(Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga, 2011), pp. 145–227.
73. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, pp. 5–6.
74. Del Villano, Ghostly Alterities, p. 4.
CHAPTER 4
❖
Uncanny Histories
The modern ghost story as a form of cultural haunting appeared in Serbian litera-
ture at the beginning of the 1980s. Ghosts and death are topics which con stitute
the most highly developed point of the uncanny, according to Sigmund Freud:
‘To many people the acme of the uncanny is represented by anything to do with
death, dead bodies, revenants, spirits and ghosts.’1 The uncanny is more than
images of the dead returning to the present. It extends to demonic representations,
doppelgangers, dream worlds, the animation of otherwise inanimate objects;
it refers to worlds which do not behave according to the rules of the everyday,
rational, and common-sense understanding of what is real and possible. Nicholas
Royle notes the relationship between the haunting presence of the ghost and the
effect of the uncanny in a more general sense in the opening sentences of his book
The Uncanny: ‘The uncanny entails another thinking of beginning: the beginning
is already haunted. The uncanny is ghostly. It is concerned with the strange,
weird and mysterious, with a f lickering sense (but not conviction) of something
supernatural.’2 Representations of the uncanny make the subject go back to the
beginning and rehearse again what has been experienced with the realization
that something has been missed, something was present but was not recognized
because it did not fit the rules of the real, everyday world. On rethinking the
event, this absence is partially recovered yet, for the effective functioning of the
uncanny, remains incomplete, a f lickering sense that the event may be supernatural.
The pause of uncertainty was also identified by Tzetan Todorov as an essential
element of the uncanny event in literature ‘which provokes a hesitation in the
reader and the hero’.3 Uncanny stories are covered by a number of terms which
express odd, distorted, and haunting views of a defamiliarized world, at once
recognizable from the historical world outside the text, yet not equal to it in their
possibilities. For Todorov, who recognizes that the definition is ‘broad and vague’,
uncanny events are ‘incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or
unexpected’.4 Events and characters are not limited to comprehensible forms of
behaviour; they may step outside accepted physical constraints and enter the realm
of other textual worlds where they suffer the logic of dreams, demonic powers,
or unrestrained imagination. The ghost story is a species of uncanny tale, a world
of grotesque and fantasy literature possessing the types of haunting motifs which
dominate times of cultural transition and political instability, as seen in the Serbia of
this period.
Uncanny Histories 65
The appearance of the ghosts in the work of Radulović, Selenić, and Velmar-
Janković are a sign that not all is well with the present world to which the ghosts
return. As Marcellus says, after seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, ‘Something is
rotten in the state of Denmark.’5 There is a rupture in the narrative connecting
past and present, and a solution has to be found to reconnect them and re-establish
continuity. Modern historical fiction generally sees the border between past and
present as a complex zone, as Elias remarks: ‘Portraying the past as sublimely
different and deferred, the metahistorical romance often constructs the border
between the past and the present not as the archival fact but as the uncanny, a place
revisited.’6 The border between past and present is not defined by the knowledge
that can be gained by historical distance, but by the intrusion of the past into the
present, when the border is broken and the past communicates what has been
forgotten or repressed. Freud views the essential terrifying factor of the uncanny
in precisely these terms when he writes that ‘the frightening element is something
that has been repressed and now returns’.7 It represents the return of archetypal
fears and memories of death, traumatic experiences which cannot be forgotten but
cannot be fully articulated and so laid to rest, of a world beyond history inhabited
by ghosts, witches, and vampires. This is the point where in the here and now the
burden of history is felt: in Frederic Jameson’s phrase ‘History is what hurts’.8 Elias
emphatically asserts the representation of the pain of history in modern historical
fiction and refers to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved as an example:
The ghost-child Beloved is the figure embodying relation, the relation between
the unspeakable historical past (a traumatic History that cannot be empirically
rationalized or understood and can only be faced with terror), and a dynamic
historical present in which human beings can choose action and can strive for
freedom in the face of what hurts.9
In this chapter I will examine ways in which history that hurts is articulated
through a range of uncanny motifs. Fictional narratives containing clearly empha-
sized uncanny motifs, rather than more classical ghost stories, also began to make
their appearance from the beginning of the 1980s. They deepen and illustrate the
theme of haunting and its semantic potential in stories which are set within an
unmistakeable historical framework. The works discussed in this chapter are by
Danilo Kiš, Antonije Isaković, and Radoslav Bratić. They cover different poetics
and approaches to the writing of literary fiction, yet they share the discordant notes
which register their challenge not only to the official version of historical events, but
also to the dominant view that the truth of the historical past correctly investigated
is open to easy and unproblematic dissemination. These works, like the ones in
the previous chapter, are not primarily concerned with the recuperation of erased
historical knowledge; rather they explore the construction of historical knowledge,
cultural memory, and the emotional consequences of that performance. They focus
on animating the different narrative voices as they jockey for position in order to
present their testimony, as Holton describes: ‘It is, in a sense, a struggle over point
of view, over the power to select from among the jarring witnesses the accounts that
may be accepted as legitimate authority.’10 The struggle is the narrative design of the
fictional text, and not a problem to be resolved by an author with the task to decide
66 Uncanny Histories
which voice is telling the truth. In the rest of this chapter I shall focus on analysing
the performance or construction of history in novels challenging traditional forms
of historical fiction.
Oneiric Histories
Danilo Kiš (1935–89) is one of the best-known writers from Serbia in world
literature. Susan Sontag marks his place as an author of significant international
reputation in her introduction to a collection of his essays and interviews in English
translation: ‘The death of Danilo Kiš on October 15, 1989, at the age of fifty-four,
wrenchingly cut short one of the most important journeys in literature made by
any writer during the second half of the twentieth century.’11 Her fulsome praise of
his place in the modern canon is echoed by Ramet, who refers to him as ‘perhaps
the greatest Serbian writer of the late twentieth century’.12 Kiš’s work was hugely
inf luential in Serbian literature, ushering in a contemporary, some say postmodern,
sensibility to the local literary scene. One critic, Mihajlo Pantić, quite simply calls
him ‘reformator srpske književnosti’ [the reformer of Serbian literature] whose
output modernized literary expression.13 Another critic, Jovan Delić, who has
written extensively on Kiš’s works and their inf luence on literary developments,
points out that the quality of ‘istoričnost’ [historicism], as one of the essential
elements in the Serbian tradition, is also ‘jedna od tih spona koje vežu Kiša s tom
tradicijom’ [one of those ties which bind Kiš’s work to that tradition].14 Branko
Gorjup also discusses the representation of history in the author’s work, linking
his name to others who question the possibility of representing the simple truth of
history: ‘They radically questioned historians’ claims of truthfulness in historical
texts that relied on and employed empirical methodology to disclose the past
accurately. “Definitive” or “complete” histories were no longer possible.’15 Gorjup
places the author’s work alongside the attacks made on traditional historiography by
cultural critics like Haydn White and Frederic Jameson.
Kiš questions the facts of history presented as if self-evident truths. To this end
literature has to correct history, which he sometimes spells with a capital letter to
indicate its privileged status. He makes his point in the following way:
I believe that literature must correct History: History is general, literature
concrete; History is manifold, literature individual. History shows no concern
for passion, crime, or numbers. What is the meaning of ‘six million dead’ (!)
if you don’t see an individual face or body — if you don’t hear an individual
story?16
Literature is in a position to offer details about how large, anonymous events affect
the lives of individuals on the margins of history, contrary to the claims of historical
grand narratives. In his interviews and essays Kiš often mentions the twin evils of
the camps run by Hitler for the Jews and by Stalin for his ideological opponents
as hallmarks which have blighted the twentieth century and made recent history
into a slaughterhouse: ‘Iskustvo logora govori o zabludama u shvatanju istorije kao
razvoja, o zabludama u pristupu istoriji kao nečemu što uvek ide napred i naviše,
to iskustvo, dakle, dovodi u pitanje ceo koncept istorije’ [The experience of the
camps speaks of the fallacy in understanding history as development, of the fallacy

in approaching history as something which always goes onward and upward,
therefore, that experience brings into question the whole concept of history].17 On
another occasion, when Adorno’s question whether literature can be written after
Auschwitz was put to him, he replied, ‘Much as I find Adorno’s question valid, I
feel the issue is not so much moral as literary, or even stylistic: how to speak of
such things without lapsing into banality.’18 However, the writer has an obligation
to speak of such matters, to be a witness to his own times, as he comments in his
polemical essay Čas anatomije: ‘Savremeni romansijer daje pre svega grozničava
svedočanstva o svome dobu, bez obzira na vreme radnje i sredinu’ [The modern
novelist offers above all intense testimonies about his own age, regardless of when
and where the action is set].19
In order to achieve his goal and speak about history, Kiš develops a literary
strategy by which the world is presented as recognizable yet at the same time not as
one would expect, a strategy bordering on the f lickering sense of the uncanny. He
describes this process when asked in an interview about the dividing line between
fact and fiction in his work saying, ‘I always begin with a document and subject
it to what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie, defamiliarization, making what
is familiar strange. Otherwise, I’d be writing an essay.’20 Defamiliarization is a
productive displacement of what is known and familiar: ‘It does not, as does science,
organize the world conceptually, but rather disorganizes the forms through which
the world is customarily perceived, opening up a kind of chink through which the
world displays to view new and unexpected aspects.’21 Kiš tempts sense out of the
darkest corners of history in order to illuminate them better and restore meaning to
them. He was only too aware of the limitations of literature to affect real change ‘u
klanici istorije’ [in the slaughterhouse of history]. Although literature may not be a
cure, it is all we have to recover something of the meaning of the past:
I, naravno, pisanje i nije ništa drugo do pokušaj, uvek uzaludan i beznadan,
da se svi ovi golemi problemi dodirnu, da se na trenutak osmisle sredstvima
književnim, da se tom sveopštem haosu istorije i ljudskog postojanja dâ,
trenutno, neki smisao i ostvari neka nada.22
[And, of course, writing is nothing other than the attempt, always in vain
and hopeless, to touch upon all the essential problems, to make them relevant
by literary means for a moment, to give some sense and create some hope
momentarily in the general chaos of history and human existence.]
Kiš’s story ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’ (‘Encyclopaedia of the Dead’), first published
in 1981, has a number of distinctive features when considered alongside his other
work. The story is set in Yugoslavia, whereas most of his other works are set in
the melting pot of Central Europe with its mixed populations speaking different
languages. His characters are often persecuted individuals trying to escape the
penalties imposed by totalitarian regimes of fascism or communism, whereas
the main character of this story is a Serb, an ordinary man living through the
extraordinary times of the twentieth century, more as a witness than a victim. The
story’s temporal limits are defined by the birth and death of the character, from
1910 to 1979. The story’s earliest moment is on the eve of the First World War, just
before the first state of Yugoslavia is founded, and the latest just before the death
of President Josip Broz Tito. The author was not to know that the country would
barely survive his own death in 1989. The life of this one individual coincides
with the collective life of the country. The literary form adopted by Kiš for his
story is central to understanding the story’s significance. His character’s biography,
combined with cultural, historical, and philosophical references, is transferred into
an encyclopaedia entry with all necessary information and images from a definite
time and place, as he described in an interview:
In this way the material of an entire classical novel of the ‘life story’ genre
became a relatively short story and has, I hope, gained in density as a result. I
wasn’t playing literary games or being lazy; the work stems from a profound
conviction that an abridged or condensed form, a form under tremendous
intellectual pressure, engenders a content rich in new meanings and an almost
philosophical tension.23
The textual density of Kiš’s story underpins its semantic complexity and adds to the
final uncanny twist in the ending.
The narrator, a female as attested by the feminine adjectival endings in the text,
addresses in her opening sentence an anonymous third party whose identity is never
revealed: ‘Prošle godine, kao što znate, boravila sam u Švedskoj na poziv Instituta za
pozorišna istraživanja’ [‘Last year, as you know, I went to Sweden at the invitation
of the Institute for Theater Research’].24 The unnamed interlocutor is addressed
at intervals as the events unfold as a further reminder that this is a testimony, a
report of events being related to someone else. The facts are given as true, but, at
the same time, from the very beginning, Kiš intimates the presence of oneiric and
haunting qualities to the story. The narrator remarks, for example, that since her
return ‘još sam živela u tom dalekom svetu kao u snu’ [‘I was still living in that
far-off world as if in a dream’] and that the night on which these particular events
took place occurred ‘posle predstave Sonate duhova u Nacionalnom pozorištu’ [‘after
a performance of Ghost Sonata at the Dramaten’].25 Such references are important
pointers to the uncanny status of events in the text. The narrator is in the care of
Mrs Johansson, who takes her charge to the Royal Library where she leaves her
with the guard who locks her in for the night in order that she may browse as she
wants. She is left alone in a series of rooms which are dimly lit, looking like an old
wine-cellar where a light draught blows the cobwebs hanging from the shelves.
Each chamber is full of books and the narrator quickly realizes that all the books in
each room are marked with the same letter of the alphabet. In the third room they
have the letter C, and in the fourth the letter D, arranged in alphabetical order. The
library is described in terms of a dungeon containing the mysterious Encyclopaedia
of the Dead. The narrator’s testimony of her experience echoes a Gothic ghost
story involving a document discovered in strange circumstances, in a haunted or
tormented space. The Encyclopaedia is a huge register of the lives of people whose
existence is otherwise not recorded in other forms of data, and its compilers have a
specific purpose in mind:
Jer oni veruju u čudo biblijskog uskrsnuća, i ovom golemom kartotekom samo
pripremaju dolazak tog časa. Tako će svak moći da pronađe ne samo svoje
bližnje nego, u prvom redu, svoju sopstvenu zaboravljenu prošlost. Ovaj će

registar tada biti velika riznica sećanja i jedinstven dokaz uskrsnuća.
[For they believe in the miracle of biblical resurrection, and they compile their
vast catalogue in preparation for that moment. So that everyone will be able
to find not only his fellow men but also — and more important — his own
forgotten past. When the time comes, this compendium will serve as a great
treasury of memories and a unique proof of resurrection.]26
The narrator races to the room containing volumes beginning with the letter M in
order to find the entry on her father who died just two months earlier.
As the narrator begins to read the entry on her father, she makes notes to
give to her mother when she gets home. The entry begins with his photograph
which was taken after he completed his military service. The narrator keeps the
same picture of her father on her desk. She remarks: ‘Snimljen je godine 1936,
dvanaestog novembra, u Mariboru, po njegovom izlasku iz vojske. Ispod snimka,
njegovo ime i, u zagradi, godine: 1910–1979.’ [‘It was taken in 1936, on November
12, in Maribor, just after his discharge. Under the picture were his name and, in
parantheses, the years 1910–79’].27 The encyclopaedia includes references to all that
the narrator’s father saw and underwent in his life. He is a Serb born in Croatia
who relocates to Belgrade in 1929 in order to study surveying. The director of the
school is Mr Stojković, ‘koji će poželeti budućim geometrima da časno služe kralju
i otadžbini, jer na njima leži težak zadatak da ubeleže u karte nove granice naše
domovine’ [‘who enjoined the future surveyors to serve king and country loyally,
for on their shoulders lay the heavy burden of mapping the new borders of their
motherland’].28 The father’s profession takes him around Serbia, measuring the
land and drawing maps of its topographgical features. The narrator makes notes
of all that is given in the entry on her father in the Encyclopaedia; whether it be
the names of f lowers in their garden, the f light of the Yugoslav government at the
outbreak of the Second World War, the price of basic foodstuffs, the bombing of
Belgrade and German troop movements. Details are essential in order to ensure
a proper testimony without hierarchy: ‘Istorija je za Knjigu mrtvih suma ljudskih
sudbina, sveukupnost efemernih zbivanja’ [‘For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history
is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings’].29 Her father
witnesses violent events which are the consequences of specific historical moments
in the national narrative. In October 1944 he overhears a conversation between a
Partisan officer and his neighbour, one of the Volksdeutschers, an ethnic German
citizen of Yugoslavia whose nationality makes him suspicious in the eyes of the
liberators. His neighbour is executed in the courtyard. A few years later, at the
time of the critical split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, one of her
father’s colleagues is denounced for supporting Stalin and for months has to report
to the police where he is beaten before coming to work. Biographical and historical
narratives become entwined after the Second World War:
Posao što ga je moj otac imao posle rata u Državnom katastru, gde se
zemlja iznova premerava i upisuje u knjige, kao posle svih velikih istorijskih
prekretnica, tu je dat sa svim onim što jedno takvo poglavlje zahteva: kvalitet
zemljišta, gruntovnice, novi nazivi za nemačka sela i nova imena za naselje
kolonista.
[The post my father held after the war in the land office, which undertook
to remeasure and rerecord the land, as is usual after major historic upheavals,
is accorded the detailed treatment it demands: quality of terrain, title deeds,
new names for former German villages and new names for freshly colonized
settlements.]30
This new phase in the development of Yugoslavia requires that the country be
brought back into textual life anew. Her father, as a cartographer, is a producer
of the documentary evidence giving witness to historical changes. Kiš constantly
extends the semantic reach of his work by maintaining the play on borders between
different orders of documentary material and weaving into the fabric of the story
references to the formation of textual records as signifying practices in this period
of transitional history.
In his later years the narrator’s father takes up painting and produces wonderfully
intricate f loral designs around the house, on a wall, on a window, on boxes. The
narrator copies the diagram given in the Encyclopaedia of the basic pattern of his
f loral artwork, of which she says: ‘Bio je najvećma nalik na neku golemu oljuštenu
i raspuklu pomorandžu, ispresecanu tankim crvenim linijama poput kapilara’
[‘More than anything it resembled a gigantic peeled and cloven orange, crisscrossed
with fine red lines like capillaries’].31 The narrator reads that her father’s passion
for painting coincided with the development of his illness, a cancerous growth in
his intestines, from which he died. The story has carefully traced and recorded all
developments in the life of the main character on personal, familial, community,
national and even international levels, now drawing his life to its natural close as an
old man suffering from a tumour. On reading this last paragraph about her father’s
death overlapping with his obsessive production of f loral designs, the narrator lets
out a scream and, covered in sweat, she wakes up. The episode has been a dream.
However, the story does not end and the narrator notes down all that she can
remember from her dream including the f loral pattern characteristic of her father’s
paintings which she saw in her dream and shows to her father’s doctor: ‘Kada
sam pokazala taj crtež doktoru Petroviću, potvrdio mi je, ne bez čuđenja, da je
sarkom u utrobi mog oca izgledao upravo tako. I da je efloracija trajala bez sumnje
godinama’ [‘When I showed the drawing to Dr. Petrović, he confirmed, with some
surprise, that it looked exactly like the sarcoma in my father’s intestine. And that
the efflorescence had doubtless gone on for years’].32 This final note, given with no
further explanation, provides the uncanny motif which redefines the whole story,
forcing a rehearsal of its meaning from its haunted beginning.
The final uncanny tone is dependent on the production of an authenticated,
historical world supplied by the illusion of the Encyclopaedia’s details of the man’s
life. The uncanny can only be effective as part of a story with a distinctive realistic
background against which to measure the supernatural or grotesque element as
Royle states: ‘There has to be a grounding in the rational in order to experience its
trembling and break-up.’33 For this reason, certain works which may be regarded as
historical fiction written in a postmodern style but do not have that other contrasting
quality essential for the uncanny, such as Milorad Pavić’s Hazarski Rečnik (The
Dictionary of the Khazars, 1984), are omitted from this study. Kiš exploits the objective
tone and sparse documentary form of the encyclopaedia as rational ground, even
though it is invented. When speaking about the stories in Encyclopaedia of the Dead,
Kiš refers to the importance of the documentary approach even when the written
brief in question is not real, for writers will ‘invent a historical document without
inventing history, forge a document, if you like, and thereby re-identify historical
reality through the imagination’.34 Adrijana Marčetić writes on Kiš’s narrative style
and postmodern techniques in her book Istorija i priča, commenting specifically on
the distanced stance of the documentary aspect of his work:
Ovaj stav ima i polemičku stranu; za razliku od tradicionalnih pisaca, ‘fabulista i
demagoga’, moderni pisac je objektivan i nepristrasan u prikazivanju stvarnosti,
on ne nudi svoju viziju prošlosti, svoju istorijsku i ideološku ‘istinu’, već samo
prikuplja i povezuje postojeće činjenice.35
[This stance also has its polemical side; in contrast to traditional writers,
‘story-tellers and demagogues’, the modern writer is objective and impartial
in depicting reality; he does not offer his vision of the past, his historical and
ideological ‘truth’, rather he collects and connects existent facts.]
In fact, as Marčetić correctly points out, Kiš’s deliberate impartiality and distance
from history is a type of authorial mystification, a strategic ploy for articulating in
literary language the enigmatic relationship between literature and history which
the author discusses in interviews, how to avoid banality and to develop that density
in the narrative structure which suggests other significant layers in order to create
an almost philosophical tension. The encyclopaedic form of the story is crucial to
its semantic richness not only for underpinning the authenticity of the story, but as
a solution for embedding meaning beyond the life of the main character and beyond
the historical context of his times.
In ‘The Encyclopardia of the Dead’ Kiš reconstructs our relationship to the
past by his undermining of the historical narrative: recording the events, first, as
if a historical record, then as if a dream, and then dispelling the unreality of the
dream by the eerie information that the father’s paintings are a representation of
the internal growth which killed him. The uncanny effect of this doubled ending
leaves a distinct unease concerning the status of the events from the story. What was
narrated in the exact tones of an encyclopaedia entry is now overlaid with a troubling
disquiet. Delić, in his analysis of Kiš’s work and inf luence, draws our attention in
particular to the dream: ‘San ima funkciju motivacije postupka, ali i vodeće teme:
on daje metafizičku i i saznajnu dimenziju naratorkinom doživljaju’ [The dream has
the function of a motivating device and of a major theme: it gives a metaphysical
and a cognitive dimension to the narrator’s experience].36 Through overturning the
conviction of the encyclopaedia form, first, by the literary convention of negating
events as a dream and, second, by linking knowledge from the dream back to
the reality of the father’s death, Kiš transforms his story into one in which the
supernatural is superimposed on history. Not much happens in the father’s life which
could not be expected from the times in which he lived. The twentieth century was
violent and he saw evidence of this violence. It touched his skin but did not destroy
him. The story’s focus falls on the representation of history suspended between the
rational encyclopaedia of events and the moment of supernatural hesitation which
problematizes our comprehension of the information: ‘Excluded from history

although experienced as an event, the supernatural is relegated by its own processes
and procedures to psuedo-history, and the marginal confronting history, incapable of
being incorporated within it.’37 There is no answer to the question posed within
the story whether the truth of the dream has been endorsed by medical observation
of the old man’s tumour. The dream in ‘Encyclopaedia of the Dead’ is not just a
convenient narrative device, but central to the narrative pattern of the story which
simultaneously frames events both as historical and belonging to another shadowy
world. History is essentially unknowable, something of which the characters
become aware and relive dramatically when the past intrudes into the present,
creating a haunted structure of time, a moment of hesitation devoid of human will
and agency. The narrative density of Kiš’s story of a Yugoslav everyman takes its
meaning to another level, that the past is never complete and haunting is a reminder
that the past is still active but broken. Uncanny history is not banal, it attests that the
past cannot be completely exorcised and its troubling manifestations forgotten.
Unremembering History
History is not only violent but when it comes to the history that hurts it also acts as
a place for amnesia, for erasure, for loss of identity. In his controversial novel Tren 2
(Instant 2, 1982), Antonije Isaković (1923–2002) tells the traumatic story of inmates
on Goli Otok, the island established as a prison for those who were suspected of
supporting Stalin after the split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1948.
Isaković’s reputation as a prose writer began in the 1950s with the publication of his
first collection of short stories Velika deca (Big Children, 1953), followed by further
collections in 1962, Paprat i vatra (Fern and Fire), and in 1969, Prazni bregovi (Empty
Hills). The stories almost exclusively concern the Second World War, presenting the
Partisan experience from different angles, both the immediacy of the event and ‘rat
u sećanju, pretočen u reči i slike’ [the war in memory, recast in words and images].38
He himself fought as a young communist in the Partisan movement and was loyal
to the regime after the war, a member of the Community Party and later League
of Communists. In 1976 he published his first novel, Tren 1 (Instant 1), in which an
anonymous narrator relates his wartime experiences to his friend Čeperko while
they sit idly by the bank of the river Sava in Belgrade. The work is in the form of a
composite novel, clearly divided into episodes and events which give it the feel of a
collection of stories, although they are closely linked by the presence of the narrator
relating his autobiographical accounts. Instant 2, featuring the same narrator talking
again to his friend Čeperko by the river, represents a departure from his earlier
thematic interests. Rather than talk about the war, he speaks about the prison island
Goli Otok, retelling the memories of former prisoners and their guards from whom
he has heard various accounts about events there.
It was not easy to publish the novel given the highly sensitive nature of the
topic. This was not the first time that Goli Otok was suggested or inscribed in a
fictional world and earlier examples can be found such as Dragoslav Mihailović’s
Kad su cvetale tikve (When the Pumpkins Blossomed, 1968). However, what was new
in Isaković’s work was the sheer concentration on the world of the prison island
through the whole book, which is composed of the personal memories of characters
who were there. The authors of The White Book, the report by the Croatian League
of Communists hostile to what was considered subversive literature published
between 1982 and 1984, are highly critical of Instant 2, citing it as one of those works
responsible for bringing the prison island to the centre of public attention ‘krajem
1981. i početkom 1982. godine (i dalje)’ [at the end of 1981 and beginning of 1982
(and further)].39 Isaković and other writers, in whose works Goli Otok appears,
gave interviews to the press in which the existence of the prison on the island was
branded to be a mistake and a sign of Yugoslav Stalinism. The report’s authors
discuss the work of literary critics who praise Isaković’s novel, citing their words as
evidence that he portrays the events of 1948, in particular its consequences and the
establishment of Goli Otok, not as a temporary expedient to save Yugoslavia but as
something much deeper, intrinsic to the socialist system: ‘Njeni su koreni u dalekoj
prošlosti’ [Its roots are in the distant past].40
Isaković’s narrator meets by chance one of the returnees from Goli Otok at the
house of his friend, Avram Mitrinović. The narrator sets the scene: ‘Sedeli smo u
prizemnoj kući, Birčaninova ulica, ne znam koja je godina bila, lipu smo osećali,
nikakvo kucanje nismo čuli, odjednom u sobu kao da je skliznuo čovek s detetom,
ne starijim od pet godina’ [We were sitting in a single-storey house in Birčaninova
Street, I don’t know which year, we could smell the lindens, we heard no-one
knock, suddenly a man with a child no older than five appeared as if he had slid into
the room].41 The description is terse but gives a precise and recognizable location
in Belgrade at a particular time of year when the linden is in f lower. Such details
uderpin the impression of a normal world in contrast to the descriptions of the
world of Goli Otok to follow. The newcomer is Toma, a man who assisted Avram
and others like him on their way to fight for the communists in Spain. Toma was
their contact in Paris. Their meeting again is clearly awkward; both skirt around
the issue of where Toma has been without mentioning Goli Otok by name. Toma
says he got back yesterday which seems to remind his friend that he has read in the
newspapers Toma’s testimony in which he admitted his guilt for past errors. To his
friend’s simple question of what was it like where he has been, Toma replies, ‘ “Pada
kiša, a trava ne raste” ’ [‘It rains, but the grass doesn’t grow’], all the while looking
at his daughter.42 He continues to explain that he has been in Australia for longer
than he expected and his little girl has grown up in the meantime so that he tells
her about Australia and kangaroos. There is an air of misunderstanding in the room.
Avram cannot help but speak as if Goli Otok was an opportunity for educative
talks and discussions: ‘ “Vodili ste debate. Sigurno su bile duge. Mogu da zamislim:
žestoke i zanimljive.” ’ [‘You had debates. They must have been long. I can imagine
them: fierce and interesting’].43 Avram’s creative imagining of the penal system has
little connection with his friend’s experience of the inhumane condition which the
prisoners have to endure as they are interrogated and beaten. When arrested and
taken to Goli Otok, prisoners like Toma are not allowed to have any connection
with their previous existence, as if it never was. They are born again in a world
with its own rules and its own borders in the middle of a sea. Even Toma’s wife is
required to divorce him after his arrest. With his marriage dissolved, the authorities
make every attempt to destroy evidence of his past.
Isaković’s evocation of the island is of a forlorn place in the middle of an
unforgiving sea. The narrator meets a former inmate by chance on a train as he
is returning from Zagreb. The man is reluctant, as are others, to talk about his
memories of what he experienced there. He makes short, evocative statements
about the sea crashing against the rocky coastline where it could even be said: ‘Muči
se voda’ [The water suffers].44 The island is barren and unbearably hot in summer.
The prisoners form a unique community cut off from ordinary life, distant from the
mainland and from their own memories of what they had once been. The length
of their stay on this rocky outcrop is indeterminate since before returning they are
to be rehabilitated and declare the error of their former ways. After release their life
is made into a semi-life in which they have to find ways to reconnect with their
broken bonds and hide the truth of where they have been. Very few people know
any details about the island, which is omitted from maps. Those who are aware of
its existence know nothing of its exact location or what actually happens there. It
exists, but it has no reality beyond what people like Avram imagine, as if it was a
meeting place in a Party cell to discuss obscure points of ideology in order to arrive
at true solutions and the right way of thinking. The narrator, however, decides
to search for more information about the place and the meaning of the prison
experience on the island, unearthing the ghosts of the past in his discussions with
former inmates.
The prison regime is based on hard labour, prisoners smashing rocks all day
for no purpose, or moving rocks from one place to another, then back again.
Talking during work or falling down from fatigue attracts a sharp beating from
one of the guards. For much of the time the prisoners police themselves through an
unwritten code administered by fellow inmates in a system with no apparent formal
organization. The worst to happen to someone sent there is to be put in boycott.
The word does not convey the same meaning as before the war when it meant a
punishment against fellow communists who were ignored by their comrades. On
Goli Otok, to be put in boycott is quite a different thing and its most savage aspect
is being forced to run the gauntlet. Prisoners line up in two rows while their victim
runs between them. They hit out and strike him with all their strength as he runs
often causing great damage and pain with prisoners losing teeth and receiving
broken bones. Everyone takes part and the punishment for not striking properly
is to be put on boycott the following day. While this goes on, the guards stand to
one side ignoring the beating prisoners receive from other inmates. The prisoners
administer the boycott to themselves, creating the brutal mechanism used to crush
them.
The prisoners have frequent sessions with their interrogators when they are
expected to confess their past ideological crimes. The following is a typical
conversation reported to the narrator:
‘Šta treba da napišem?’ ponovio sam pitanje.
‘Šta hoćeš. Počni od svoje biografije.’
‘Ne mogu svega da se setim.’
‘Ne moraš.’
‘Mogu da pogrešim, činjenice da pobrkam.’
‘Ne mari. Ispraviće se. Postupak tek započinje. Ima da traje.’45
[‘What should I write?’ I repeated the question.
‘What you like. Begin with your biography.’
‘I can’t remember everything.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I can make a mistake, get the facts mixed up.’
‘It doesn’t matter. They’ll get corrected. The proceedings are just getting under
way. They’ll go on.’]
The interrogators insist that prisoners write down all that they can remember to the
last detail. Admission of guilt is an end in itself on the island with little relation to
whether events confessed are real or complete fabrications. One prisoner says that
he does not know what he is supposed to have done, what is his crime. He is told,
‘ “Tvoje nije da odabiraš: manje važno, više važno. Postojimo mi, odabraćemo.” ’
[‘It is not for you to choose: less important or more important. We are here, we’ll
choose’].46 The prisoners do not write their own confessions. They are denied the
right to narrate the terms of their own past. Their sense of identity is eradicated
and replaced with another, chosen by the penal system. One of the prisoners says to
the narrator: ‘ “Kad sam bio tamo, dešavalo mi se: zaboravim zašto sam na ostrvu.” ’
[‘When I was there, it used to happen to me that I would forget why I was on the
island’]. And he adds: ‘ “Sve što si na kopnu ostavio, polako u zaborav. Druga pamet
nastaje. Znam dobro, ponavljao sam kako se zovem i pitao se zašto je to tako, mogao
sam i drugi znak da ponesem.” ’ [‘You slowly forget everything you left behind on
the mainland. Another mind takes over. I know it well, I used to repeat my name
and then ask myself why is it that, I could be the bearer of another sign’].47 Goli
Otok destroys what existed before, and all that remains is the endless repetition of
its meaningless brutality. The prisoners have no identity other than that permitted
to them on the island.
The narrator never doubts the horrors of the island, but as he goes about his self-
imposed task it soon becomes clear that there is no singular truth that will surrender
the secrets of the island. He tells one of his witnesses whom he meets by chance on
a train at night that it is difficult to find evidence about the island because he has no
access to written records and, he says, ‘ “Ljudi različito pamte.” ’ [‘People remember
differently’].48 He gathers different memories which he then reconstructs for his
silent friend, Čeperko, as they sit by the bank of the river. He even describes the
process of reconstruction when he tells his friend from whom he heard a particular
story: ‘ “Čeperko, Jelena mi je u prekidama pričala, a ja tebi odjednom. Sastavio
sam sve sastavke, neke sigurno ispustio. I šta ćeš, Čeperu, svako prede svoju svilu.” ’
[‘Čeperko, Jelena talked to me in intervals, and I’m telling you everything in one
go. I’ve put together all our meetings; some I’ve certainly missed. What can you
do, Čeperko; each weaves his own silk’].49 The narrator is part of a chain of telling
and retelling which is the only way to save the past from oblivion. Toma, like all
the other former inmates from Goli Otok, is reluctant to recall the pain of his
experiences. He urges the narrator to drop his investigation into the secrets of the
island and let it all be forgotten, but he insists, on the contrary, that the story has
to be told since, as he says, ‘ “Bez iskaza nema ga!” ’ [‘Without expression it is no
more!’].50 Unless Toma and the others speak now, there will be no witness to what
happened on Goli Otok and it will sink into oblivion. The past, that is history,
becomes too painful to remember and has to be saved from amnesia.
In Instant 2, the fact of Goli Otok has no place in the historical processes which
created it. When it is gone, guards and prisoners alike no longer need one another
and are banished by the outer world, which does not wish to be reminded of their
existence. They hide, they commit suicide, or die. There is a thin line separating
the guards as executioners and the prisoners as victims in the novel. As Vladislava
Ribnikar attests, Isaković’s novel offers no simple explanations: ‘Istorijski događaji
viđeni su iz različitih uglova, a raznovrsna svedočanstva dopunjuju se utoliko što
sva otkrivaju tragiku koja potiče iz nemogućnosti bezbolnog razrešenja konf likta
i ogleda se u suštinskoj bliskosti dželata i žrtvi’ [Historical events are seen from
various angles, and the different testimonies complement one another in so far as
they all reveal the tragedy rooted in the impossibility of resolving the conf lict and
in the essential closeness of executioners and victims].51 The novel is the narrator’s
collection of testimonies, often contradictory and unable to resolve the conf licts of
the past, giving rise to the haunting status of the prisoners’ memories.
The prisoners in their stories about Goli Otok are obliged to utilize the language
of myth and archetype in order to give some order and sense of perspective to
what happened on the island. On one occasion, a prisoner recalls hearing a cry
as he is breaking rocks. He is told to hurry toward the sound and comes upon
one of the prisoners being stoned. Other inmates pick up stones and throw them
at him until he is buried beneath them and it appears that the man is dead. The
prisoner remembers the sight: ‘Tomina čista glava viri kao sa kamenog postamenta.
Napravili smo spomenik, samo ga odneti u park’ [Toma’s clean head is sticking out
as from a stone pediment. We have made a monument, just waiting to be taken to
the park].52 The dead man’s name, Toma, is one shared by many inmates and is a
name into which they dissolve as part of the structure of the island. The image of
a statue recalls the function of commemorative monuments, standing on a stone
base, placed high for everyone to see in celebration of the spirit and continuity
of the community. But, there is no park in which to put Toma’s effigy, just the
quarry where the prisoners perform their back-breaking labour. Toma’s death
is transformed into one of the island’s rituals, its barbarism signifies the brutal
reality of living beyond the structures of ordinary life. The witness recalls his own
physical reaction when urged to continue throwing stones: ‘Savijam se, hteo bih
da povratim, smrdim na creva’ [I bend down, I could throw up, I can smell the
bile rising].53 There is a moment when the universal metaphor of commemoration
collides with the bodily intensity of the executioner. A boundary is crossed where
the spaces of both symbolic signification and naturalist description are combined
into a new linguistic structure. This is the space of myth where meaning may only
ever be residual or potential since the reality is ineffable.
Another event is related by the same former inmate about a prisoner known as
Čabra, although no-one is certain of his real name, which may have been Čabrić,
Čabrilović, Čabrinović, or Čubrilović. He is frequently subjected to the tortures of

running the gauntlet, which leaves his body broken and his mind affected by the
constant beatings. But, without warning, he suddenly confesses his mistakes and he
is moved from being the chief victim of the gauntlet to taking his place in the line-
up. He takes to his new role like a recent convert, ferociously lashing at the victims
as they run before him. One day, he disappears so the others go looking for him and
eventually find him standing on top of the highest point on the island, completely
naked and facing the sea. The guards and the prisoners call out to him to come
down. Some prisoners are kneeling at the base of the cliff while others secretly cross
themselves. Čabra remains at the top, looking down at them from his position on
high. The former inmate describes him playing the role of a monument explaining:
‘Zato se, valjda, i skinuo; golcat i siv, produžio se u šiljak kamenog brega’ [That’s
probably why he took his clothes off; stark naked and grey, he was an extension of
the stone hill’s peak].54 On the one hand, the scene recalls the tormented figure of
Christ crucified, on the other hand, Čabra, like Toma before him, is turned into a
part of the island’s rocky landscape. In the final moments the image is transformed
when Čabra urinates on the crowd below before leaping from the stony outcrop
towards the sea, seeming to f ly before plummetting to his death like Icarus in his
attempt to escape from his place of imprisonment.
The new mythic structure does not propose an alternative meaning or give sense
to what has no sense. Rather, such images abruptly return to and highlight the
terrifying materiality of life on the island from which there is no escape. Isaković’s
Instant 2 is a highly stylized account of events on the island, constructed as a world
outside the usual categories used to evaluate and judge events. This is the essence
of the experience of confinement there. Isaković’s suggestion of an expression
beyond the historical reality of the island does not lead him to try to transcend it
‘in the search for a more secure and universal value system’, as Hutcheon claims
is sometimes the case in literature which turns to mythic allusions.55 Isaković’s
strategy is akin to that of Elias in her formulation of the operation of myth in
new historical fiction as ‘the place where history cannot be fathomed at all, or is
perceived as a sublime and decentered Absence, in all its terrifying, chaotic, and
humbling incomprehensibility’.56 The island is where historical events turn to
myths as uncanny representations of that which cannot otherwise be understood or
expressed in ordinary terms. The former prisoners rarely talk about how they came
to the island, as if they have always been there and will remain for ever. Part of
them will always stay on the island as they cannot take their memories with them
when released. The experience leaves a deep trauma, which can hardly be given to
testimony. The prisoners’ memory of events ‘has been overwhelmed by occurences
that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be
construed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our
frames of reference’.57 And yet, despite the deep wounds left by their experience of
the prison island and their efforts to unremember the past, the history that hurts
does not leave them completely. It demands some form of testimony which is not a
reconstruction of what happened but a sign of its lasting terror.
Uncanny Borders
Writers of Serbian historical prose in the 1980s confront what Elias considers the
‘shattering unsettlements’ of recent political and cultural mythologies.58 These
unsettlements in the Serbian context are not only the nightmares of history, its
traumatic events, but are also caused by exposure to the myth that history can be
resolved as a narrative of constant progress in the ideological toolkit of the CPY, later
LCY. Kiš follows a narrative strategy of inscribing the unsettlements in a dream,
Isaković embeds them in testimony with mythic dimensions, while Radoslav Bratić
(b. 1948) narrates them alongside other events from dream, myth, memory, and
other discourses and, in so doing, structurally modifies them in the search for their
meaning in the chaos of historical time. Bratić’s collection of short stories Slika bez
oca (Picture without Father, 1985) is a literary world in which shattering unsettlements
are relayed in a highly concentrated form. The work is a series of interlinked short
stories set in the small village of Biš in Herzegovina not long after the Second
World War. The author assumes a radical approach to the question of different
discursive orders linking events from the recent past with layers of history, folk
tale, myth, and collective memory in order to represent the disorder of history as a
complex symbolic order. The narrator recalls events from his childhood in which
his village characters constantly refer to what they have experienced or witnessed
in their own lives. As the narrator tells of events from his past, his neighbours recall
events from a more distant past. Both levels of individual recollections are overlaid
with the social memory of the collective generations about events and figures from
local and national historical narratives.
The differences between individual and social memories, between different
historical epochs, between events from the real past and events from legend, become
blurred. The story ‘Otac i sin’ (‘Father and Son’) involves Mojsije, the father, and
Vujica, his son, who constantly cross swords and bicker between themselves. In
one scene, while they are arguing, Vujica complains how he is held responsible for
all the problems of the world: ‘ “I sada sam ti ja kriv što si pao s vlasti i što si se
razbolio. Ja sam ti kriv što se kraljica Jelena udala za Talijana, i što je Miloš ubio
kuma Karađorđa, i što ti žena rano umrije.” ’ [‘And now it’s my fault that you lost
your political position and that you fell sick. It’s my fault that Queen Jelena married
an Italian, and that Miloš killed his best friend Karađorđe, and that your wife died
young’].59 Vujica weaves together events from different historical times which have
no connection with one another; some are from their personal lives and some
involve much broader historical events. Mojsije held an important political position
in the district after the war but was the victim of some kind of intrigue as a result
of which he lost his authority. He always refused to speak about what happened and
never allowed the name of the man responsible for his downfall to be mentioned in
his presence. After his fall from power, Mojsije became ill and never recovered his
full strength. His wife died when they were both young and he never remarried.
Queen Jelena was the daughter of the Montenegrin King Nikola who married an
Italian and left her country to live abroad. Miloš Obrenović and Karađorđe were
friends and then rivals in the Uprisings against the Turks, beginning a family feud
which developed into dynastic rivalry between the two families. Vujica’s apparently
random selection of events combining historical figures and his own family roots
overlaps and suggests further allusions between the personal and national levels:
there are political conspiracies among close-knit communities and the departure of
young wives. In Bratić’s world all stories combine the intimate and personal with
the historical and national levels. Time in Biš is measured according to apocalyptic
historical events, as Vujica comments:
‘Mi ništa drugo i ne radimo no računamo koliko je prošlo od kog rata, koliko
je prošlo od Kosova, koliko od pokolja nad Korićkom jamom . . . Niko ne kaže:
Mijat se rodio te i te godine, no se kaže: rodio se dvije godine pred prvi rat.’60
[‘We don’t do anything else than count how long has passed since which war,
how long has passed since Kosovo, how long since the massacre at the Korićka
pit. . . . No-one says Mijat was born in such and such a year, but they say: he
was born two years before the first war.’]
People calculate when events took place in relation to the Ottoman occupation of
Serbia beginning with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, to the beginning or end of a
war, to the assassination of King Alexander in 1934, to the massacre of the villagers
during the Second World War when their bodies were thrown into the vertical
shaft of the Korićka cave. The village marks out its history according to events and
natural catastrophes over which it has no control.
In the stories there are frequent references to the time of the dispute between
the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. This historical context is indicated by discussions
in private and public meetings ‘ko je za Tita a ko za Staljina’ [who is for Tito and
who is for Stalin].61 The villagers often mention Stalin, an awe-inspiring figure of
a great leader in a distant land whose magnanimous hand reached out to help the
village and put an end to the massacres and the hurt of the last war. At least, this is
the version of events which the local community is encouraged to adopt with the
arrival of the new post-war authorities. He is also spoken of with some degree of
suspicion as the architect of this new system of communism which seems to arrive
out of nowhere. The lives of the villagers are now more complicated by the current
change in the air since the dispute began. Stalin is now a figure representing a
new and unspecified danger. The change is marked by slogans in the form of short
rhyming couplets or lines which pepper the text: ‘Telefonske žice zuje | To nas Staljin
kritikuje!’ [The telephone lines are all abuzz | That’s Stalin criticizing us!]62 Those who
prev iously hoped to benefit from open demonstrations of support for friendship
with the Soviet Union or are suspected of disloyalty to the Yugoslav leadership are
whisked away in cars. The narrator only remembers that some people are arrested
and quickly bundled away to an unknown fate. Some of them later return and some
do not. Those who come back have been aged and broken by the experience. The
narrator recalls seeing one of his neighbours, Aleksije, arrested while listening to
the news of the political events of 1948 on the radio:
I sada vidim kako ustaje Aleksije, zaprepašćeno gledajući nekud ispred sebe,
ništa ne vidi, misli da su ti ljudi u crnim dugačkim kožusima izašli iz radio-
aparata. Osjeća im oštre kljunove kakve nose čavke i vrane, da će se svakog
trena zabosti u njegovo meso. Bi jasno i njemu i svakome šta se zbilo.63
[Even now I can still see Aleksije standing up, looking in surprise somewhere
ahead, not seeing anything, thinking that those men in their long black leather
coats came out from the radio. He felt their sharp beaks, like those of jackdaws
or ravens, which could stab into his f lesh at any moment. It was clear to him
and everyone what happened.]
Nothing is spoken or needs to be spoken. The narrator remembers the smell of
petrol as the car with Aleksije inside drove away until it turned into a black dot on
the road. The same car returned later and took away another one of the villagers
who was denounced by his brother with whom he was in dispute over the property
of their late father. The actions are repeated but individual events blur into the
sound and fury of history’s apocalyptic moments.
Times change and yet everything stays the same. Armies have come and gone,
wars have taken their toll, one regime replaces another with monotonous regularity,
each bringing new demands which the village has to bear. Disease, severe winters
and other natural disasters are just as frequent and devastating for the people in the
district. They hardly notice any difference between the oppressive cycles of disaster
whether wrought by man or the result of some unavoidable natural catastrophe.
The narrator says of the place occupied by their village that it has always been
surrounded by danger:
S te strane su dolazile vojske da nas biju i kolju, s te strane se hvataju gromovi i
munje s mora, s te strane dolaze šverceri, džandari, globe i kazne. S te strane se
ukrštaju primorski i vjetrovi s Volujaka, ali ih vazda raznesu ovi naši i s njima
se samo poigravaju.64
[From that side come armies to beat and slaughter us, from that side thunder
and lightning spread from the sea, from that side come smugglers, police, fines,
and punishment. On that side, the winds from the sea and the mountains meet,
but our winds always blow them away and toy with them.]
In the new Yugoslavia, Biš has received a village cooperative to which they are
obliged to contribute under the watchful eye of its manager, Špiro. This local
functionary also organizes work brigades to build roads, lay water pipes, and put
up poles for electricity that the villagers passively resist. The narrator’s depiction of
the period of socialist development and renewal is not a picture of happy peasants
fulfilling the dream of communist idealism. They apply themselves to the state’s
expectations in an atmosphere of forced patience; nothing has fundamentally
changed from the time of Turkish rule. The lesson of history for them is that
it always hurts and they have never been in a position to exercise authority for
themselves and direct their own lives.
Different discourses with allusions to fairy stories, national legends, and ancient
myths are inscribed in many of the stories. In the story ‘Majčin pričin’ (‘Mother’s
Apparition’) the narrator and his mother, being short of money, have to sell their
cow and calf at market. Like characters from a children’s story, they are forced to
give up an object which is very dear to them but with little choice in the matter. The
surrender of beloved objects in the structure of make-believe worlds usually results
in the payment of some kind of compensation. The goods or objects are returned
at a later point, or they are exchanged for something which turns out to be much
more valuable. The night before their journey, the narrator’s mother is anxious,
shifting under her blanket ‘kao da je progone vampiri’ [as if vampires are chasing
her].65 References to vampires, ghosts, family ancestors, village superstitions, and
the uncanny are common in Bratić’s stories, framing terrifying images and motifs
taken from legend and myth. Mother and son arrive at the market hoping to get a
good price for their animals when someone shouts: ‘ “Sva ibeovska stoka na desnu a
ostali na lijevu stranu!” ’ [‘All Cominform stock to the right and the rest to the left
side!’].66 The result is as absurd as it is comical since all animals suspected of being
tainted by owners who have supported Stalin go to the right, and those loyal to Tito
go to the left. Cominform stock is to be sold more cheaply and, to the protests of
the narrator’s mother, their animals are taken to the right. The magic of the fairy
story is broken by a farcical association between their cow and the political divisions
of the day.
The shifting frames of reference in this story alternating between make-believe
worlds, on the one hand, and the historical context, on the other hand, are further
deepened. Characters from the immediately real world and from legend appear side
by side. When selling their cow, the mother remarks to her son that she recognizes
a policeman passing by as one of those who come snooping around their village
looking for smugglers selling tobacco. But, the narrator notices someone far more
interesting: ‘Baš tada ulicom naiđe neki čovjek, uzjahao na konja, liči na Miloša
Obilića’ [ Just then a man came into the street, riding on a horse; he looks like
Miloš Obilić].67 Obilić was a mythic hero from the Battle of Kosovo, fighting to
save Serbia from the Ottoman army. According to legend, he managed to kill the
Turkish leader before he himself was cut down. The narrator remembers these
scenes from his childhood in which he combines references to his family’s poverty,
the world of fairy stories, the political context of the day, national myths and
legends. The boundaries separating different orders of the past and the present are
indistinct, and the worlds they represent are equalized.
In the last part of ‘Mother’s Apparition’ the narrator is transported to a time many
years later when he is a student in the big city. He receives a telegram informing
him that his mother is gravely ill. He journeys back to the village to visit her and
despite his long period of absence nothing seems to have changed. The land is
covered with snow, the trees give a hallucinatory impression of being formed from
ice, hungry animals howl in the countryside. Arriving at their house, he finds it
filled with women dressed in black and his mother in bed with a high fever. One
of the women says of his mother, ‘ “Bori se sa sotonom!” ’ [‘She is battling with
Satan!’], as if they are witnessing a supernatural struggle.68 In her delirium, his
mother calls out the name of one of their old animals, an ox, whose mother was
the cow they sold at market. The narrator calls a doctor who comes to examine
his mother, but he cannot see the change which comes over her: ‘Ne vidi kako joj
se lice mijenja, kao da prelazi u nekog meni sasvim nepoznatog pretka’ [He does
not see her face change, as if she is turning into an ancestor whom I do not know
at all].69 She eventually recovers, but he closes the story by saying: ‘Ali, znam, čim
udari nevrijeme, čim se opet razboli, pojaviće se taj vo koji nas proganja i kažnjava’
[But, I know, as soon as the bad weather strikes, as soon as she falls ill again, the ox
that chases and punishes us will appear].70 All times and histories collapse into the
present moment and ghosts from the past appear. All things from memory, history,
haunted spaces, legend, dream, and feverish imagination slide into one uncanny
dimension with no clear boundaries dividing them.
Some episodes echo traces of archetypal motifs which lift their significance from
the everyday mundane to another level. This other level takes the reader to a shared
experience, reshaping the individual experience as part of a wider understanding of
its meaning. The short story ‘Kosturnica’ (‘The Mausoleum’) brings a number of
motifs together which interact with one another in a complex narrative structure.
The community’s suffering during the war is recognized by the authorities who
decide to rebury its dead with appropriate ceremony under a new memorial in the
village itself. Many of the dead were left where they fell during the war and never
received proper burial. Reburial is intended only for those who fell fighting for the
Partisans or who were victims of the wartime Ustasha massacre at the Korićka cave.
The bones of the victims have to be retrieved for reburial and the only volunteer
to go down the pit and bring them out is Nikodije. His body was thrown into the
pit in 1941, but he was not dead and later climbed out. He descends once more into
the cave to collect the victims’ bones as if entering the underworld. One woman,
Ješna, whose brother died during the war but in other circumstances, does not
accept the decree that only Ustasha victims or Partisans have the right to a proper
burial. She steals to the cemetery at night in order to dig out his bones and transfer
them herself to the communal grave under the new memorial. She does not explain
how her brother died, just that she knows who planned his murder but without
disclosing the name of the guilty party. She kneels at night by her brother’s grave
when something stirs in the darkness and she sees her dead brother running past.
She reaches out to touch him, but her hand finds only a bone which she pulls from
the earth, then: ‘Prinese je uz lice i poljubi’ [She lifted it to her face and kissed it].71
She assumes the role of an Antigone, the sister who refuses to suffer her brother’s
indignity in death, but there the similarity ends. Antigone’s brother, Polyneikes,
fought against his own brother for possession of Thebes and as a traitor was denied
the right to proper burial. Antigone threw earth on his body in a symbolic act of
burial for which she was entombed alive and then hanged herself. Traces of the
classical motif remain, but they are joined to the very individual story of Ješna and
her brother, brought together in this final macabre image. Her action offers no
mythic compensation for participation in the affairs of history.
The title story ‘Slika bez oca’ (‘Picture without Father’) tells of the death of the
narrator’s father. When he dies after a long illness his funeral presents a problem
as there is no photograph to accompany the deceased as is the usual custom. The
solution is to dress the narrator as his own father to play the part of the missing
photograph. The grotesque addition to the ceremony does not stop at his mere
presence. He begins to assume the authority of his deceased father and one of
their neighbours gives him messages to take to relatives on the other side. The son
has become the father in an uncanny reversal of roles which blurs the distinction
between the living and the dead. Death is everywhere in Bratić’s stories. The
geographic setting of the village is a further allusion to the presence of death since it
is surrounded by graves: ‘Omeđeni smo grobljem sa svih strana’ [We are bordered by
graveyards on all sides].72 The villagers have encircled themselves with the bones of
their ancestors. In one of the last stories, one of the boys in the village dies. Some of
the men go to dig a grave for him in the cemetery where the community’s ancestors
form a kind of screen: ‘I ne vidi se grobljanska ograda, ne raspoznaje se dokle su
mrtvi a odakle počinju živi’ [And the graveyard fence cannot be seen, you can’t
recognize how far the dead go and where the living begin].73 The uncanny forms
the border between the past and the present as death forms the border between the
village of Biš and the outside world.
David Bidney in his essay ‘Myth, Symbolism, and Truth’ comments on the
nature of this archetypal or mythic element:
Myth, like great art and dramatic literature, may have profound symbolic or
allegorical value for us of the present, not because myth necessarily and intrin-
sically has such latent, esoteric wisdom, but because the plot or theme suggests
to us universal patterns of motivation and conduct.74
These themes and motifs in Picture without Father are a fundamental part of the
structure of the work and expand the significance of the boy’s memories of
individual events to the collective level of the community in the village and
ultimately to the outside world of the reader. Myth is rejected by Hutcheon and
Elias as a device to dissolve concrete realities in universal structures of meaning.
However, this level is never allowed to dominate the textual fabric of Bratić’s stories
in which the traumatic events of history retain a strong presence and are transformed
into scenes of an unsettled present. The narrator refers to memories of the plague
striking the village, to the Serbian rebellions in the nineteenth century, the First
and Second World Wars, the split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in
1948, and other events from further back in time, all told within the same shifting
narrative frameworks dipping between different generic conventions of real and
unreal stories. The fictional world in Picture without Father is formed at the meeting
point between different narrative discourses which f low one into another without
proper demarcation. John B. Vickery in his introductory essay to the volume Myth
and Literature elucidates a particular quality which a mythic dimension can bring
to literary texts when it invokes ‘the mystery in the face of which we feel an awed
delight or terror in the world of man’.75 This kind of mythic allusion is akin to
Elias’s view of the sublime in historical fiction.
In Bratić’s prose, as in the other works of new historical fiction of the 1980s in
Serbian literature, narratives circulate intertextually, exchanging their plots, motifs
and symbolic orders among themselves, hiding and splitting their borders so we do
not know where one ends and the other begins. Demons, vampires, and ghosts are
as much a part of the community’s life in Biš as is the newly formed zadruga, with
history as a lacuna where the identities of actors are not known and where meaning
is amputated. Placing the border of one world against another of a different
ontological depth, where past and present coexist, Bratić arrives at the expression
of the uncanny. Bratić and other writers of the 1980s in Serbia may write what
seem to be realistic prose works about historical events on the surface. However,
they are, in fact, highly stylized evocations of the past which contest the status of
historical knowledge and yet attempt to elicit the significance of that historical pain.
They articulate views on history which are close to Hutcheon’s historiographic
metafiction and even closer to Elias’s metahistorical romance. They confront the
lies and gaps in the master discourse of official history with the defamiliarized, the
bizarre, the uncanny and at its most extreme the ghostly.
Constructing History
Narrators in works of modern Serbian historical fiction frequently turn to questions
of knowledge about the past, of individual memories and the wider f low of
historical time. Increasingly aware of the irrecoverable nature of history and the
exercise of the legitimizing role performed by some voices over others, their focus
falls on the search for the meaning of the past. The origin for their concerns lies
in the horrors of the twentieth century: wartime atrocities, abrupt changes to the
social and political order, the demands of socialist revolution in Yugoslavia and the
summary justice by which liberators are transformed into executioners. This is a
traumatic history which deeply affects all areas of the experience and consciousness
of the narrators, forcing them to rethink their relationship to the society in which
they live. Their internal drama drives their attempt to salvage what can be salvaged
from the past. They present the historical past combined with their personal
memoirs with no hierarchical distinction between them. They are concerned with
the role of memory such that their narratives of memory become narratives about
memory. They represent communities with their own histories, a shared memory
and a shared language, a symbolic code which unites those who recognize its
meanings and values.
The narrators’ combinations of stories are evidence that history as understood and
lived in the community to which they belong does not stand still since: ‘All societies
invest their energies in the creation and destruction of history through many different
kinds of oral, written and material memory.’76 The community acknowledges that
there are forces of history, like forces of nature, which exist independently of
understanding and knowledge about them. Articulating their existence does not
inf luence how these forces perform, but exposes ways in which the community
tries to make sense of them. As it tries to give voice to its own position surrounded
by these forces, it creates new stories and discards old ones if no longer adequate
for their purpose. This kind of creative historical imagination is a powerful factor
in constructing the community’s sense of self. Understanding the present during
times of crisis and transition requires that the past be re-thought. It has been noted
that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the unification of the two Germanys
triggered huge changes in German cultural identification, raising many questions
about the nature of the new state. Gerd Gemünden remarks: ‘Not surprisingly, the
fight over Germany’s future is fought across its past.’77 Such rewriting assumes not
just changes to the abstraction of collective history but also demands transformed
memories to correspond to this new symbolic order. Individual biographies stand
alongside the community’s story of its own development, its genesis, its fall and its
renewal. Narratives both on an individual and on a collective level slide into this
new reality and its discursive effects. Changes to history and memory are actually
signs of a negotiation for future possible contracts over the past. Peter Middleton
and Tim Woods ascribe a function to historical fiction in the following terms:
Historical literature’s imaginative inventions ‘edit’ the past not out of mere
unprofessional playful disregard for historical truth nor out of an aesthetic
impulse to shape the material into coherent forms, but from a more socially
responsive wish to edit the social memory for the future.78
The modern Serbian historical novel offers resistance to dominant voices in its
recognition that the truth of history is beyond reach and in its insistence that the
processes which put it out of reach are open to narration. It bears striking similarities
to Elias’s conclusion that the post-traumatic, metahistorical consciousness of new
historical fiction ‘presents history as sublime, a territory that can never be reached
but only approached in attempts to understand human origins and the meaning of
lived existence’.79
Memory, though, is only one of the many ways in which the past is animated in
the present time of narration: ‘Myth, religious memory, political history, trauma,
family remembrance, or generational memory are different modes of referring to the
past.’80 When the different forms are presented as in literary works by Kiš, Isaković,
and Bratić, they reveal links between the many different ways of confronting the
past at the deeper level of understanding the construction of the past. They do not
produce an alternative history, they do not fill the holes left by official histories;
rather, they allow voices to be heard which were denied, they disclose not one
past but many different versions of the past and in their coexistence produce a
counter-memory not of what happened but of its meanings in the present. As Elias
remarks, ‘At the border of experience, on the edge of History, the imagination
confronts not its products (i.e., history as the known past) but its own operation,
the construction of History itself.’81 Combining different ways of referring to the
past gives way to the uncanny as various semantic planes meet and collide. The past
becomes a dynamic network of relationships which have to be constantly negotiated
in order to be meaningful to the present. The forms in which the past becomes
usable once again demonstrate the interplay between past and present. Those who
wish to use literature in order to discover alternative interpretations of history may
find this process discouraging, but such fictional narratives confront the problem
of attributing meaning in a historical world which has no distinct purpose. It is a
secular world where myths and memories participate in trying to give meaning
where there is only a logical absence. They produce narrative patterns which
suggest where to search for sense and purpose in the post-traumatic moment at the
end of the twentieth century when old certainties are disappearing. The ghosts of
the past are as necessary as they are frightening, as without them cultural memory
will become cultural amnesia.
Historical fiction of the 1980s combines a literature of memory with constructions
of historical narrative. Until the end of the decade, writers continued to inscribe the
symbolic function of ghosts and uncanny motifs into the narrative fabric of their
works. Svetlana Velmar-Janković’s novel Lagum (Dungeon, 1990) was published at
the very end of the decade, incorporating many of the thematic elements associated
with other works from the period and closing with a strikingly ghostly scene. The
narrator, Milica Pavlović, writes a diary of her life as a testimony of her memories
about herself, her husband, their two children, the Belgrade society in which they
lived before the Second World War, the events of the war, the downfall of the
family and the consequences for her post-war life. Her husband, Dušan Pavlović,
is a Professor of Fine Art at the University and a respected critic. They live in a
comfortable f lat in Belgrade and enjoy all the privileges of their class, but their life
changes during the war when Belgrade is under occupation. Dušan accepts a post
in the quisling government of Serbia following the dismemberment of Yugoslavia,
with a remit to save as many Serbs as possible from the Ustasha camps in Croatia.
He refuses, however, to save himself by leaving the city as the Partisans draw near in
late 1944. They arrest him for collaboration with the enemy and he is executed.
Milica’s life takes an unexpected turn. She and her children are allowed just two
small rooms of their former home in which to live while the larger part is given to
their former maid, Zora, one of the Serbs from Croatia whom Dušan saved from
certain death in an Ustasha camp. At first denied the opportunity to work, Milica
eventually finds a job as a translator in order to support herself and her children.
Permission for this position is only given on the condition that she publish her work
under an assumed name and the family live in anonymous poverty in the post-war
city. Zora, on the other hand, who has betrayed the trust shown to her by the family,
goes on to become a successful figure in the new regime, the wife of an important
functionary, everything that Milica represented in pre-war Belgrade society. The
closing pages of the novel focus on Milica’s funeral in 1984 described by the major,
who was her husband’s arresting officer but with whom Milica eventually became
friends. There is an atmosphere of quiet dignity as befits the occasion. When
Milica’s coffin is lowered into the ground, Zora, who is also at the graveside, asks,
‘ “Kud će mi duša?” ’ [‘Where will my soul go?’].82 She finally articulates her guilt
forty years after playing her part in Milica’s downfall. The major closes his account
with a comment on the rain which suddenly appeared. Milica has the final word
from beyond the grave to correct the major:
Lepo kaže Agata Kristi da nijednom svedoku ne treba verovati i to se, evo,
još jednom potvrđuje ovim iskazom. Čak ni major u penziji koji dobrovoljno
svedoči o mojoj sahrani, ne svedoči dovoljno pouzdano. Ono što priča o
kukanju je tačno, kao i ono što se pita o dušama. Ali ono što tvrdi o kiši, nije.
Naročito nije o kiši iz vedrog neba.
[Agatha Christie put it well: you should never believe a single witness and
that has been borne out by this statement. Even the retired major who gave a
voluntary account of my burial, is not sufficiently reliable. What he said about
the wailing was correct, as was the question about the soul. But not what he said
about the rain, no. Especially not the business about rain from a clear sky.]83
These closing sentences of the novel portray the two worlds of the dead and the
living in contact with a final uncanny note about the making of testimony. Whether
reliable or not, testimony is left behind as evidence that someone was there. Milica
has not disappeared completely and a trace of her lingers to haunt the world.
The historical novels of the 1980s share thematic lines and structural features as
their narrators obsessively recount past events. Characters live in the shadows of
previous worlds, haunted by episodes of betrayal, which leads to feelings of guilt
and punishment. Such actions are portrayed as random moments of over-burdened
historical crisis. These Serbian works mirror the concerns of the modern historical
novel that began to emerge in Europe and North America in the latter part of
the twentieth century and of which Elias writes that ‘these novels imply that the
most we can know about history is that it hurts: it is political, it is violent, it is
material’.84 Serbian works of new historical fiction also reject the assumption that
descriptions of historical events in prose fiction follow mimetic laws in which the
only referent is the historical world itself. Rather, they emphasize the difficulties
encountered with narrating the past. The structure of the texts revolves around
the production of testimony, trying to tell what happened, to put names to those
involved in the action, to pinpoint place and time. All the authors discussed in these
last two chapters are more concerned with the complexity of narrating the past
than with reconstructing events in ways similar to David Price’s comment on the
work of contemporary historical novelists in general: ‘Through their novels, these
writers explode the univocal expression of history as a description of “what really
happened” and replace it with a polyvocality of competing discourses, languages
and points of view.’85 Serbian historical fiction does not uncover the truth of the
past; instead, it counters official history by its insistence that the past is composed
of multiple narratives. The past returns in the haunting shapes of unresolved social
violence, and the normally discrete categories of past and present are ruptured and
the border between them becomes the site of the uncanny; a meeting place for
myths, memories, and histories. This is a meeting place of repressed contradictions,
of constant transition where the present never fully emerges. The ghosts of the
past keep breaking through: ‘They linger in the shadows of our houses and in the
corners of our minds, and they still haunt all places disturbed, following in the wake
of war, or dispossession, or suppression.’86 Many critics of Serbian fiction of the
1980s focused on its immediate link to political events of the time. What they were
not to know was that the works would have more enduring appeal and that many
of them have been republished. In the late 1990s and early years of the twenty-first
century, the publishing house Stubovi Kulture reprinted Svetlana Velmar-Janković’s
works, while Prosveta released the novels of Slobodan Selenić and the collected
works of Radoslav Bratić. Other works have been reprinted more than once, such
as Danko Popović’s novel The Book about Milutin. This publishing activity attests to
a continuing interest in the work of these authors and strongly suggests that their
thematic concerns about the nature of history and living in history go beyond the
immediate anxieties of their own day. The haunting ghosts of Serbian fiction of
the 1990s are equally troubled by stories of war and dispossession, but now find
themselves in the middle of a current conf lict, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock, intro. by Hugh
Haughton (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 121–62 (p. 148).
2. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 1.
3. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. by Richard
Howard, foreword by Robert Scholes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 32.
4. Ibid., p. 46.
5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, i. 4.
7. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 147.
8. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen,
1981), p. 102.
10. Holton, Jarring Witnesses, p. 251.
11. Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. by Susan Sontag (Manchester: Carcanet,
1996), p. vii.
12. Ramet, Balkan Babel, p. 197.
13. Mihajlo Pantić, Kiš, 2nd edn (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 2000), p. 121.
14. Jovan Delić, Književni pogledi Danila Kiša: Ka poetici Kišove proze (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1995), p. 94.
15. Branko Gorjup, ‘Textualizing the Past: The Function of Memory and History in Kiš’s Fiction’,
The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1 (1994), 161–68 (p. 161).
16. Danilo Kiš, ‘Naming is Creating’, in Homo Poeticus, ed. by Sontag, pp. 204–11 (p. 206). Interview
originally in French.
17. Danilo Kiš, ‘Udeo čuda i truda’, in Život, literatura, ed. by Mirjana Miočinović (Sarajevo:
Svjetlost, 1990), pp. 158–70 (p. 161).
18. Danilo Kiš, ‘Baroque and Truth’, in Homo Poeticus, ed. by Sontag, pp. 262–68 (p. 263). Interview
originally in French.
19. Danilo Kiš, Čas anatomije (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990) p. 147.
20. Kiš, ‘Baroque and Truth’, p. 265.
21. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1981), pp. 24–25.
22. Danilo Kiš, ‘Između nade i beznađa’, in Homo Poeticus, ed. by Miočinović, pp. 187–90 (pp. 188–89).
23. Kiš, ‘Naming is Creating’, pp. 209–10.
24. Danilo Kiš, ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’, in Enciklopedija mrtvih (Zagreb: Globus; Belgrade: Prosveta,
1983), pp. 47–79 (p. 47); ‘The Encyclopaedia of the Dead’, in The Encyclopaedia of the Dead, trans.
by Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), pp. 37–65 (p. 39).
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 52; p. 43.
27. Ibid., p. 49; p. 40.
28. Ibid., p. 58; p. 48. The published translation refers to ‘their motherland’, but a more literal
translation of the original would be ‘our homeland’.
29. Ibid., pp. 68–69; p. 56.
30. Ibid., p. 69; p. 57.
31. Ibid., p. 78; p. 64.
32. Ibid., p. 79; p. 65.
33. Royle, The Uncanny, p. 25.
34. Danilo Kiš, ‘I Don’t Believe in a Writer’s Fantasy’, in Homo Poeticus, ed. by Sontag, pp. 269–80
(p. 271). Interview originally published in German, 1989.
35. Adrijana Marčetić, Istorija i priča (Belgrade: Zavod za udžbenike, 2009), p. 163.
36. Jovan Delić, Kroz prozu Danila Kiša: Ka poetici Kišove proze II (Belgrade: Beogradski izdavački
grafički zavod, 1997), p. 396.
37. Clive Bloom, ‘Angels in the Architecture: The Economy of the Supernatural’, in Ghosts: Decon-
struction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1999), pp. 226–43 (p. 229).
38. Vidosav Stevanović, ‘Pogovor’, in Antonije Isaković, Tren 2 (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1982), pp.
290–339 (p. 294).
39. Nikolić, and others, eds, Bela Knjiga, p. 84.
40. Ibid., p. 89.
41. Antonije Isaković, Tren 2 (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1982), p. 9.
42. Ibid., p. 10.
43. Ibid., p. 11.
44. Ibid., p. 37.
45. Ibid., p. 63
46. Ibid., p. 88
47. Ibid., p. 45.
48. Ibid., p. 39.
49. Ibid., p. 144.
50. Ibid., p. 113.
51. Vladislava Ribnikar, Mogućnosti pripovedanja: Ogledi o novijoj srpskoj prozi (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1987),
p. 69.
52. Isaković, Tren 2, p. 54.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., p. 84.
57. Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 5.
59. Radoslav Bratić, Slika bez oca, 2nd edn (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1986), p. 105.
60. Ibid., p. 97.
61. Ibid., p. 23.
62. Ibid., p. 79.
63. Ibid., pp. 175–76.
64. Ibid., p. 154.
65. Ibid., p. 44.
66. Ibid., p. 52.
67. Ibid., p. 55.
68. Ibid., p. 60.
69. Ibid., p. 62.
70. Ibid., p. 63.
71. Ibid., p. 86.
72. Ibid., p. 33.
73. Ibid., p. 188.
74. David Bidney, ‘Myth, Symbolism, and Truth’, in Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and
Practice, ed. by John B. Vickery (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), pp. 3–13 (p.
13).
75. John B. Vickery, ‘Introduction’, in Myth and Literature, ed. by Vickery, pp. ix–xii (p. ix).
76. Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 86.
77. Gerd Gemünden, ‘Nostalgia for the Nation: Intellectuals and National Identity in Unified
Germany’, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. by Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer, pp.
120–33 (p. 120).
78. Middleton and Woods, Literatures of Memory, p. 112.
80. Astrid Erll, ‘Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction’, in Cultural Memory Studies, ed. by Erll
and Nünning, pp. 1–15 (p. 7).
82. Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Lagum (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1991), p. 248; Dungeon, trans. by Celia
Hawkesworth (Belgrade: Dereta, 1996), p. 249.
83. Ibid.

85. Price, History Made, History Imagined, pp. 8–9.
86. Julie Anne Stevens, ‘Introduction’, in The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth
Century: A Ghostly Genre, ed. by Helen Conrad O’Briain and Julie Anne Stevens (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2010), pp. 11–15 (p. 11).
CHAPTER 5
❖
In the Shadow of War
Writing War Literature

During the 1980s, a decade dominated in literature by themes of unresolved vio-
lence, Serbian cultural patterns were conditioned by the shadow of the Second
World War, which gave birth to socialist Yugoslavia. In the following decade, liter-
ature was still living in the shadow of armed conf lict, but this time as the result of
actual and not remembered hostilities, marking the end and not the beginning of
Yugoslavia. Some literary motifs and narrative structures with uncanny and ghostly
characteristics used to represent the traumatic brutality of historical events in the
fiction of the previous decade were echoed in novels and short stories during the
civil wars of the 1990s. Such manifestations, however, served different semantic
ends in the changed climate of the contemporary conf lict. The uncanny, as an
articulation of fear and unease in times of transition, continued to appear with
new meanings since, if for no other reason, war augmented the rate of mutation
and diversification of human experience with the close proximity of real and not
just imagined death. Similarities and differences between the narrative fictions of
the two decades were crystallized in the aftermath of another short but intense
period of armed conf lict when NATO forces conducted an air attack against the
country in 1999. I shall continue my analysis with a general introduction to war
fiction in order to situate the field in an international literary context, as I did with
considerations of historical representations in the first part of this study, and to
categorize specific areas most relevant for understanding Serbian contributions to
the evolution of literature about war.
War has been a constant theme inscribed in narrative fictions and symbolically
re-enacted for thousands of years. Tales of battles, heroic deeds, great victories and
defeats are found in Babylonian literature, form the main subject of the Iliad, and
frequently feature in the books of the Old Testament. They are central components
in Arthurian legends, epic ballads and medieval romances. Such depictions do not
correspond to what is termed war literature in the modern sense. In earlier works,
the emphasis often falls on the representation of heroism depicted in instances of
individual combat, while the bigger picture of the struggle between opposing
military forces is related through epithets or standard descriptions. Such stories of
conf lict hold at their centre a change in social and political power symbolically
ref lected on the small scale of competition between representative figures from
different sides. In the nineteenth century, however, with the development of the
92 In the Shadow of War
modern novel, the broad sweep of historical change is combined with depictions
of individual experiences of combat in the works of Walter Scott, James Fenimore
Cooper, Stendhal and Lev Tolstoy. Sometimes the emphasis is placed on the
psychological and emotional responses of characters to their being involved in a
level of organized violence beyond their comprehension while maintaining a sense
of the wider theatre of war, as in Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (1895). The
numerous conf licts of the twentieth century have spurred the traditions of war
writing, which began in the nineteenth century with its combination of the breadth
of large scale conf lict and its significance for those caught up in its dizzying chaos.
The First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War and numerous
other examples have produced shocking, controversial and contested descriptions
of the human experience of those conf licts. This constant, ubiquitous, pervasive
diffusion of representations of military activity ensures that, for most of us, we first
learn about war from the representations of belligerency and the effects produced
by a call to arms as read in novels and observed in feature films. It is strange that
the human activity which in reality is the most destructive of all should figure so
prominently in fictional form, in the creative arts, particularly from the beginning
of the twentieth century, the most violent in history.
In his essay about war literature, ‘Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime’, H. M. Klein
comments on the special place reserved for representations of the First World War
in the traditions of writing about warfare:
A great deal of European literature since Homer deals with war, but, owing
to circumstances and developments that have by now been widely enough
discussed, the concept of ‘War Literature’ along with terms like ‘War Writers’
and ‘War Poets’ only emerged with the First World War.1
The horrors unleashed by the Great War have been transposed into poetry, prose,
and drama more than any other conf lict in earlier centuries. At the same time,
it represents a watershed in the transposition of the real experience of war to the
fictions on the printed page. James Knibb in his article ‘Literary Strategies of War,
Strategies of Literary War’ acknowledges the tradition of narrative fictions about
war but also awards a special place to those from the First World War since ‘they
effect a rearticulation of that tradition, and eventually set in motion a radical
disjuncture with it’.2 Fiction about the First World War draws on literary precedents
about war, but with the admission that the previous tradition is not adequate to the
task of communicating that particular experience. War writing in the twentieth
century is both highly aware of the practices and conventions for depicting conf lict
which have emerged and developed in relation to previous wars, and aware that
while the language and prior rhetorical devices at first appear to offer a potential
model for the discourse of the current situation they cannot portray the details or
reality of what is being experienced. The inadequacy of previous discursive models
is widely recognized among writers and critics in the twentieth century, as Walter
W. Hölbling remarks when examining the work of modern American authors
who ‘are — not unlike their literary predecessors after World War I — looking for
new literary techniques, a new language, that would express the very specific and
unsettling experience of the Vietnam War and its concomitant social and political
In the Shadow of War 93
events’.3 Twentieth-century fiction about war relates both the distinctive features of
a particular conf lict and ref lects the common human suffering of those caught up
in hugely disturbing matters outside their control. The simple matter is that, as Kate
McLoughlin points out in her study of war literature Authoring War: The Literary
Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, ‘while it is indisputable that all wars are
different, it is simultaneously also the case that all wars have certain elements in
common’.4
The shared elements of what is the most extreme of all human experiences
sketch out some of the familiar preoccupations of war literature in general. The
activity and events of war follow no logical or rational path for those involved. The
soldier on the battlefield and the civilian at home are not privy to the unfolding
overall strategy of military and political leaders. The distinction between the
home front and the battle front is in many instances a blurred line. Wars are never
completely fought across a no-man’s land of empty territory but involve the towns
and villages which may be of strategic importance because of their position on a
line of communication, situated in the path of an advancing or retreating body
of troops, or which are subject to a policy of terror as a war aim. Wartime policy
begins with slogans simplifying the combatants’ aims in addresses to glory, victory,
and the justice of the cause, while subsequent political decisions and military policy
are determined by a course of events governed by chance, ill or good fortune, new
alliances, or unforeseen changes in the disposition of forces. McLoughlin expresses
such ‘perceived senselessness of armed conf lict’ as ‘primarily a result of the vast
disparity between the military endeavour and the individual caught up in it’.5 With
hindsight, it becomes apparent that the actual achievements of conf lict differ from
the official versions of events as the politics of peace shape the consequences of
conf lict. Paul Fussell in his study on literature and the First World War, The Great
War and Modern Memory, comments on this aspect of war’s absurdity when he writes:
‘Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes
an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to
its presumed ends.’6 Irony is here the expression of the ultimate incongruity in the
destruction of physical bodies and structures for the protection of those initial aims
and abstract notions. Death for the sake of freedom, for instance, may provide a
spirited rallying cry, but the measure of freedom in time of peace takes on a more
nuanced and circumspect shape. As Fussell points out, Britain and France went
to war in 1939 in defence of Poland’s sovereignty, but ‘that war managed to bring
about Poland’s bondage and humiliation’.7 There is no logical connection between
ends and means, between the stated intentions by leaders for going to war and the
result which the slaughter appears to accomplish.
All wars are the same because each follows the same essential structure. Elaine
Scarry in her book The Body in Pain epitomizes the two necessary parts of
conducting war: ‘first, that the immediate activity is injuring; second, that the
immediate activity of war is a contest’.8 Her concise summary of what war entails
makes the point that in their very structure all wars are in some sense the same.
Two sides come together in an intractable duel, the purpose of which is ‘to alter (to
burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue, as well as to alter the surface, shape,
and deep entirety of the objects that human beings recognize as extensions of
themselves’.9 While the causes and the aims differ in each case of armed conf lict,
the basic means of pursuing war remain consistent. The technological side of
combat advanced greatly during the twentieth century, limited in different cases
by the resources available to create the machinery of war, by the terrain on which
fighting takes place, and by the aims of the parties involved. However, the drive
to victory encourages all sides to assume the maximum effort and expense, often
without due consideration for any gains which may be made. Retreat from the
battle lines appears inconceivable until and unless one side is forced to surrender.
The path to achieving that result involves inevitable changes to initial war aims as
the demands to injure the other side and so win the contest become paramount.
What may constitute the sign of victory and identify the point of disengagement is
compromised and increasingly difficult to identify. Hence, once the line separating
the normality of peacetime from the senselessness of war has been crossed, military
and militant logic dominate and the conf lict itself constitutes the objective of the
conf lict. In all, war is an absurd activity which takes place outside the normal
conventions of what is generally considered right and wrong, outside the normal
limits of comprehension, when human beings engage in unspeakable acts far in
excess of any reasons put forward in order to initiate the course of events.
At the same time that the shared elements allow a certain exchange of
representations between wars, writers strain to find a more appropriate language
in which to express the experience of each new war. The specific experience of
a particular theatre of combat is determined by numerous factors including: the
geographic limits of the battlefield and the difficulties imposed by the lie of the
terrain on the manner of attack and defence, distances from home to the place
of combat and the consequences for communication with family, the state of
technological advancement affecting the zone of fighting, the official cause of war
and strategy employed to achieve stated aims, the course of conf lict and its temporal
limits with changing fortunes of victories and defeats. These elements determine
how combat is conducted and the effects on the soldiers, the meanings of war for
those left behind, the moral justification for the organization of conf lict. Each
country or nation taking part in the same war combines these elements according
to individual needs, giving identifiable cultural responses such that no side fights
the same war. British, Soviet, American, and Yugoslav literatures about the Second
World War differ in their approach to giving narrative shape to the conf lict and
in their recourse to specific mythical structures. In the British case, for example,
reference may be made to certain iconic events which have an immediate resonance
with an audience: the declaration of war to defend Poland, the saving of troops on
the beaches at Dunkirk, the sacrifices of the civilian population facing the Blitz,
the return to the European mainland for the D-Day Landings. Such references have
limited significance outside their context, and within that context their significance
is compounded by being part of an implicitly greater structure which is the role
of that conf lict in the national narrative. From a Soviet or Russian perspective,
the Second World War begins and is pursued in different historical circumstances,
summarized in its usual designation as the Great Patriotic War. The war fought in
Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945 was officially centred on the Partisans’ guerrilla
activities, until events in the 1980s and 1990s caused the mythic structures of the
past to be rethought. The socially consuming experience of war itself contributes to
political and cultural upheavals generating transformations in patterns of imagining
and perceiving the world. In the United States, the Vietnam War precipitates other
changes in social thinking about minorities in the Civil Rights and Women’s
Movements; while the Wars of Yugoslav Succession have far-reaching consequences
on cultural patterns in south-eastern Europe.
War literature, while marching in time with the traditions of martial language
for the portrayal of mass conf lict, is also obliged to search for the specific idiom for
each conf lict within a national narrative. The idiom shapes the iconic events behind
the formulation of the war’s mythic structures, but at the same time the semantic
level of a work of literature may contest rather than support the myths. It has to
work with them, but it may do so with the effect of undermining their place in the
national narrative, or of adding another layer to the accepted sequence of events.
Novels which seem to tell a different side of the story will continue to organize
narrative perspective from a familiar point. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse
Five (1969) unusually focuses on the destruction wrought by the Allied bombing
of Dresden told through the memories of an American POW in the city. Contrary
and contested interpretations of the event unfold, compounded by the moral
questioning of the justice of the action. Were the narrator a German, the novel
would have a very different ethical position in relation to raising questions about
moral responsibility. The American has already been a victim of the enemy army’s
capability, however sensitive he is to the ruinous effects of his own side’s military
machine. War literature has its own field of operations in which the victor has a
licence to represent different points of view more liberally than is the case in the
literature of the defeated. Literary depictions not only ref lect the national narrative
but also create it by offering imaginative structures in which to give some sense
and coherence to what is otherwise the chaos of conf lict and in so doing to play a
role in its memorialization. The narrative realization of war responds to both the
resemblance and dissemblance of instances of mass conf lict by rallying to provide
the human stories of war, to give a sense of order where there is none, and to make
the essential absurdity of war real.
The small stories of war are told in and around its mythic structures, contesting
their celebratory status by reducing their quasi-historical level to that of the
participant, the men and women caught up in the conf lict and who are forced to
live through its absurdities. Adam Piette in his book on British literature and the
Second World War, Imagination at War, distinguishes between public and private
stories, and associates the latter variety with the discursive patterns of fiction:
The public stories were about a just war against an evil enemy; the private
stories worry about being manipulated by propaganda, hardly think about
Germany at all, conceive of the war as a drudge and an incomprehensible duty.
The voice of history trumpets Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the
Normandy beaches; the private story is about cock-ups, army indoctrination,
fear of the new mechanisms of military technology, satire levelled against the
vicious playground of war.10
Piette describes two contradictory responses to the challenge of narrating war: on

the one hand, the historical voice proclaims the great victories and defeats marking
the course of the national fortune in war; on the other hand, the small voice
proclaims its lack of understanding for the course of the conf lict, its inability to
see its role in the greater scheme of things, its anxiety and terror at what has been
unleashed in human terms. War fiction relates the experience of war to the personal
level, taking from the historical level stories about insignificant people whose lives
are disconnected from the organization of mass conf lict and yet who are affected
by it in all areas of their existence. Fiction humanizes what is a vast world in terms
of geographical space and human misery with large numbers killed or displaced, a
period of time in which all normal values are inverted. The small stories counter the
heroic patterns of war in which strategic gains justify the expenditure of lives, since
they relate the events from the point of view of expenditure rather than gain.
Narrative fiction about war necessarily counters war’s illogical absurdity and
senselessness in its search for order and meaning. While artists find war a difficult
subject as the most extreme form of human experience, its very difficulty is partly
the reason for its necessary articulation, as McLoughlin points out:
Yet, even as it resists representation, conf lict demands it. The reasons that make
war’s representation imperative are as multitudinous as those which make it
impossible: to impose discursive order on the chaos of conf lict and so to render
it more comprehensible; to keep the record for the self and others (those who
were there and can no longer speak for themselves and those who were not
there and need to be told); to give some meaning to mass death; to memorialise;
to inform civilians of the nature of battle so as to facilitate the reintegration of
veterans into peacetime society; to provide cathartic relief; to warn; and even,
through the warning, to promote peace.11
The list above can be divided into the two aims of providing the events of war
with structure and purpose. The narrative gives structure since events have to be
related in a sequence that provides a basic communicative level to give discursive
order, to offer a record, and to tell of what happened. To give purpose, however,
requires that the simple process of communication rise to a semantic level where
causal links between events suggest that they are not just the result of random
forces but that there exist reasons which impart meanings to occurrences, that
there is a process of effects open to investigation leading to a conclusion which
may be committed to a form of memorialization. Relations between events have
an implicit if not explicit causal basis which careful reading can elicit. Expectations
may be supported by events and clues in a text, or the meaning may be disrupted,
presented as unknowable or as just one of many alternative fictional realities. It
is my contention that the events described in Serbian fiction set during the Wars
of Yugoslav Succession are often contrary to any rational understanding and their
significance is deliberately obscured. Systems of signification keep breaking down
in the wake of the conf lict, compounding the difficulty of articulating its terrible
and frightening reality.
Modern fictions about war face the challenge of presenting the reality of its
terror and, at the same time, highlighting the absurdity of the enterprise. The
twin demand makes the narrative of the experience of conf lict on a human level
a risky and unpredictable undertaking regardless of the narrative mode used.

Former soldiers in relating their experiences from the First World War in fictional
narrative or in autobiography, for example, faced a dilemma of choice between
documentary-style and non-mimetic modes of representation: ‘The chroniclers
of the First World War found themselves torn between the impulse of integrating
war into history and the impulse of demonstrating its radical otherness.’12 On
the one hand, armed conf lict when massaged into the rationalizing contours of
a longer historical account appears as the result of a natural f low of events, thus
neutralizing its inherent madness. On the other hand, as a story so alienated from
the familiar and everyday world, it loses the ability to communicate the potency
of its terrifying consequences for those who were there. The translation of real
wartime into fictional form raises the question for literature of how to express such
extreme destructiveness, or, as phrased by Margot Norris in her study Writing War
in the Twentieth Century, ‘how to make its inherent epistemological disorientation,
its sense of experienced “unreality”, real’.13 In the remainder of this chapter I shall
introduce the breadth of the literary expression of the conf lict from the first half of
the 1990s, the troubled and jaundiced stories from the combat zone, and the strange
parallels implied in historical novels from the period, particularly as they relate to
themes of the literature of the 1980s. The ensuing discussion is an introduction to
the literature of the period in which events are strange, grotesque, and disturbing
but may rarely be classified as uncanny. This chapter closes with a novel which takes
as one of its major themes the links between the Second World War and the civil
wars of the 1990s. More detailed analysis of the uncanny representation of war is
given in Chapters 6 and 7.
Serbian War Fiction

Debates about the causes and consequences of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession,
1991–95, reveal very different perspectives when the issues of responsibility for and
the purposes of the conf lict are discussed. Croatian and Bosnian Moslem points of
view emphasize that armed combat was the result of Serbian aggression to achieve
territorial and political gain as Yugoslavia disintegrated. The official Serbian per-
spective focuses on the defence of Serbian communities threatened as the balance
of power in Croatia and Bosnia shifted towards nationalist political parties. Each
detail of nomenclature in the conf lict is a source of polemical debate. In Croatia it
is called the domovinski rat (homeland war), a struggle to establish the independence
of the country against Serbian forces. In Serbia it is generally regarded as a civil war
among parties brought into conf lict by the break-up of the multiethnic Yugoslavia.
Many studies have been written on the cause and course of the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession; a title which is criticized like all others. This study is not intended to
be an analysis of the conf lict itself but a study of literary motifs and representations
of history and war in narrative fiction. What follows is a brief outline of the effects
of what happened in Serbia to contextualize the literary perspective and variety of
fictional responses arising from the imagined experiences of those involved in or on
the periphery of the conf lict in those years.
Hostilities began in Croatia in 1991 between Croatian security forces and local
Serbs. Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence in June, which led to
a short confrontation between Slovene territorials and the Yugoslav army based
in the republic. Army bases were withdrawn from Slovenia after some ten days
while events in Croatia escalated. Serbia sent increasing numbers of troops to
fight in Croatia, ostensibly to protect the Serbian minority living there. By the
end of 1991, a ceasefire was imposed by foreign intervention. War in Bosnia
between different ethnic groups broke out in April 1992, with Muslims and Croats
wanting to leave what remained of Yugoslavia, which was now dominated by
Serbia. Independence was opposed by the Bosnian Serbs, who received support
from Slobodan Milošević’s government in Belgrade. Official help ceased with the
withdrawal of Yugoslav army units stationed in Bosnia, but Milošević maintained
close relations with the Bosnian Serb leadership under Radovan Karadžić. The
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as the state comprising Serbia and Montenegro
called itself, was placed under an international regime of sanctions imposed by
the United Nations for Belgrade’s role in fomenting civil war in Bosnia. Sanctions
isolated the country from all economic, diplomatic, educational, sporting, and other
links with the outside world. International traffic by air and sea was banned, leaving
just a few crossings into Serbia from neighbouring countries, principally Hungary
and Bulgaria, for road traffic. Strict visa policies were applied to all Serb citizens,
ensuring that only a small number of people could travel abroad. The consequences
of UN policies generated a complex psychological reaction among citizens of the
country as they adapted to the conditions of an effective ban on all meaningful
communication with the outside world. A siege mentality emerged, combined with
a general confusion at the events that were breaking up the Yugoslav federation,
leaving relatives and friends scattered across a discontinuous territory.
Serbia under sanctions looked a very different place from just a few years before.
Following the split with the Soviet Union in 1948 and rapprochement with the
West, which brought many favourable trade agreements and access to credit, Yugo-
slavia in the 1970s and 1980s became the most successful economy among Eastern
Europe’s communist states and, politically, the most liberal. Yugoslav citizens were
accustomed, relatively speaking, to much greater freedom of speech than was the
case in other mono-party systems and to travel across the globe. Now, behind a
wall of sanctions confining the country to a claustrophobic space, most citizens of
Serbia faced a sudden and precipitous decline into poverty. During 1993 industrial
production almost ceased completely, factories closed and unemployment reached
mass proportions. The monthly rate of inf lation increased throughout 1993 until,
at the beginning of 1994, it stood at 313,563,558 per cent, which translated into a
daily rate of 62 per cent and an hourly rate of 2 per cent.14 The ordinary rhythm
of life with its everyday activities ceased. The Milošević regime controlled the
military and security forces, and most of the population were too occupied with
matters of everyday existence to offer resistance. The country was administered
with no regard for the good of its population. Law and order withered away with
consequences as described by Tim Judah: ‘The unprecedented breakdown of law
and order and the fantastic business opportunities provided by sanctions-busting
meant that many Yugoslav gangsters who had hitherto operated in the richer
pastures of Germany and Switzerland returned to reap the profits of war.’15 There
was a constant emergency with no money, very few goods in shops, no petrol for
transport, and the only economic activity provided by the black market supplied by
smuggling. Government ministers and heads of organized crime operated hand in
glove for their mutual advantage. Criminal gangs roamed the streets of Belgrade,
their vastly luxurious lifestyles earning them even celebrity status. A country was
disappearing, social networks were fragmenting as friends and family left the
country, while a sharp division opened up between the majority who had lost
everything and the few per cent of the new governing and social elite who were
profiting from the conf lict. Large numbers of citizens were forced into involvement
with the illegal and semi-legal activities as their only means of survival. Serbia was
run by the President, his family, and a few other chosen individuals, like a private
fiefdom from which criminals benefited by exploiting the financial impact of
sanctions and by entering the war zone for loot and profit. Such changes and crises
leave a mark on the semiotic space that society occupies. Its language, sign systems,
and the values they represent are inevitably changed.
Literature in the 1990s responded to the situation by offering a range of imagi-
natively drawn portrayals. The literature of ghosts, of constructing history and of
past violence which dominated the 1980s was compounded by a new conf lict as the
critic Aleksandar Jerkov remarks: ‘U vremenima kada je čitavo društvo opsednuto
nadolazećim, ili, mnogo češće, tek završenim ratom, književna imaginacija je pod
snažnim uticajem opsesivnih slika i razorne logike sukoba’ [At times when the
whole of society is engrossed by an approaching, or, far more often, by a recently
concluded war, the literary imagination is under the strong inf luence of the
obsessive images and destructive logic of conf lict].16 Serbian culture found itself
caught between the recent reimagining of a past war and the reality of a fresh
conf lict. Writers captured this experience in all its variety, turning into fictional
narrative events from the battlefield, fears felt for those taken to the front, changes
in human relationships under the pressures generated by the all-consuming pursuit
of war, and the effects on the emotional structure of a society suddenly finding itself
surrounded by death. The war was an unavoidable topic in all forms of literary and
popular fiction. With a nod in the direction of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Day
of the Jackal about a plot to assassinate the French President de Gaulle, the novel
Čovek koga je trebalo ubiti (The Man Who Should Have Been Killed, 1996) by Nenad
Petrović (b. 1961) tells the story of a plot to kill President Slobodan Milošević.17 The
British Secret Service hires an assassin, but their plans are opposed by the American
CIA, which believes that the conf lict in Yugoslavia is driving a wedge between
the European states and is less than anxious to see the conf lict come to an early
end. The plot fails and the killer is taken prisoner by the Serbian authorities, tried,
and executed. The story unfolds according to the rules of the thriller genre with a
sensationalist plot bringing together ordinary citizens opposed to the regime, local
political elites, and an international conspiracy. Bojan Bosiljčić (b. 1957) published
his work Đavolji kolosek (The Devil’s Line) in 1995, taking us into the genre of
romantic fiction.18 The narrator, Boris from Belgrade, falls in love with Marija from
Zagreb. They decide to take a holiday, travelling to Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, then
through Kosovo and Montenegro to the Dalmatian coast from where they go to
Italy, driving back into Yugoslavia via Slovenia. Their holiday includes many areas
of the country which is about to disappear. While they have been on vacation, their
country has dived into civil war and on their return Slovenia is no longer part of
the Yugoslav federation. They continue seeing one another even when direct road
and rail links between their two cities are cut. On one occasion, Marija is driving
to Belgrade via Hungary when she is tragically killed in a collision with another
car. The time of peace before the conf lict functions as a magnet for nostalgia, a pre-
war utopian space filled with the hopes and small joys of youth in stark contrast to
the unwelcome and forbidding spaces of the war. Bosiljčić’s haunting memories of
Yugoslavia animate a conventional love story with a pattern of events revealing how
those far removed from the conf lict find themselves the victims of its indiscriminate
destruction.
The combat zone of the Second World War was rarely in the centre of attention
in the literature of the 1980s. Attention was turned towards the resurfacing of
suppressed memories and local stories which would result in allusions to events,
such as the massacres in Serbian villages by Ustasha forces in the work of Radulović
and Bratić. Some of the fictional events contained in the literature of the 1980s
included portrayals of atrocities against Serbian civilians which have been criticized
for feeding the growth of nationalist resentments leading to the civil wars of
the 1990s, but there were few descriptions of military activity. The most recent
models for battlefield fiction in Serbian literature came from earlier Partisan
novels. However, the debunking of the mythological structure underpinning
Partisan literature in the 1980s freed Serbian war fiction in the 1990s to create
a new language for the combat zone. One such novel is Idemo na Zagreb (We are
Going for Zagreb, 1998) by Nebojša Jovanović (b. 1963), a fictional story overlaid
with strong autobiographical elements. The main character is a reluctant recruit
whose war experience is of a confused and uncoordinated military campaign. In an
introduction to a later edition, Jovana Krstić says of the novel: ‘U centru pažnje su
obični ljudi, dojučerašnji mirni građani provincijske varoši na granici dva sveta, koji
odjednom treba da se suoče sa ratnim strahotama o kojima do juče nisu razmišljali’
[In the centre of attention are ordinary people, until recently peaceful citizens of a
provincial town on the border of two worlds, who suddenly have to face the terrors
of war which until the day before they have not considered].19 Krstić’s remark could
be applied to much of this literature from the 1990s. The first-person narrator of
the novel Roman o Sarajevu (A Novel about Sarajevo, 1995), by Ljubiša Utješanović (b.
1969), is a young Serb from Sarajevo caught up in the early stage of the war, until
he leaves, knowing that he can no longer take part in its destructive madness: ‘Grad
u kojem smo rođeni umire, nestaje. Sada ponovo moramo obnavljati svoje živote,
dio po dio. Sastavljati ih kao mozaik. Da li ćemo imati snage za to?’ [The town in
which we were born is dying, disappearing. Now we have to renew our lives, bit
by bit. To construct them like a mosaic. Will we have the strength for it?].20 Živojin
Pavlović (1933–98), writer and film director, published a short story, ‘Ledeno nebo’
(‘Frozen Sky’, 1999), featuring a small platoon of Serbian soldiers accompanied by a
tank as they move across desolate spaces in northern Croatia.21 They stop at a lonely
farmhouse where the elderly woman who lives there suddenly drops a grenade into
the tank killing its occupants. They shoot her behind the stable of the smallholding.
The platoon splits with one group turning its back on the war and marching away
from the combat zone and another group going forward. At the end of the story,
one soldier is left by the tank looking first in one direction and then in the other,
unable to make a decision whether to follow those going home or to continue with
the war.
The motif of the reluctant recruit is strongly expressed in a short story by
Miroslav Josić Višnjić (1946–2015), and intertextually linked to an older tradition in
Serbian literature. His story ‘Priča o žurki’ (‘A Story about the Bash’, 1998) is told
by a narrator who, hiding from the army to avoid conscription, is rarely seen on the
streets or anywhere in public where he might be found and taken to the front. One
day, he is invited by a friend to a party at her house and is tempted to attend. The
friends are eating, drinking, and listening to music when their enjoyment is suddenly
interrupted by a group of armed men in camouf lage uniform who burst into the
room and call out three names of men who are to leave the party immediately and
accompany them to barracks. The narrator is one of the three men taken away. He
is sent to the frontline on the river Vuka, near Vukovar. His first wound is to his
ear when he is left nearly deaf by an explosion. Shortly afterwards he is caught by a
bomb which lands on the bunker in which his unit has been stationed. He survives
the attack and is taken to hospital where the doctors have to operate to avoid the
effects of gangrene and he loses both legs. Visiting him in hospital, his father assures
him that everything will be alright, upon which the narrator thinks: ‘A u mojoj
glavi odzvanja rečenica koju pamtim još iz lektire: “Sve će to narod pozlatiti”, ali
ne mogu da se setim čija je i šta se pod njom skriva’ [And in my head echoes a
phrase which I remember from a high school reader: ‘The people will gild it all.’
I don’t recall who wrote it, nor what is hidden behind it].22 The sentence which
he recalls is the title of a well-known short story by the nineteenth-century writer
Laza Lazarević. The original story opens by a river where an old man is waiting
for the boat bringing back his son from the war. When the boat arrives, he sees
that his son has lost a leg and has to walk with crutches. The father optimistically
pronounces his sentence ‘The people will gild it all’, meaning that the people, or the
state, will not abandon those who have sacrificed themselves for the nation and that
his son will be cared for. In the last sentence of Lazarević’s story, the crippled soldier
is depicted begging on the streets. The nineteenth-century author’s soldier is not a
reluctant recruit, but Josić Višnjić’s intertextual reference shows that his twentieth-
century narrator’s sacrifice is nothing new and will mean little in the post-war
period. Fiction about combat in this period does not tell of the return of heroes who
will be memorialized but of the pity of war and the hurt of history awaiting all its
victims. It continues to trace a perspective first offered in the literature of the 1980s,
that this war’s brutality and violence is not resolved in a way which allows memories
of it to be easily settled and stay buried in the past. It also offers a perspective on
the losses of ordinary soldiers, a staple of the traditions of non-triumphalist war
writing from different countries: for example, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front (Germany, 1929), Henry Williamson’s The Patriot’s Progress (UK,
1930), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (US, 1961).
Past and Present Conf licts

Novels with historical themes continue to appear in the 1990s, developing
approaches to historical fiction begun in the previous decade with a narrating
voice commenting on the construction of the story, exposing the incoherence of
stories from the past with their dissenting voices and unreliable witnesses, showing
them as a constructed narrative of historical fragmentation rather than a world of
historical recreation. The themes, settings, narrative voices, and motifs of these
contemporary novels are used to establish parallels between the historical world
and the present day. Velmar-Janković’s novel, Bezdno (The Abyss, 1995), is set in
the nineteenth century and concerns the marriage of the Serbian Prince, Mihailo
Obrenović, to his Hungarian wife, Princess Julija. Mihailo, living in exile from
1842, is freed from the responsibilities of state and devotes himself to his young
wife. Their marriage is portrayed as an idyllic match between two young people
in love. Changed circumstances in Serbia, the downfall of his family’s political
enemies, creates the opportunity for his ageing father, Miloš, to return and take up
the title of Prince of Serbia in 1858. Mihailo inherits the title on his father’s death
two years later. Princess Julija finds Serbia a dirty and unrefined place, not at all like
the European capitals to which she is used. She and Mihailo become estranged as he
assumes the reins of government at a very turbulent time. His father was a strong
personality and Mihailo lives in his shadow. He sees him in his dreams and in his
waking thoughts when he hears his father’s strident voice commanding him to take
control of events, like a ghost haunting his every step. Mihailo is drawn into a web
of political intrigue, the schemes of the ambassadors of European Great Powers, and
the final attempts of a declining Ottoman Empire to maintain its inf luence over
this corner of its territories. He is almost brought into conf lict but, after complex
negotiations, he secures the freedom of Belgrade and Serbia as the Ottoman Pasha
and his garrisons are required to depart. The atmosphere of the novel in Serbia
during the 1860s ref lects the chaos of the 1990s: political confusion and weakness,
international interests at play, Mihailo and Julija as individuals caught in historical
circumstances beyond their control. At the same time, there is a lingering uncanny
element of Mihailo hearing his father’s voice from beyond the grave; the past which
refuses to be buried is urging him on to action.
The links tying historical times to later events are further suggested in the dreams
recorded by one of the characters, Anastas Jovanović, Secretary to Mihailo’s Court.
On two occasions, Anastas dreams of happenings which foretell future traumatic
events from the Second World War. In the first nightmare he sees thousands of
thin, naked, dead bodies piled one on top of the other: ‘Neki su u jamama, u
dubinama. Crnim. Neki na pustarama. Gluvim. Ili gore u ogromnim pećima.
Visokim kao najviše kuće’ [Some are in caves, deep in the ground. Black. Some
on open heaths. Distant. Or they are burning in huge ovens. Tall as the highest
houses].23 It is a frightening vision combining the victims of Ustasha massacres
dumped in the deep shaft caves of the Croatian and Bosnian hills and the inmates
of concentration camps killed in gas chambers. The second dream seems to be an
account of an air raid on an unnamed town but told by someone who has never
seen an aircraft. Anastas describes a deafening noise like the howling of a huge dog
and the appearance of a f lock of enormous birds in the sky: ‘U tom trenu iz svih
tičurina počnu padati duguljasta crna jaja. Na sve strane nastane tresak, i blesak,
i lom, i jek, i plamen’ [At that moment long black eggs begin to fall from all the
great birds. On all sides there are thudding sounds, f lashes, crashes, cries, f lames].24
Anastas awakes afraid at what he has seen but he has no idea what it means. The
territory in which past and present mingle as a dream, a powerfully uncanny zone
beyond rational comprehension, was animated earlier, for example, in the short
story ‘Encyclopaedia of the Dead’ by Danilo Kiš, another shared feature with the
historical fiction of the 1980s.
Velmar-Janković’s The Abyss is narrated by three characters each of whom keeps
a record of events, commenting on what the others may or may not know, what
they have been told, or what they have observed in their actions. These distinct
voices are Prince Mihailo, his wife Princess Julija and Anastas Jovanović, who
also plays another role as the first Serbian photographer. He took many pictures
of Mihailo, Julija, and Belgrade of this period and some of them are reproduced
in the novel: grainy and ghostly images of the characters and their surroundings.
They are three historical personages whose diaries, letters, and notebooks have been
collected by the narrator-editor, who presents them explaining how she has come
by them, bringing the past into the present. She explains that Mihailo’s diary was
in the possession of a certain lady who died in Belgrade in 1992. She was given it
by the daughter of Anastas Jovanović who left Yugoslavia for Switzerland around
1940. The lady kept it for over fifty years and in her will she bequeathed it to an
elderly gentleman, a relative of hers, with an instruction: ‘Posle moje smrti molim
da se Dnevnik preda nekom od istaknutih naučnika ili pisaca u kome se može
imati poverenje a bavi se životom i sudbinom Kneza Mihaila Obrenovića III’ [After
my death I ask that the Diary be handed to a renowned scholar or writer who is
trustworthy and works on the life and fate of Prince Mihailo Obrenović III].25
A year later in 1993, the elderly relative, the diary’s new owner, handed it to the
narrator-editor of the novel Bezdno after ‘odnekud je čuo da se pisac ovih redova
bavi životom Kneza Mihaila. (To odnekud moglo bi biti i jasnije, ali nije. Otkuda?
Od koga? — ne zna se)’ [he heard from somewhere that the writer of these lines is
working on the life of Prince Mihailo. (That from somewhere could have been stated
more clearly, but it was not. From where? From whom? — it is not known)].26
The narrator puts forward her own questions in brackets — from where did he
hear about her work? — foregrounding her presence and her time of writing in the
structure of the work.
Most of the novel’s material is presented as Mihailo’s fictional diary. There
are gaps in his record of events which the narrator-editor tries to fill from other
documentary sources of the period, but without success until she is helped by
the same elderly relative who gave her Mihailo’s diary. He returns after two or
three months with another set of documents written in a different hand. The
narrator recognizes it as the writing of Anastas Jovanović, which she verifies by

comparing them with other documents held in the Serbian Academy of Arts and
Sciences and known to have been written by him. His notebook helps to fill in
some of the holes in the Prince’s diary. Some letters written by Princess Julija are
later added to the narrative. They are from the Princess to her mother about the
strains in her marriage and the solace she finds in a lover, a liaison of which her
mother profoundly disapproves. Velmar-Janković, playing on the motif of the found
manuscript presented to an anonymous narrator-editor, erases the distance between
herself and the fictional manuscripts by eliding her identity with that of the fictional
narrator; she too is a renowned author of historical fiction with a strong interest
in Prince Mihailo and is a member of the Serbian Academy. This coincidence of
identity reinforces the implicit analogy between Mihailo’s Serbia in the 1860s and
events from the time of the novel’s narration in the 1990s.
The parallel qualities suggested by Velmar-Janković’s narrative strategy are taken
a stage further by Milica Mićić Dimovska (1947–2013) in her novel Poslednji zanosi
MSS (The Last Ecstasies of Milica Stojadinović-Srpkinja, 1996) about the eponymous
Serbian poetess Milica Stojadinović who adds the tag Srpkinja (The Serbian Lady) to
her name as a mark of her patriotic fervour.27 The unmarried daughter of a village
priest, she is left without a home after her father’s death. Mićić Dimovska takes up
the story of her historical subject in the last years of her life: her decline into poverty
after leaving the family home in northern Serbia to take up residence in Belgrade
in 1875. She observes the Serbian rebellion in Bosnia against Ottoman oppression
during 1876 and the atmosphere in Belgrade in support of their co-nationals. The
story dwells on the differences between Milica’s perspective coloured by her strong
patriotic feelings and the realities of complex political questions in times of conf lict.
Her naïve belief in the bravery of the rebels and their cause is counteracted by the
personal interests of some of those involved and the international tensions produced
by the uprising. All talk in Belgrade is centred on the course of the conf lict over
the border in Bosnia, as was also the case in the real world of the 1990s. Parallels
with the Wars of Yugoslav Succession keep recurring: war in Bosnia; conf lict
spreads and soldiers return badly wounded; enthusiasm for the fight is replaced
by resignation; the hoped-for victory ends in defeat. The pronouncements of the
government ministers leading the call for arms turn to empty posturing, while
the involvement of outside foreign powers dictates the pace of events. The context
of the conf licts of the 1870s ref lects much of the conf licts of the 1990s. The two
temporal planes of the time of events and the time of narration are fused not only
by the similarities of events and atmosphere but also when the narrator overtly
refers to similarities between herself and her character: they are both women, they
bear the same name Milica, and they share the same profession as writers. In this
way, the conf lict in nineteenth-century Bosnia exceeds the status of a parallel event
ref lecting the conf lict of the 1990s. The two wars, placed on equal temporal planes,
become models for one another, mutually interacting so they are held in reciprocal
equilibrium, one lighting up the experience of the other.
The novel Sudbina i komentari (Destiny, Annotated, 1993), by Radoslav Petković (b.
1953), offers a broader semantic scope in the use of historical parallels. The main
character is the Russian adventurer Pavel Volkov, a Serb by origin whose forefathers
emigrated to Russia.28 The action is set at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and
Volkov is a soldier sent to spy on the comings and goings of the Venetian and
French f leets around the port of Trieste. His activities in Trieste are centred on the
international community living there in one of the Adriatic’s great ports, including
a substantial community of Serbian merchants originally from Dalmatia. It was a
very successful and popular novel, taking the coveted NIN prize for novel of the
year in 1993. In common with many other critics, Adrijana Marčetić regards it as a
postmodern work of fiction, playing with the conventions of the historical novel,
with many intertextual references both to the history of literature and to the facts
of history. Marčetić also emphasizes another of its qualities:
Za razliku od ogromne većine srpskih postmodernističkih romana, Sudbina i
komentari su roman s pričom, i to roman s ‘pravom’ romanesknom pričom: pričom
o ratu, ljubavi i životnom putovanju, pričom punom uzbudljivih pustolovina
i neočekivanih obrta, jednom rečju, pričom kakve su se pripovedale nekad
davno, u starim, danas već pomalo zaboravljenim romanima.29
[Contrary to the huge majority of Serbian postmodern novels, Destiny, Anno-
tated is a novel with a story, and a novel with a ‘real’ novelistic story: a story about
war, love and life’s journey, a story full of exciting adventures and unexpected
twists, in a word, a story such as was told long ago, in old, today somewhat
forgotten novels.]
According to Marčetić, Petković’s work easily falls into Hutcheon’s category
of historiographic metafiction by self-consciously ref lecting on history while
simultaneously being held in high popular esteem and telling a historical tale
involving ‘historical events and personages’.30 The work’s fragmentary exposition
of the historical chronicle and tendency towards the fantastic and uncanny in
literature also link it to literary strategies of the 1980s. Towards the end of the novel,
the action moves forward to the twentieth century when another character, Pavle
Vuković, is forced into making a compromise during another tense and dangerous
historical period. Pavle’s name is the Serbian equivalent of Pavel Volkov. He is a
Yugoslav historian who finds himself in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising
of 1956. The two stories begin to echo one another in a narrative structure in
which different temporal planes of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries slide
into one another. Marčetić refers to this structure of parallelisms and the strangely
uncanny coincidences combining the different sections of the novel, spanning the
times of the Napoleonic Wars and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, suggesting ‘da
politička slika Evrope u drugoj polovini XX veka nije suštinski drukčija od one iz
Napoleonovog doba, interesi velikih sila prekrajaju geografske karte i sudbine malih
naroda’ [that the political picture of Europe in the second half of the twentieth
century is not essentially different from that of Napoleon’s time; the interests of
great powers reshape the geographical map and the destiny of small nations].31
Some historical novels of the 1990s include specific mention of events from the
conf licts of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession. Goran Petrović (b. 1961) in his novel
Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa (The Siege of the Church of Saint Saviour, 1997) combines
three historical moments from Serbian medieval history to the twentieth century.
The major part of the novel concerns the siege of the monastery of Žiča at the
end of the thirteenth century, another section tells of the taking of Byzantium by
the Fourth Crusade in 1204, and the third part is set towards the end of the war
in Bosnia in the 1990s. The main narrative keeps returning to the siege of the
monastery of Žiča by a combined army of Bulgarians and Tartars. The monastery
church is saved in Petrović’s fantastic tale by being raised from the ground to the
clouds where it hovers out of the reach of its attackers. It is eventually brought
to earth by a giant mechanical bird and sacked by the enemy waiting below.
Historical events are combined with fantastic motifs, creating and undermining
the construction of historical narratives which otherwise relate times of menace
and threat coming from the outside. The fantastic elements create episodes in
which political, social, or military consequences of events are obscured and keep
returning the thematic scope of the story to the construction of the narrative itself,
to its strategies of uncanny combinations over discontinuous times and spaces. At
one point the conf lict in Bosnia is mentioned with reference to a newspaper report
in the Belgrade daily Politika: ‘U poslednjih godinu dana na području opštine
Srpski Brod, na severu Republike Srpske, kao posledica dejstva NATO avijacije
narušen je ekološki sistem, piše dobojski nedeljnik Svitanja’ [In the last year, in
the north of Republika Srpska, the ecological system on the territory of Srpski
Brod has been destroyed as a consequence of action by NATO aircraft, writes the
weekly paper Svitanje from Doboj].32 Mechanical birds at the time of the Wars of
Yugoslav Succession repeat their destructive powers seen in the fantastic tale of the
thirteenth-century siege.
In all the stories of war and destruction, at Žiča, Byzantium, and in Bosnia, there
are parallel scenes of ruin and violence, and instances of fantastic and uncanny
events such as the church which rises up into the air out of harm’s way until
brought down to the ground. Saša Ilić insists on the decoding of Petrović’s novel
in the political context of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession and, as such, sees it as
a regressive defence of national Serbian interests: ‘S jedne strane, Opsada pledira
postmodernu strategiju pisanja, iznoseći na površinu naracije problem pripovedanja,
dok s druge, dajući tom istom problemu ontološku utemeljenost u motivu ugro-
ženosti jezika, nacije i kulture, čini veliki korak unazad’ [On the one hand, The
Siege pleads the postmodern strategy of writing, bringing to the surface of the
text the issue of narration, while on the other hand, giving to that same issue an
ontological foundation in the motif of the threat to language, nation, and culture,
it takes a huge backward step].33 Ilić’s argument is countered by others who consider
Petrović’s novel on a universal semantic level, not least because of the fantastic and
uncanny elements which refuse to allow the novel to be tied to one particular place
or time. For instance, Mihajlo Pantić writes:
Egzistencija se u pripovedanju shvata i slika kao permanentna opsada, od koje se
ne možemo izbaviti čak ni u snovima, kao stanje u kojem nas uvek neko ometa
da budemo ono što jesmo, a kada toga drugog nema, mi ga stvaramo u nama,
od nas. Opsedamo se.34
[Existence is understood and depicted in the narrative as a permanent siege,
from which we cannot free ourselves not even in our dreams, as a state in which
someone is always trying to prevent us from being what we are, and when
there is no-one else, we create him in ourselves, from ourselves. We besiege
ourselves.]
The historical novels of the 1990s build on some of the structural and thematic
features of works from the 1980s, expanding and deepening their thematic and
semantic range by suggesting parallels with other times and places. Some stories
combine such references without directly mentioning the contemporary crisis.
In his short story from 1995, ‘Silsila’ (an Arabic word meaning ‘chain’ or
‘lineage’), Mileta Prodanović (b. 1959) uses a motif from the horror genre to
suggest the presence of an evil terror. The story’s unnamed narrator unexpectedly
inherits a small f lat in Belgrade and, delighted that his housing problem appears
to be solved, he takes up residence. In his new f lat, he hears strange noises each
night, whispering in different languages and inexplicable sounds. Investigating the
history of his neighbourhood in the city archives, he discovers that there were many
important buildings where his house stands. In Ottoman times, a mosque, a large
Muslim graveyard, and the harem of one of the Sultan’s officials were close by. A
famous eighteenth-century visitor, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the wife of the
British Ambassador to Istanbul, stayed in the vicinity for some six months. The
mosque was used as a church by the Austrians during their occupation of the city
between 1717 and 1739, while Serbian rebels occupied the buildings in 1806, using
them for government offices. Nowadays, there is hardly a visible sign remaining
of these people, their monuments, and the wars which caused abrupt historical
transformations. But, the ghosts of the people who have lived here remain hidden
under the city in a chamber of their own. These spirits from the past entice the
narrator down below the earth where the story ends with Lady Mary’s words to
him in English, ‘Sir, why don’t you join us?’35 The literary output of the 1990s
was limited under wartime conditions, but it provided a varied and imaginative
response to the conf licts in the region in which Serbia was involved. These works
with historical themes cannot avoid the enormity of the crisis of the early 1990s and
the feelings of anxiety and torment generated by the war. The consequences of the
current war were introduced into novels and short stories of varied literary styles.
Historical themes were read against the backdrop of the crisis of the moment, with
different temporal layers intertwined in analogous or parallel stories.
The Second World War and New War Fiction

Dialogues generated by historical parallelisms also feed into references to the
Second World War in literary works from the 1990s on two levels. First, discourse
about a previous war may act as a model for representing a current one. Second, it
is often acknowledged that memories of the Second World War played a crucial role
in destabilizing social relations in socialist Yugoslavia. Paul Fussell writes about the
appearance of a previous war and its use in depicting a current conf lict as a general
rule: ‘Every war is alike in the way its early stages replay elements of the preceding
war. Everyone fighting a modern war tends to think of it in terms of the last one he
knows anything about.’36 The previous conf lict offers a way of thinking about the
current one, using its established discursive modes as an inherited model for writing
and understanding the excesses of the present. The unique causes of war and the
scale of destructive forces set in motion at the beginning are beyond experience,
so we look back for models to interpret, explain, or justify contemporary events.
This process occurs at official and private levels, opening the social door to the
impending experience. When writing about the Falklands War of the 1980s, Kevin
Foster claims that the myths and language of the Second World War were recycled
by the British media and presented to the public as an expression of contemporary
events. So the sending of armed troops on boats to save the captured islanders in
the South Atlantic was articulated in the discourse of the Dunkirk spirit which
had once saved the United Kingdom: ‘The Second World War thus functioned as
a palimpsest over which events in the Falklands were inscribed, in the context of
which they might be understood, and against which they might be measured.’37
Literary texts are part of the treasury of discursive traditions about war and can
provide a readymade repertoire of warlike situations, as Fussell explains: ‘In the
same way, when London was being bombed in 1940, the young Colin Perry tried
to make sense of what he saw and felt by reading Vera Brittain’s Honourable Estate
(1936), a novel about the earlier war.’38 However, in the Serbian context, the recent
corpus of literature about the Second World War focused on discrediting the myths
of Partisan heroism. The discourse of the previous conf lict could barely function
as a palimpsest in such circumstances, but neither could it be forgotten. The break-
down of consensual memory and the re-emergence of forgotten memories of
events from the Second World War played an important role in the collapse of the
country. With regard specifically to the new narrative fiction of the 1980s, much
of it challenged the official narrative of the Second World War by offering a more
nuanced view of history and setting out the difficulties of constructing a coherent
narrative of the past. For some, the wars of the 1990s were a continuation of the
ethnic rivalry seen in the previous war. For this reason, I intend to explore the
link between the two periods of civil war articulated in literary fiction about the
Wars of Yugoslav Succession. Memories of the previous conf lict and the discovery
of documents from the time form a substantial basis for Slobodan Selenić’s novel
Ubistvo s predumišljajem (Premeditated Murder, 1993).
Selenić’s Premeditated Murder was the first major novel to consider the effects of
the war in the 1990s. It was hugely popular, winning the National Library’s prize
for the most read novel two years in succession, 1994 and 1995.39 Sales were not
notably high, just 17,000 copies, but in the straitened circumstances in which most
of the population lived this figure represents one of the highest grossing novels
of the time.40 It was also made into a highly acclaimed film directed by Gorčin
Stojanović in 1995. Selenić wrote the screenplay, very closely based on the original
novel, but did not get to see the film on its release as he died following a sudden
and short illness. It is not surprising that the discredited legacy of the discourse
about the Second World War is one of the themes in his work given that Selenić
himself was one of the main exponents of new historical fiction in the 1980s. His
novel Heads or Tails is one of the works analysed in Chapter 3 of this book, a story
in which the ghost of Maki returns to Belgrade to confront the memories of those
involved in his death while in custody following his arrest for supporting the Soviet
Union’s claims against the leadership of the CPY. That novel concerned the vague
and shifting contours of memory as a record of the past, the elusive slipping away of
the historical account, and its traces in the present. A similar process is followed in
Premeditated Murder but, now connected to the tension generated by the context of
the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, it produces a very different semantic result.
The novel comprises two stories separated by almost fifty years, linked by
narrative design and by historical circumstances. The main narrative covers the
period between the closing stages of 1991 and the beginning of 1992 as the war in
Croatia is being fought. A young woman in Belgrade, Jelena Panić, a student of
Drama, meets a Serb soldier from Croatia, Bogdan Bilogorac, as he is recuperating
from his battlefield wounds in the city. They fall in love but he returns to the front
against all her wishes where he is killed at the end of January 1992. The second
story concerns Jelena’s grandmother, also called Jelena, at the end of the Second
World War after the liberation of Belgrade by the Partisans. Jelena Panić writes the
embedded narrative, later helped by Bogdan, based on sources which they find.
Jelena’s first source consists of the materials which she finds in the bottom of the
wardrobe in her f lat which belonged to her grandmother. They are supplemented
by archive documents and by the spoken testimony of witnesses who knew
her grandmother, principally the old man Branko Kojović. She calls her book
Premeditated Murder, to which she adds the subtitle The Love-Life of my Grandmother
Jelena. It soon becomes clear that her grandfather was either Jovan, with whom
Jelena was brought up as brother and sister although not themselves blood relations,
or Krsman, a Partisan officer from the Serbian provinces, uneducated and from a
poor background but now a member of the new social and political elite. The two
stories unfold in parallel with overlaps which suggest connections between past
and present, although historical time is ultimately shown as a discontinuous line of
possible but unfulfilled relations.
There is a strong metafictional element running through the whole text which is
signalled in the book’s preface, self-consciously given the title ‘Acknowledgement’ by
Jelena Panić. The word is spelled in phonetic transcription in Serbian as Eknolidžment
and her first sentence draws attention specifically to the meaning of this term: ‘Ćuj
mene — eknolidžment! Ko u pravoj knjizi’ [‘See that? Acknowledgement. Like
this is a real book or something!’].41 From the very beginning, Jelena introduces
her distinctive voice, characterized by the non-standard grammar of street slang
and rapid switches from one register to another in a playful medley of different
tones and inf lections. She states that she is not going to write this book, rather she
says, ‘Ovu knjigu — ako je isteram do kraja — neću ja napisati. Ja ću je skupiti. I
sklopiti. Ako mi usput ne dosadi. Moraću, mislim, ponešto i da dodam, jer, mnogo
je rupa, priznajem’ [‘This book, if I manage to get through with it, will not be
written by me. What I mean is — I won’t really “write it”. I’ll collect the pieces,
I’ll put them together. That is, if it doesn’t bore me rigid in the process. Of course,
I’ll have to jazz it up a bit, because it’s pretty sketchy’].42 She continues to cite the
different sources from which she gleans her information, putting the book together
from her relatives’ letters and diaries, historical records and the testimony of still
living witnesses. She will fill the gaps in the story as they appear, but insists that she
will not make anything up. She gives thanks to Bogdan, whom she affectionately
calls ‘kreten’ [Bonehead], and others who have helped in her enterprise. A striking
reference in this section is a brief aside in which she comments on the word
‘metaphor’. In her mocking gush of thanks to different people, she says that they
ought to thank her if, because of her efforts, their lives become literature, if she
may express herself metaphorically: ‘A METAFORA, to su ti ona kolica na atinskoj
železničkoj stanici na kojim amali prevoze prtljag od perona do talija. Videla
svojim očima. Pipnula metaforu. Pljunula u nju, kad niko nije gledo’ [‘Speaking of
which, a “Metaphor” is a little carriage-type thing that porters at Athens station
use to transport people’s luggage to and from the tracks. Saw it with my own eyes.
Touched it. Spat on it too, when no one was watching’].43 Her remark exposes
the artifice of literature and its metafictional potential. The novel may speak of
concrete events happening in a specific time and location, but the meaning of words
may be transposed from the fixed notion and context of a single story to another
more abstract level. The language of prose fiction operates on a f lexible scale of
signification, meanings accumulate through the logical development of the events
described and by associative and contextual relations to the meanings of other
words and other events. Comments on the narrative construction of this text and
on the traditions of fictional discourse in general are a feature of Selenić’s novel.
One of the recurrent themes in the book concerns language and the operation
of language to produce both official and unofficial testimonies purporting to
represent the truth of what happened, drawing on the rich legacy of similar novels
exploring the past from the 1980s. Jelena and Bogdan are writing a book about
her grandmother and Jovan, brought up together in the household of the wealthy
industrialist, Stavra Aranđelović. Stavra’s first wife dies giving birth to their son,
Jovan, and Jelena joins the family as the daughter of Stavra’s second wife. When
Belgrade is liberated in 1944, the Partisans arrest Stavra as a collaborator with the
German occupying forces. Jelena asks a Partisan officer, Krsman Jakšić, if he can
find out what is happening to her stepfather in prison. Krsman asks Jelena to write
a short biography of Stavra, which is one of the documents later discovered and
given, like others, as part of the novel. More information about the family comes
from Jovan’s diaries, in which he recounts the childish sexual relationship between
him and Jelena, to which she calls a halt in their later teenage years. Such private
elements are accompanied by archive material from the court proceedings against
Stavra comprising the testimony of witnesses who give evidence of what they saw
and heard as proof of Stavra’s collaboration. The testimony contains numerous
inconsistencies and circumstantial evidence that cast serious doubt on the reliability
of the witnesses, despite which the prosecutor still confidently pronounces Stavra’s
guilt. A facsimile of the front page of the main daily newspaper Politika is included
‘verodostojnosti radi’ [‘to lend a note of credibility’] to the account of events.44
The page was found among Jelena’s things and reveals the deliberate manipulation
of the truth by the communist authorities. On 28 November 1944, a list of traitors
executed by the Partisans was published in the newspaper with an editorial supplied
by Marko Ristić, a senior figure in the new government, justifying the use of the
death penalty. Jelena simply closes with her comment: ‘Jebeš zemlju koja Marka
ima!’ [‘Thou art in deep shit, O ye countries with a Marko Ristić for moral
judge’].45
The cynical portrayal of the truth in official documentation puts in question the
status of information supplied by other informants. The passage of time and the
need to represent one’s own actions in a particular light contribute to the distortions
of personal memories. The documentation that has survived provides no cross-
references so there is no corroboration by Jelena of the relationship which Jovan
claims developed between them. It is not easy to make a judgement about the extent
of Stavra’s collaboration with the occupying forces. When Jelena asks Kojović for
his opinion on Stavra’s guilt, he replies that from the perspective of the Partisans or
communists he was guilty, but from the point of view of those who would consider
themselves patriots he was innocent. Jelena says more than once that the breaches
remain in the narrative account of what happened, when and why. However, the
desire to tell the story, to keep returning to the narrative plane in order to fill the
gaps, is a strong temptation. When telling Jelena about the relationship between
her grandmother and Krsman, Kojović admits that he felt that there was a secret
arrangement between them but that he can only guess what it might have been.
He says,
Odstupam, kao što i sami vidite, od pripovedačkog načela da iznosim samo ono
što sam video i čuo, jer bih malo šta imao da iznesem. Odstupam ne žaleći.
Doslednost, znate, nije među vrlinama koje naročito uvažavam. Doslednost
vam je, mladi moji prijatelji, predvorje svake dogmatike . . .
[As you can see, I am sidestepping the narrative rule of only relating what I saw
and heard, otherwise I wouldn’t have much to relate. I sidestep it with pleasure,
as consistency is not a quality I particularly respect. Consistency, my dear young
friends, is the hallway leading to all dogmatism . . .]46
Jelena encourages him to express his opinions, to fill the hole in the story with
his assumptions of what he thinks might have happened, linking events from the
Second World War to the present by speculation.
But there are also other kinds of lacunae when recounting the past, ones caused
by the differences in meaning and association accrued by words as time passes.
Kojović says that words, like people, get old, and he describes this process with
reference to the word ‘Partisan’:
Ma šta danas značila reč ‘partizan’, recimo, ona je četrdeset pete značila nešto
sasvim drugo. Koliko se samoobožavanja, mržnje, laži, priča, uspomena,
filmova, memoara slilo u tu reč za pedeset godina. Ne, vi ne možete znati šta
je ta reč značila pre amalgamisanja.
[For example, whatever the word Partisan may imply today — even at its most
objective — Yugoslav Communists who fought against both the Royalists and
the Axis powers, its meaning in 1945 was entirely different. Ah, the amount
of self-adoration, hatred, the sheer volume of stories, memories, films and
memoirs stored within that word in the last half-century! No, you simply
cannot imagine what that word meant before your time.]47
Kojović is giving his young friends a lesson in historical linguistics, recounting
the emotional structure behind words which has been lost after so many years
of distortion as a consequence of the mythopoeic processes promoted by the
authorities. The word ‘Partisan’ signified something quite different in 1944 from
what it does nowadays. The Partisans had power and did as they saw fit to establish
their authority, imprisoning or executing opponents, confiscating their homes
and all property as a symbolic act of replacement, taking the place of the old elite.
They created images of themselves based on their mythic exploits celebrated in
films, novels, TV series, carved on monuments, and recalled in state celebrations
punctuating the political year. Even the reinterpretations of the Partisan story in
the 1980s have added another layer of meaning. The old stories of Partisan heroics
were not simply wiped away and replaced by new interpretive narrative frames;
rather, the discourse of the previous decade contributed further additions to the
narrative volume. Kojović is a witness to the changing use of language under the
communists. The story for the other characters from 1944 ends in disaster. Stavra
commits suicide in prison after learning that he is sentenced to ten years with hard
labour. Jovan rapes Jelena in a fit of jealous rage at her relationship with Krsman.
He later murders Krsman with the officer’s own pistol before turning the gun
on himself. Jelena dies a few years later after giving birth to a daughter who may
be Jovan’s or may be Krsman’s child. The novel thematizes the issue of gaps in
narratives about the past, echoing some of the concerns felt in the 1980s at official
falsification of history and memory, relativizing the many reasons why the past is
an incomplete story.
As Jelena and Bogdan work together on the book, their discussions often turn to
issues of narrative structure and the creation of their narrated world. When Jelena
wants to include her grandmother’s letter to Jovan from Paris, Bogdan objects as
it ‘unosi zbrku u priču’ [‘brings chaos to the storyline’] and ‘ne unapređuje radnju’
[‘doesn’t progress the action’]. Jelena insists on its inclusion with her rhetorical
response, ‘Ko je, bre, dramaturg u ovu kuću!’48 [‘Who’s the drama student in this
house?’]. Their discussions act as constant reminders that the book is about the
writing of a book about events which happened in the past and their significance
for today. When Jelena asks Bogdan why are they writing the book, he replies,
‘. . . dab ti doznala ko ti je bio đed.’ [‘So you know who your grandpa was’].49 Jelena
is dismissive of the idea, but when pressed she admits that she would prefer it to be
Jovan, while Bogdan admits a preference for Krsman. On the surface, the two stories
appear to have certain overlaps in their setting, characters, plot, and structure. Both
are set in wartime; one at the end of the Second World War and the other at the
beginning of a civil war almost fifty years later. The characters are brought together
by the conf lict: on the one hand, Krsman and Jelena; on the other hand, Bogdan
and Jelena. The two women share the same name while the two men are outsiders.
However, the parallels are also subverted and replaced by general references to the
consequences of war and stories from war literature. The two women are very
different. Jelena the grandmother and Jelena the granddaughter have distinctive
voices which identify them as products of very different environments: the older has
a bourgeois upbringing and education from before the Second World War, while
the younger takes on the voice of modern, street-wise youth. The name they share
is also the name of the woman who caused the legendary war between the Greeks
and Trojans celebrated in the Iliad, Helen (or Jelena) of Troy. Both men may be
outsiders, but they are very different types: Krsman is a barely literate peasant while
Bogdan is a university student. Both Krsman and Bogdan die uselessly, but in very
different circumstances: the former is murdered by Jovan, while Bogdan returns
to the front where he is killed in battle. Remarking on events from 1944, Kojović
makes a comparison with today: ‘Izglobilo se vreme, znate. Kao i sada, crno doba
propadanja. A u dobu-nedobu sve je moguće, i najgore postaje, da stvar bude još
gora — verovatno’ [‘Those were turbulent times. Like today, a dark era of ruination.
And in such an era, all is possible; even the worst becomes a likelihood’].50 Such
dark days are connected to all wars rather than being an element shared between
the two stories of Premeditated Murder.
The language and structure of the novel function to distance the events of the
two stories. Kojović points out how the basic connotations of words from 1944
have been lost. Events from the time of the Second World War are reported on
the basis of the partial knowledge available. Jelena and Bogdan try to guess at what
might have happened, but events remain episodic and their details are difficult to
pin down. Moments in time are highly charged instances replete with tension,
drama, and emotion, but with no underlying connection from one to the next. The
relationship between Jelena and Bogdan blossoms quickly and intensively under the
pressure of the proximity of the war with all its attendant dangers as if in a single
moment. When Bogdan is killed, Jelena decides to collect his body from the front
and give him a proper burial in Belgrade. She refuses to have anything more to do
with the book now he has gone. Her friend and publisher, Ðurađ Ðurić, finishes
the book, narrating her journey to Croatia in the final chapter and noting her
decision at the end to emigrate to New Zealand to join her mother. The book and
the events of 1944 over which she and Bogdan laboured so hard are now irrelevant,
leaving the purpose of their undertaking, to discover the identity of her grandfather,
unfulfilled. It is never known if she is related to Jovan or Krsman, the old Belgrade
family or the new communist elite. The link between the Second World War and
today is lost and irrecoverable; Jovan, Krsman and Bogdan become metaphoric
expressions for all the needless and futile deaths from both periods.
The story of recovering Bogdan’s corpse is an important event when seen in the
context of metaphoric death. Ðurađ accompanies Jelena to Croatia to recover his
body. They have difficulty in finding a reliable witness who can direct them with
certainty to the point where Bogdan fell on 27 January 1992. They hear of a certain
Vidosav who has come to the front to locate the body of his own son in order
to take him home for burial, though without success. But he has a reputation for
finding the bodies of other soldiers for their relatives who come looking for them
and he manages to discover Bogdan’s makeshift grave. As he begins to dig, Jelena
takes a spade to help and soon they uncover the horrific sight of the mutilated
bodies of dead soldiers, Bogdan among them. This is not the first time that Selenić
includes an episode of digging up the corpse of a fallen soldier to be taken back
from the battlefield for burial. The same scene is found in his earlier novel Očevi
i oci (Fathers and Forefathers, 1985), as Predrag Palavestra remarks: ‘Iz romana Očevi
i oci Selenić je u roman Ubistvo s predumišljajem gotovo doslovno preneo sliku

ekshumacije poginulog mladog ratnika, čime je pokazao da se tragedija ponavlja’
[Selenić almost literally transposed the image of the exhumation of a fallen young
warrior from his novel Fathers and Forefathers to Premeditated Murder, thus showing
the repetition of tragedy].51 In Fathers and Forefathers, Stevan Medaković goes to
collect the body of his young son killed in battle at the end of the Second World
War. He is helped in his search by the peasant Vidosav, who came in search of his
own son’s body. Vidosav is resurrected in the later novel to fulfil the same function
as in the earlier fictional world. The scene is repeated over some two pages with
only the names changed, including Vidosav’s prayer to the remaining bodies of the
soldiers which begins:
Za zlo ne uzimajte, mili moji sinovi, što vas u večitu počinku uznemirismo,
ova Panić Jelena, student iz Beograda, i ja, Vidosav Prokić, seljak ispod Avale.
Vi ništa od teg nemate, ali drugara vašeg, Bogdana, izvadismo, kući da ga
pratimo.
[Forgive us, my dear sons, for disturbing you in your eternal rest, this Jelena
Panić, a student from Belgrade, and I, Vidosav Prokić, a peasant from the foot
of Avala. Alas, you will not profit from this intrusion, but your friend Bogdan
will be taken home.]52
The retrieval of the body of a warrior killed in combat is an archetypal reference
found in many stories about war: for example in the Iliad King Priam from Troy
enters the Greek camp to recover the corpse of his son, Hector, from his killer,
Achilles.
In the narrative fiction of the 1990s, writers turned to representing aspects of the
conf lict. They tried to salvage some kind of meaning from the destructive forces of
war, the dismantling of the country, and its isolation from the rest of the world in
a wide variety of genres covering combat literature, political thrillers, love stories,
and historical fiction, sometimes with uncanny or ghostly effects. These literary
representations of wartime mourn a world beyond redemption and embroiled in
the monstrosity of war. The historical novels link the present crisis and the past by a
double coding between different historical times, and between the time of narrating
and the time of events, in a manner which recalls postmodernist historical fiction as
described by Hutcheon: ‘It suggests no search for transcendental timeless meaning,
but rather a re-evaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the
present.’53 Some of the characteristic features of the earlier literature are deepened;
instances of social violence remain unresolved and the border between past and
present is a zone of parallel but never completely articulated echoes. Selenić suggests
in the structure of his novel, Premeditated Murder, that there may be parallels with the
Second World War, but they are ultimately illusory. The preceding war no longer
presents a usable model, leaving a gap in its wake: not a hole in the historical record
but a break in the tradition of the literary depiction of war. Jelena’s and Bogdan’s
efforts to produce a book about the previous war demonstrate that memories of it
are overburdened, obscured by layers of records, new interpretations, and stories.
References to connections between the two wars dissolve into a broader image
of the pity of all wars. In the next chapter I shall focus on the three characteristic
challenges of war fiction as they are faced by literature of the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession: small stories; producing narrative order; making the unreal feel real.
In the face of each challenge, fiction also creates uncanny responses, adding to the
strangeness and transformative power of the experience of war.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. H. M. Klein, ‘Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime’, in The Second World War in Literature: Eight Essays,
ed. by Ian Higgins (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), pp. 1–18 (p. 1).
2. James Knibb, ‘Literary Strategies of War, Strategies of Literary War’, in Literature and War, ed.
by David Bevan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), pp. 7–24 (p. 10).
3. Walter W. Hölbling, ‘The Impact of the Vietnam War on U.S. Fiction: 1960s to 1980s’, in
Literature and War, ed. by Bevan, pp. 193–209 (p. 194).
4. Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 167.
5. Ibid., p. 167.
6. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford
9. Ibid., p. 64.
10. Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995),
p. 5.
11. McLoughlin, Authoring War, p. 7.
12. Evelyn Cobley, ‘History and Ideology in Autobiographical Literature of the First World War’,
in Troops versus Tropes: War and Literature, ed. by Evelyn J. Hinz (Winnipeg: University of
Manitoba, 1990), pp. 37–54 (p. 53).
13. Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000), p. 24.
14. Mlađan Dinkić, Ekonomija destrukcije: Velika pljačka naroda (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 1997), p.
43.
15. Judah, The Serbs, pp. 255–56.
16. Aleksandar Jerkov, ‘Kulturna poetika rata u savremenom srpskom romanu’, in Srpski roman i rat,
ed. by Miroslav Pantić (Despetovac: Narodna biblioteka ‘Resavska škola’, 1999), pp. 77–85 (p. 77).
17. Nenad Petrović, Čovek koga je trebalo ubiti: Politički krimić sa epilogom (Belgrade: Vreme knjige,
1996).
18. Bojan Bosiljčić, Đavolji kolosek (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1995).
19. Jovana Krstić, ‘Historia vulgata, na granici dva sveta . . .’, in Nebojša Jovanović, Idemo na Zagreb:
Historia vulgata (Belgrade: VAJAT, 2003), pp. 5–8 (p. 7).
20. Ljubiša Utješanović, Roman o Sarajevu (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1995), p. 88.
21. Živojin Pavlović, ‘Ledeno nebo’, in Blato: Priče (Banja Luka: Glas srpski, 1999), pp. 61–71.
22. Miroslav Josić Višnjić, ‘Priča o žurki’, in Novi godovi (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1998), pp.
42–52 (p. 50); trans. by Ana Smiljanić, ‘A Story about the Bash’, in The Man Who Ate Death: An
Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Stories, ed. by Mihajlo Pantić (Belgrade: Serbian PEN, 2003),
pp. 166–74 (p. 172).
23. Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Bezdno (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1995), p. 310.
24. Ibid., p. 363.
25. Ibid., p. 15.
26. Ibid.
27. Milica Mićić Dimovska, Poslednji zanosi MSS (Belgrade: Nolit, 1996). Like many of the novels
in this study, Mićić Dimovska’s work was later republished by the Belgrade publisher Narodna
knjiga in 2003, which attests to a longevity of interest beyond the immediate war years.
28. Radoslav Petković, Sudbina i komentari (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1993); trans. by Terence
McEnemy, Destiny, Annotated (Belgrade: Geopoetika, 2010).
29. Marčetić, Istorija i priča, pp. 58–59.

31. Marčetić, Istorija i priča, p. 101.
32. Goran Petrović, Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1999), p. 364.
33. Saša Ilić, ‘Memorija, ideologija, (re)konstrukcija: Roman Opsada crkve Sv. Spasa Gorana
Petrovića’, in (Zlo)Upotrebe istorije u srpskoj Književnosti od 1945. do 2000. godine, ed. by Nikola
Tasić (Kragujevac: Liceum, 2007), pp. 81–94 (p. 93).
34. Mihajlo Pantić, ‘Ratna proza u novom ključu’, in Srpski roman i rat, ed. by Pantić, pp. 257–64
(p. 261).
35. Mileta Prodanović, ‘Silsila (onirički trip)’, Nebeska opera: Distorzije, paraeseji, iskliznuća . . .
(Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1995), pp. 90–110 (p. 110).
36. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 314.
37. Kevin Foster, Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (London: Pluto Press, 1999), p.
14.
38. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 319.
39. Žunić, Nacionalizam i književnost, p. 199.
40. Ibid., p. 197.
41. Slobodan Selenić, Ubistvo s predumišljajem (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1993), p. 7; trans. by Jelena
Petrović, Premeditated Murder (London: Harvill Press, 1996), p. 3.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 8; p. 4.
44. Ibid., p. 98; pp. 72–73.
45. Ibid., p. 102; p. 75. The English translation is longer to convey the full sentiment of Jelena’s brief
and vitriolic expletive.
46. Ibid., pp. 114–15; p. 85.
47. Ibid., p. 18; pp. 11–12. The English translation contains brief historical information in order to
clarify who the Yugoslav Partisans were for a foreign audience.
48. Ibid., p. 207; p. 156.
49. Ibid., p. 196; p. 147.
50. Ibid., p.217; p. 164.
51. Predrag Palavestra, ‘Poetika građanskog poraza: Romani Slobodana Selenića’, in Slobodan
Selenić, Ubistvo s predumišljajem (Belgrade: Laguna, 2009), pp. 221–42 (pp. 239–40).
52. Selenić, Ubistvo s predumišljajem (1993), p. 246; Premeditated Murder, p. 186.
CHAPTER 6
❖
Making War Real
Unhomeliness
The fiction writer’s creative engagement with the material of armed, organized
conf lict to convey the reality of the unreal and abnormal traces of war invites a
wide poetic and aesthetic response. After a decade dominated by literature about
the memory of war producing uncanny responses to the historical moment as the
past unsettled the present, literature of the 1990s added a new layer of unease in a
second dislocation of the historical continuum as the known world of Serbia as part
of Yugoslavia was wrenched apart. Old ghosts and new spectres met in another era
of social violence. Freud’s idea of the uncanny, already touched on in this study,
becomes increasingly relevant to the literature of the war years of the 1990s. In his
1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, he investigates the term:
There is no doubt that this belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what
evokes fear and dread. It is equally beyond doubt that the word is not always
used in a clearly definable sense, and so it commonly merges with what arouses
fear in general.1
Freud recognizes that he is writing as a psychoanalyst who has taken up an aesthetic
theme with the aim of isolating the specific qualities of the uncanny within
the general realm of the frightening. His conclusion is based on a psychological
understanding of what imparts this specific kind of dread:
Our conclusion could then be stated as follows: the uncanny element we know
from experience arises either when repressed childhood complexes are revived
by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted appear
to be once again confirmed.2
The origin of the feeling imparted by the uncanny is a species of something which
has been forgotten returning to haunt the present and is, essentially, an inversion
of cultural knowledge.
In Freud’s analysis the uncanny is a return of memories and cultural practices
which have been consigned to oblivion. They are either of an individual or
collective nature and generate fears and anxieties related to events in childhood
or to cultural knowledge that has been superseded, such as belief in a supernatural
world of monsters and ghosts. It is the resurrection of something which properly
belongs to another time and place as it disturbs the present. An initial unease builds
into feelings of fear and terror because, as the familiar blends with the unfamiliar,
118 Making War Real
the security of being surrounded by the accepted normality is abandoned and one is
left facing the abnormal. That which ought to be known, makes an impression as if
it is known, is simultaneously and dangerously beyond immediate comprehension.
Freud uses the term unheimlich, to which the translator of his essay adds in
parentheses ‘[of which the nearest semantic equivalents in English are “uncanny”
and “eerie”, but which etymologically corresponds to “unhomely”]’.3 The
particular etymological origin of Freud’s term is of specific interest in examining
some uncanny motifs in literature of the 1990s. For, it evokes the dislocation of the
individual caught in transition between the comfort of ‘homeliness’ to the painful
unease of ‘unhomeliness’. The world continues to look familiar in wartime, but the
conditions of its existence are strained to breaking point as the sense of everyday
reality crumbles under the logic of conf lict and one is left being in and out of place
at the same time. As a sign of traumatic crisis, ‘unhomeliness’ overlaps with Elias’s
view that the border between the past and the present in new historical fiction is
the place of the uncanny, ‘a place revisited’; but it also indicates a more intimate
response to the collapse of order witnessed as it is happening.4
In his study on the uncanny, Anthony Vidler considers Freud’s use of these
terms and their effect: ‘For Freud, “unhomeliness” was more than a simple sense
of not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its
owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.’5 The
uncanny in Freud’s terms is a result of an ambiguous and sudden shift when the
ordinary and domestic becomes extraordinary and threatening. Similar reasons are
behind the discussion of grotesque and fantastic imagery by Wolfgang Kayser, in
his The Grotesque in Art and Literature, and by Rosemary Jackson, in her Fantasy: The
Literature of Subversion, marking times of social and political upheaval when familiar
patterns of perceiving the world are disrupted.6 Freud’s uncanny is particularly
relevant to Serbian literature’s articulation of the consequences of war visiting the
familiar environment of the home and the city. Serbian fiction depicts the binary
reality of the conf lict: on the one hand, there is the ordinary landscape of daily
existence; on the other hand, there is a descent into the madness, absurdity, and
destructive impulse of the conf lict and the terrifying enormity of events outside the
control of those who are affected by them. This kind of literature echoes a general
association between war and the uncanny: ‘Stories of war and the supernatural have
always gone hand in hand, both in fact and fiction.’7 Such stories often focus on
the ghosts of fallen soldiers from the battlefield, yet the losses incurred in conf lict
go further than the military aspect and include non-combatants searching for the
meaning of the wider catastrophe of bereavement, grief, fear, and the absence of
normality. Jay Winter says that one of the effects of the First World War was that it
‘brought brutality into the centre of social life’.8 Belgrade often provides the setting
for many of the short stories and novels from this period, in which its streets and
urban architecture are transformed from the safe world of known surroundings into
a distorted, terrifying image of what they once were. I shall examine the strategies
adopted by writers to portray this binary reality through literature’s focus on what
Piette calls the private stories of war, the demand to maintain at least narrative order
and sense as outlined by McLoughlin, and Norris’s observation that literature has to
make war’s fundamental unreality feel real.9
Making War Real 119
War’s Small Stories

Jelena Panić in Selenić’s Premeditated Murder goes into voluntary exile to New
Zealand. But her exilic condition begins before her departure from home, for
Belgrade has already become a strange and alien place. The city to which she
belongs has changed beyond recognition and is no longer a measure of her urban
identity. Bogdan and Jelena are surrounded by the effects of the conf lict, Bogdan’s
impending return to the front, international sanctions, poverty, the lack of state
medical services to care for Bogdan’s wounded leg, public corruption, the crippling
cost of private medicine, the sight of soldiers everywhere. Jelena and Bogdan walk
by a group of people who, to Jelena’s eye, are clearly refugees from the Croatian
provinces, newcomers to the town and visibly out of place. She disparagingly details
their dress code of greasy hat, blue jacket, brown trousers, dusty shoes tied with
one shoe lace. They function as just one small sign of the dilution of Belgrade’s
urban character by the arrival of a new population. Similarly, for the generation of
her grandmother and Jovan, their understanding of the city with its urban culture
is radically altered by the arrival of the Partisans from the countryside when they
liberate Belgrade. They are regarded by the settled urban community as invading
hordes who do not know how to behave in a civilized world. The communists
move the middle classes from their large houses into smaller and cramped quarters
while they requisition their houses and take their place in the city’s elite districts,
usurping them politically, socially, culturally, and physically. Kojović recalls losing
his family home in this way and he has continued to live ever since in the same
little f lat to which he was allocated. These are the stories of war on the domestic
front, the substantive and palpable effects of conf lict on an urban population, but
which are also symptomatic of much larger issues. The threat to the individual and
his sense of self in a world which is changing under pressure from the invasive forces
brought by the consequences of war are a frequent theme in the literature of the
1990s, often expressed through changes in the cityscape.
The short story ‘Bomba’ (‘The Grenade’, 1994) by Vladimir Pištalo (b. 1960)
focuses on the effects of war on the young narrator and his two friends Rakun and
Buratino. The narrator goes out early one evening. He has not been out for some
time because of fear of being caught in the street, mobilized for military service,
and sent to the front. Avoiding the draft is one of the iconic signs in the literature
of this conf lict, as all men who had completed compulsory military service were on
the reserve list and could be served at any time with papers to report to their units
for active duty. Many spent the war not living at their home address, frequently
moving from one f lat to another in order to avoid being called up. The narrator
suggests a note of menace on the city streets with criminals who go about their
business unpunished: ‘Te večeri, kao i ostalih dana i noći, na beogradskim ulicama
osećalo se teško prisustvo mafije’ [That evening, as on all other days and nights,
the heavy presence of the mafia was felt on the Belgrade streets].10 He indicates that
normal life has been disrupted by the appearance of those taking advantage of a
breakdown in social order and the official system’s complicity in their activities. He
goes to see his friend, Rakun (a nickname meaning ‘racoon’), who is a journalist
120 Making War Real
just back from Bosnia, where he has been interviewing Muslim, Serb, and Croat
politicians. Rakun plays back his interviews and asks the narrator for his opinion
of what he has just heard. He replies, ‘ “Da sam Indijanac, rekao bih: Moje misli su
kao potok koji su pregazili mnogi konji.” ’ [‘If I were an Indian, I would say: “My
thoughts are like a river across which many horses have waded” ’].11 His reply recalls
the tone of poorly scripted lines spoken by a stereotypical Native American from
a conventional Hollywood western, relying on an idiom of cinematic imitation to
convey his feelings. The choice of Hollywood’s idiom playfully evokes the potential
of war to be transformed into a childish game of cowboys and Indians, and more
thoughtfully evokes the representational othering of the enemy in cultural memory
played out in the media industry in a post-conf lict world. His words indicate the
particular power of language not as a ref lection of reality, but as an instrument
to reproduce concealed, or glamorized, historical experience. Fiction, not being
tied to indicative or explanatory modes of discourse, exposes the multiple layers of
connotation in linguistic references to the real world.
The two friends in ‘The Grenade’ call on another, Buratino (nickname from the
Italian word for ‘puppet’), who tells them that he is leaving the next day for Brussels
in order to escape the war. Both nicknames are motivated within the story: Rakun
as emblematic of the cinematic western, Buratino for someone whose movements
are controlled by another. The friends decide to go to a local café for a drink, but
even here there is no escape from the crisis in which they are living. Next to them at
the bar stands a group of drunk young men from Knin in Croatia, taking a rest from
the frontline. They resemble the roughneck cowboys who ride into town and break
up the saloon on a Saturday night while the normal townsfolk keep their distance.
There is a tense moment when one of them tries to change a large denomination
note of foreign currency into dinars when none of the three friends has money. The
friends leave the bar and learn the following morning that it was destroyed a little
after they left. The man who tried to change currency later tried to sell a grenade
which he passed to one of the others but, in their drunken state, it fell to the f loor
and exploded. The narrator’s closing words summarize the banal terror of everyday
life in war: ‘Tada je to bila smrt, izbegnuta za dlaku. Sada . . . je to priča’ [Then that
was death, missed by a whisker. Now . . . it’s a story].12 On a broader level Pištalo’s
story concerns more than one character or small group of friends. It is a reference
to the abnormality of wartime conditions and their effect on the city and modern
understanding of urban life, introducing the violence of the battlefield into a space
designed for community gathering. Belgrade has become a place to escape from, a
place where young men live in fear of being taken away to fight in a war in which
they feel no part, while their home has already been lost to an alien force.
The same themes of loss and the destructive force of war are evident in the
novel U potpalublju (In the Hold, 1994), written by Vladimir Arsenijević (b. 1965).
The work was very successful both at home and abroad, being awarded the NIN
prize for novel of the year in 1994 and translated into many languages around the
world. The popularity of such novels reveals the need for literature to portray the
difficulties of an event so large and incomprehensible as war. Miodrag Maticki
considers the reasons for the approval and cachet given to them in Serbia. He
Making War Real 121
describes the dominant line in twentieth-century Serbian literature with literary

examples about various wars, capturing the tragic experience and senselessness of
armed conf lict, and continues:
Možda u ovoj liniji srpskog romana treba tražiti i razlog što su danas mnogo
veću pažnju privukle knjige o izgubljenoj generaciji u poslednjem ratu
Vladimira Arsenijevića ili Vladimira Jokanovića, nego romani u kojima je
obnovljena slika nacionalne epopeje i stradanja.13
[Perhaps one should look in this trend of the Serbian novel for the reason why
today books about the lost generation in the last war by Vladimir Arsenijević
or Vladimir Jokanović attracted much greater attention than novels in which
the image of the national epic and suffering is renewed.]
The story about this lost generation in the 1990s is the story of urbicide, the death
of the city. The term was used by the sociologist Sreten Vujović in his book
Grad u senci rata about the damage done to urban centres during the 1990s in
former Yugoslavia as a result of attack, siege, and the changes brought by wartime
conditions as poverty increases, refugees arrive, and cultural life disappears: ‘U ovoj
knjizi grad i rat su teme koje stoje jedna naspram druge, prožimaju se i, na nesreću,
postaju jedno: u urbicidu. Pretnje smrću od gladi i smrću od oružja bile su se nadvile
nad slobodom i životom građana’ [In this book the city and war are themes which
stand opposite each other, pervade each other and, unfortunately, become one: in
urbicide. The threat of death by hunger and the threat of death by arms hung over
the freedom and lives of the citizens].14 Vujović relates in sociological terms how
the cities in the Wars of Yugoslav Succession lost many of their characteristics as
urban centres, while prose writers inscribe this concern on a symbolic level, as
part of a general decline of social, cultural, and moral values when the trappings
of civilized behaviour disappear and the accepted rules governing everyday human
interactions are suspended. The city in literature has been used to represent the
pinnacle of modernity’s achievements and contemporary anxieties at the fragility
of what has been gained, as ‘the source both of political order and of social chaos’.15
Its anonymity is ‘an affirmation of common humanity’ which can spill over into
danger ‘into an emphasis of isolation, of mystery — an ordinary feeling that can
become a terror’.16 Arsenijević uses Belgrade as more than a setting for the action of
his novel. Presenting the story of the loss of civilization in time of war, he gives his
novel the subtitle ‘sapunska opera’ [a soap opera], a form which he exploits to contrast
the everyday lives of his characters with the threat to their normal expectations
introduced by the conf lict, bringing death and chaos into their homes.
Arsenijević uses some of the attributes of television soap operas to provide a
narrative framework, rather than a model to be slavishly followed. They are popular
dramatic forms typically set in a limited environment, often focused on a street or
small village, with a limited number of characters known to one another through
friendships and family ties. They focus on the realism of everyday life, but also stray
into melodramatic moments as relatively trivial incidents receive intensely histrionic
treatment out of proportion to their objective significance. This is the pattern of
the soap opera: to make little events larger, transform the everyday banality of
individual lives into exciting stories, burden what appear to be insignificant events
122 Making War Real
with tragic or tragicomic tones:

As a rule it is not the plot that is providing the suspense here but the characters.
Suspense is generated by doubts and uncertainties as to how the characters will
deal with unexpected or difficult events and how they will develop and fill out
as a result.17
Nicholas Abercrombie’s description of the motivating feature of soap-opera narrative
corresponds to Arsenijević’s novel. The novel is organized in three sections, with
the titles ‘October 1991’, ‘November 1991’, and ‘December 1991’, covering the last
three months of the year and the first three months in which hostilities increased
substantially. There is little to surprise readers who themselves lived through those
months, well aware of what happened in the war dominating the essential conditions
in which the story is unfolding. All that remains is to see how the characters cope
with the inevitability of what is coming in their domestic setting.
The story is told by an anonymous narrator whose wife, Angela, is expecting
their first baby. The narrator describes how he and Angela live through the
atmosphere of war, prepare their f lat for their new baby, and visit friends and other
family members. Ultimately, the war rather than the arrival of a new baby defines
every moment of their lives. In the first few pages, the narrator conveys a sense of
hopelessness pervading the street where they live:
Ako ispravno pamtim, oktobarske večeri 1991. godine, bile su nekako ljuspaste,
i zelenožute, poput nezdrave smegme. Nad Molerovom je, u to sam siguran,
danima plovio jedan čudan oblik [sic]. Vetar je pod prozorom četvorospratnice
od žute opeke, u kovitlacima raznosio skrhano lišće.
[If I remember rightly, the October evenings of 1991 were sort of f laky, and
greenish-yellow. For days a strange cloud f loated over Molerova Street, I’m
certain of that. A swirling wind scattered crushed leaves below the window of
the yellow-brick four-storey building.]18
The street where he lives is close to the centre of town in the well-known resi-
dential district of Vračar and immediately signals a strong sense of location within
the capital. He evokes colours, green and yellow, usually associated with illness
but here attached to the time of day and the building in which their small f lat is
housed, binding together essential points of the time and place of their lives as a
morbid, diseased state. The atmosphere is all-encompassing, stretching from the
menacing cloud in the sky down to the ground below the level of their window.
The narrator knows what is coming but inwardly he seems at ease: ‘Video sam
sebe kako, pred nadolazećom katastrofom, ostajem miran, poput govečeta koje
pitomo trepće pred sudom kasapskog čekića’ [‘I saw myself, calm in the face of
the impending catastrophe, like a calf blinking meekly before the sentence of the
butcher’s hammer’].19 He does not need to define what the catastrophe might be as
the chapter heading ‘October 1991’ informs the reader of the wartime context. In
a departure from the beginning of an episode in a soap-opera series, the narrator
emphasizes the strangeness of the street scene rather than its comforting familiarity,
establishing the unhomeliness of the homely setting.
The contrast between the wartime context and the domesticity of the soap-opera
genre becomes apparent during a visit by Angela’s brother, Lazar. He calls round
Making War Real 123
every Saturday morning to his sister and brother-in-law’s f lat where they drink tea
and smoke marihuana. Lazar with his shaven head and yellow robe is a devotee of
the Hare Krishna sect. On the day in question, he has brought with him an envelope
containing his call-up papers, which he shows to Angela. His sister is anxious and
angry because of the danger to which her brother is now exposed and because the
papers, to be legally served, have to be delivered personally to the recruit or be
accepted and signed for at the recruit’s home address. She rightly suspects that their
mother took the papers even though she knew that it meant her son would have
to go to fight. Angela’s immediate reaction is that Lazar must go into hiding, but
he refuses, regarding the issue as karma, and he is sent to the front. Angela decides
to confront her parents, Vida and Mihailo, in an episode resembling the setting of
a soap opera. The narrator and his wife visit her parents at their house. Vida and
Mihailo talk politely as if nothing has happened, but the parents and their daughter
soon adopt well-known familial positions:
Osim toga, dugovala im je obračun koji se ticao potpisivanja poziva za Lazarovu
mobilizaciju, a njeni roditelji drugo i nisu očekivali jer im je stečeno iskustvo
razdvojenog života već nagoveštavalo da ih kćerka posećuje uglavnom kad
namerava da se s njima posvađa.
[Apart from that, she owed them a showdown in connection with their having
accepted Lazar’s call-up papers and signed for them. Her parents didn’t expect
anything different because the experience acquired during their separate lives
had already suggested that their daughter usually visited them when she felt
like a fight.]20
They defend themselves against their daughter’s accusations in a way which the
narrator has observed before; it has elements of comedy combined with a sense
of family tragedy, but any consequences are usually short-lived. The characters
play their predetermined roles with a limited range of reactions, as in a soap opera
where audience satisfaction is based on the frissons generated by fulfilling generic
expectations of domestic bliss temporarily upturned. Angela gives her usual
performance at the end of such confrontations, gathering up her things, combing
her hair furiously in the hall mirror: ‘To je činila uvek kad bi osetila da svađa
dostiže vrhunac, jer je dobro pazila da poslednja bude njena, na taj način što je kraj
svog deklamovanja poklapala sa izlaskom iz roditeljskog stana’ [‘She always did that
when she felt that the quarrel had reached its peak, so as to be sure that she had the
last word by making the end of her oration coincide with her exit from her parents’
f lat’].21 The narrator adds a farcical note as the scene reaches its culmination, when
Angela is angry, Vida is crying in the kitchen, and Mihailo suddenly enters wearing
his new slippers, which he wants to show off to try to calm things down by pointing
to their rather smart side-fastening. The scene is staged as a family drama, touching
and funny in the carefully observed details, almost obliterating the weight of the
real situation: a young man has been conscripted and sent to the front where he
will be killed. The triviality of the light motifs typical for the soap-opera structure
contrasts and highlights the enormous gravity of the approach of war.
Lazar’s funeral presents another opportunity for a similar series of comic details
accompanied by a greater sense of the meaning of living in that wartime context.
124 Making War Real
Angela leads the funeral procession with her prominent pregnant stomach. A
priest at the entrance to the cemetery for some unknown reason slaps a novice. An
official at the crematorium giving the signal to lower the coffin takes a step back
into a large pot plant and falls to the f loor with a yelp of pain. People attending the
service begin to giggle. The narrator walks out of the building in a panic, sensing
that the cable lowering Lazar’s coffin might snap. He is followed by a woman, one
of Angela’s distant relatives. She is described in terms which cast her immediately
as a femme fatale with dark eyes and full lips. They walk through the cemetery
together when the narrator’s description of events becomes an overblown eulogy
to a stereotypical male fantasy: ‘Rođaka je sopstvenu lepotu držala pod nekakvim
ključem, drhtala je plamtećim stidom i čudnovato čitkim iščekivanjima, a i ja sam
drhtao pred njom, kao što bih drhtao pred filmskom divom kad bi se preda mnom
pojavila u omiljenoj ulozi’ [‘The Relative bore her own beauty under lock and key,
she trembled with fiery shame and amazingly obvious expectations, and I trembled
before her, as I might have done in the company of a film star appearing before me
in a favourite role’].22 They have sex in the incongruous setting of the cemetery,
and as he hurries away he steps up to his knees in mud. The full significance of the
funeral ceremony is turned to literary effect as the narrator links this event with
the meaning of the war, the context of ever-present death, and the destructive
logic of conf lict in the lives of everyone. He feels that, since he has betrayed his
wife, there should be some higher power pointing a finger at his blasphemy and
lies, but nothing happens and Angela remains ignorant of what has just passed:
‘Tu, na samom izlazu iz groblja, snažan pod Anđelinim tupim pogledom, nasmejao
sam se apsolutnoj nemoći Nebesa: znači, istina je! Sve se može’ [‘Here, at the very
gate of the cemetery, strengthened by Angela’s dull expression, I smiled at the
absolute impotence of the Heavens. So, it’s true! Everything is possible’].23 Wartime
conditions teach that there is no punishment for transgression. What happens every
day is an abomination and life is out of kilter. The authorities collect the young
men of the city, send them to the frontline where they are killed, their bodies are
returned for burial, and no-one is punished.
As the narrator betrays his wife, so he sees all the citizens of Belgrade have been
tricked or outwitted by this war when he refers to ‘nostalgični susret sa sokacima
jedne izigrane prestonice’ [‘a nostalgic encounter with the alleyways of a deceived
capital city’].24 The city has been altered by the pressure of war and is no longer
what it once was. Ann Patten has written on the literary evocation of the effects
of wartime conditions on transforming the city environment in her study ‘Edith
Wharton’s Wartime Ghosts’. The urban landscape, in this case Paris during the First
World War, is disturbed and Patten remarks:
The rapidity with which the environment changed ref lected the uncanny
nature of the event: at first the war appeared strangely beguiling, and in the next
moment, the full horror of the war and the vanity of the prior excitement were
expressed as dreadful; those affected by the war were castrated irrecoverably
from the innocence of their prior histories, lifestyles and values.25
The war has transformed the environment and rendered the home unfamiliar. In
his representation of the bizarre strangeness of wartime, Arsenijević has recourse
Making War Real 125
to uncanny images and events in order to articulate the unhomeliness identified by

Freud as essential to the formation of the uncanny. The result is a severe sense of
unsettlement. In Arsenijević’s work, Belgrade becomes distorted, which, according
to Lucie Armitt in her study Theorising the Fantastic, is what uncanny effects are
grounded on:
In order for us to feel something to be uncanny, it must derive from a situation,
object or incident that ought to feel (and usually has felt) familiar and reassuring,
but which has undergone some form of slight shift that results in what I have
referred to as a form of dis-ease.26
The war, with its menacing presence and catastrophic consequences, stretches the
pre-war understanding of normality, deforming the world around and infecting it
with its paranormal, degenerative disorder. Walking down the street, the narrator,
surrounded by the cacophony of sounds of his fellow citizens, suddenly senses the
danger and menace facing them:
Beše mi žao svih nas. U bljesku iznenadne i sveprožimajuće vizije, koja je
pocepala uobičajeni bulevarski prizor ispred mojih očiju, ugledao sam nas sve,
kako bežimo, dok se tlo pod našim stopalima, uz stravičnu ciku, lomi, i otvara, a
iz tih se dubina širi nepodnošljivi zadah vekova koje smo, u svojim inertnostima,
propustili da iskoristimo na dostajan način, čitava jedna pulsirajuća sipa nam
se odatle podsmeva, nezainteresovana za užas koji joj ponizno dočaravamo
mlakim pokretima, i željom da nas nema. Tokom karnalne bahanalije koja je
trajala sekund, u dubinama tog bunara od mesa nestale su nasumice odabrane
žrtve. Njih beše mnogo.
[I felt sorry for all of us. In the glare of a sudden and all-pervasive vision
that split the ordinary street scene before my eyes, I caught sight of all of us,
running, while the ground beneath our feet was breaking up and opening with
a terrible cracking sound, and out of those depths came the unbearable stench
of the centuries which, in our inertia, we had omitted to use in a dignified way,
a great, slimy pulsating monster was mocking us from in there, unconcerned
about the horror which we were conjuring up with our irresolute movements,
and our desire not to be. In the course of this carnal bacchanalia, which lasted
for one second, the chosen victims had vanished randomly in the depths of that
well of f lesh. There were many of them.]27
The narrator’s fevered mind suddenly tips over and the events surrounding him
which he cannot comprehend or articulate find form as a terrifying monster below
the ground on which he and his fellow citizens habitually walk. Such moments
focus on the uncanny element not as a ref lection of a psychological response to
the effects of the war but as transforming the environment. Royle describes this
extended reach of the uncanny when ‘its critical elaboration is necessarily bound up
with analysing, questioning and even transforming what is called “everyday life” ’.28
The motifs and structural features typical for soap opera stories make such moments
all the more striking for their disruption of the otherwise domesticated equanimity
of the narrative. Every area of the city, all families within it, is infected with the
spreading ‘dis-ease’ of the uncanny, compressed into the narrator’s small story.
Arsenijević makes economic use of the soap-opera structure to underpin his
description of the encroachment of war on a whole city. Abercrombie’s description
126 Making War Real
of the relationship between inside and outside the tight-knit community at the centre
of most soap operas seems understated in the context of In the Hold: ‘Despite the
quarrels that regularly mark community life, and which provide much of the plot,
the community is internally fairly harmonious. The world outside the community,
by contrast, is a source of trouble and more serious strife.’29 The community of In
the Hold is caught in that claustrophobic space below decks, as in the work’s title,
besieged by the effects of a conf lict which they did not invite. The experience
of war is ultimately uncanny when all that is familiar has been threatened with
destruction, the world is deformed, and there are no longer any limits to what
is possible. At the same time, the soap-opera structure keeps a small story in the
centre of attention, the family whose life is turned upside-down, not the broad
sweep of history, but as Adam Piette says, the private story which ‘is about cock-
ups, army indoctrination, fear of the new mechanisms of military technology, satire
levelled against the vicious playground of war’.30 The author closes his novel with
an appendix containing information about the narrator’s friends who left Belgrade
at the beginning of the 1990s because of the war and what befell them when they
arrived abroad. The first friends he mentions are Sile and Lana:
Nekad smo se svakodnevno družili sa Siletom i Lanom. Proleća 1991. otputovali
su u Utreht, oboje su ovde diplomirali medicinu, a tamo ona radi kao bejbi-
siter na dva mesta paralelno, i sprema jedan stan vikendom; on je našao posao
tek nakon nekoliko meseci jalavog traganja — Indus iz restorana u njihovom
susedstvu zaposlio ga je kao pomoćnog radnika.
[Once we used to meet up every day with Sile and Lana. In the spring of 1991
they went off to Utrecht, they had both qualified as doctors here, and now
she is working as a babysitter in two different places, and cleaning a f lat at the
weekend; he found a job after several months of fruitless searching — an Indian
in a restaurant in their neighbourhood took him on as an assistant.]31
The past and the promise of the future have been erased by the conf lict. In
Arsenijević’s novel, and in other works of the time, the decline of the city, or
urbicide, is projected as a metaphor for the end of a familiar civilization. The
characters are caught in that uncanny moment suspended between the expectation
of what is real and the new reality of war. The sense of unhomeliness in the novel
is not just an individual reaction, but touches the whole community, and is part of
the new language of this war, articulating the feeling of being in and out of place
at the same time.
Making Narrative Order

Narrative fiction constructs order and suggests meaning in its sequence of events on
the assumption that what happens later has been caused to happen by prior actions.
Sometimes it is difficult, however, to connect the end result of a narrative with the
semantic level of the sequence of events. It may be clear how an event has been
caused to occur, and yet the sense of the event remains obscure. Complex literary
narratives convey meaning on the level of narrative and in other ways. Further
connotations lie in allegorical structures or intertextual references supplying extra-
Making War Real 127
contextual layers of meaning, which writers of war fiction exploit in their attempt
to impart sense to events which have no sense. As in the recourse to war’s small
stories, elements of the uncanny as signs of threat and fear intrude in war literature
of the 1990s when applying the logic of narrative structure and language to root
out some meaning in times of war. In his short story ‘Priča o događaju koji se nije
zbio’ (‘A Story about an Event that Did Not Happen’, 1995) Radoslav Bratić builds a
narrative around a conversation overheard on a city trolleybus. The narrator captures
the atmosphere of the first half of the 1990s during the Wars of Yugoslav Succession
and by a mixture of allusion and allegory points to the wider world outside the text
and beyond the confined limits of the city street where the story opens. Details of
the opening scene suggest a microcosm of the effects of war on Belgrade and its
individual citizens as they wait for a bus: ‘Oni što s kišobranom stoje sa strane uvek
više vide od drugih koji se guraju u masi sveta. Svuda ima sumnjala što ne veruju ni
da je danas sreda, ni da pada kiša, ni da će vozilo stići’ [Those who stand to one side
with their umbrellas always see more than the others who jostle in the mass of the
crowd. Everywhere are the doubters who do not believe that today is Wednesday,
that it is raining, nor even that the bus will come].32 Instead of solidarity in the face
of adversity the crowd feel mistrust and hostility towards one another. The war is
ever present in the minds of those waiting; one man even saying that he does not
like the number of the bus for which they are waiting, number 41, because it is the
same year when the last war began. There is no escape from the past or the present;
there is only the perpetual time of the present with no prospect of real change like
the rain: ‘Jer deo vode će ispariti i otići u oblake, pa opet iznova. Kao da je sve
osuđeno na ponavljanje’ [Since part of the water will evaporate and disappear into
the clouds, and then again from the beginning. As if everything is condemned to
repetition].33 The bus comes into view as if it has surfaced from below ground,
looking as if it has been fashioned by the devil himself, being of a strange shape
and constructed of patched-up parts. One passenger with severe toothache speaks
out loud, trying to take his mind off the pain, saying that in England scientists
have crossed the genes of a man and a pig, that the devil’s hand is everywhere,
that the Mafia rules the world. But no-one listens to him and his words are left
hanging in the air. Two girls are travelling in the bus, their easy conversation and
laughter introducing a positive note into the otherwise dark world. The other
passengers overhear one of them tell the other about Paja: ‘Bio je na ratištu, teško
je ranjen. Jedva su lekari uspeli da mu spasu nogu. Izgubio je mnogo krvi. Nema
lekova, zavoja, ničeg nema’ [He’s been in the wars, seriously wounded. The doctors
scarcely managed to save his leg. He lost a lot of blood. There are no medicines,
no dressings, there’s nothing].34 Paja has recovered but he now sits in front of the
television and stares at scenes from the battlefield. In the end, it turns out that Paja
is a pet dog, but for a brief moment he has been a wounded soldier. The girl’s story
begins to suggest the unfolding of an episode from the war, but it loses its meaning
as the event never happened. The small story based on a misunderstanding and the
distressing nature of the situation from which there is no escape are encapsulated in
the dilapidated and overcrowded bus moving on like the ship of state, an image of
the nation caught in war.
128 Making War Real
The writer David Albahari (b. 1948) was one of the most significant exponents
of Serbian postmodernist prose before the wars of the early 1990s. His works
focused on the unreliability of language with little interest in historical detail.
In some of his later work, he addresses the issue of understanding the conf lict
which accompanied the end of Yugoslavia and the difficulty of communicating
its devastating consequences, notably in the novels Snežni čovek (Snowman, 1995),
Mamac (Bait, 1996), and Mrak (Darkness, 1997). He was awarded the NIN prize for
novel of the year for Bait. The narrator of this short novel is obsessed with finding
some meaning and order to the war in Yugoslavia. He is an anonymous figure who
has emigrated to Canada during the Wars of Yugoslav Succession two years after
the death of his mother in Zemun and is now living quite literally out of home;
an archetypal position for the uncanny. He takes with him a series of audio tapes
which he recorded at home in Zemun some years before, following the death of
his father. Wanting to tape his mother’s memories about her life, particularly her
experiences during and after the Second World War, the narrator organized the
recording sessions in the family kitchen, he sitting on the opposite side of the table
to his mother with the tape recorder between them. The sessions took place over
a lengthy period of time as his mother would sometimes find it too emotionally
disturbing to continue or sometimes too difficult to recall events from the past. She,
her first husband, and two children left their home in Zagreb at the beginning of
the Second World War and moved to Belgrade. As Jews, they found Croatia under
the control of the fascist forces of the Ustasha government a dangerous place. The
move did not save her husband who was executed and, to add to the tragedies of
those years, she also lost her two children in a train accident. The narrator’s father,
his mother’s second husband, also Jewish, spent most of the war in a prisoner-of-war
camp, while his wife and children were interned in a camp near Niš where they
died. After the war, the bereaved pair meet and marry, he taking up his pre-war
career as a doctor, and the narrator is born.
His mother’s memories keep bringing the horrors of the Second World War
into the present: German troops marching into Zagreb and crushing f lowers and
chocolates beneath their boots, his mother f leeing Zagreb and living as a refugee
in Serbia, the atrocities committed against innocent civilians, the image of his
mother’s first husband awaiting execution in the camp for Jews in Belgrade. They
intrude on the narrator’s own feelings, deeply disturbing his already fragile state as
he comments on the situation at home: ‘tamo, odakle sam došao, vodi se novi rat,
odnosno, okončava se onaj stari, dovršavaju se neostvarene namere, kao da je neko
izvukao prošlost iz filmskog arhiva i podstakao glumce da nastave započetu scenu’
[‘there, where I came from, a new war is going on; that is, the old one is ending,
unrealized goals are being achieved, as though someone has excerpted the past
from a film archive and goaded the actors into continuing the opening scene’].35 As
Vladislava Ribnikar notes of Albahari’s novel, ‘Various historical realities rub up
against one another, revealing numerous similarities and analogies.’36 The past is
absorbed by the narrator’s own thoughts and feelings, but it cannot act as a lesson
for how to behave today; the past war and the present war share similarities, but
they are not the same. His mother’s stoical attitude to the calamities of her life
Making War Real 129
is not matched by the narrator’s inability to respond to the present. He is simply

overwhelmed by events. His mother recalls that her world changed with the war:
‘Prvo sam mislila da se samo ljudi menjaju, onda sam uvidela da se menja ceo
svet i da više nikada neće biti isti, iako to nikada nisam sebi priznala’ [‘At first I
thought only the people were changing; then I realized that the whole world was
changing and that it would never again be the same, though I never admitted this
to myself ’].37 The narrator has a similar feeling as he watches the war unfolding
in his own day, except that his becomes a story of general mourning, unlike his
mother’s story of resistance to hatred and loss. He has lost almost everything and
says: ‘Nisam više imao zemlju, ostao sam bez majke, preostalo je još da se jezik
sasvim istroši i da ostanem bez ičega’ [‘I no longer had a country, I was left without
a mother, it only remained for language to be completely worn out and for me to
remain without anything’].38 Zoran Milutinović remarks on this emphasis in the
novel’s thematic structure, saying that the work is ‘a book of mourning’ for the loss
of mother and country.39 Mourning here falls short of either reconciliation with the
past or making use of it as form of redemption for the future. Instead, it signifies the
absence of what has been lost and the mother’s voice becomes a haunting presence
filling the void. Her familiar tones frame a series of uncanny moments, enhancing
the growing sense of menace which accompanies the narrator’s ref lections on the
reality of the present conf lict.
The uncanny element of Albahari’s Bait is asserted from the first sentence of the
work: ‘ “Odakle da počnem”, kaže majka. Istog trenutka pružam ruku i pritiskam
dugme na magnetofonu’ [‘“Where should I begin,” says mother. At the same time
I reach out my hand and press the button on the tape recorder’].40 The mother’s
disembodied voice reaches out from the past, alive once again as the narrator
listens to the tapes and recalls the time when he recorded her voice. The bizarre
and ghostly element of the uncanny is not conveyed simply by her words but by
the interaction of her story with the narrator’s preoccupations with the present.
His mother’s voice actually forms part of his immediate reality as she says things
which chime with his present thoughts. Comparing his intimate knowledge of
the old family f lat in Zemun with the strangeness of his new home where he is
always bumping into things, he becomes listless: ‘Koturovi se okreću, traka se
zateže. Umoran sam. “Nemoj meni da pričaš o umoru”, kaže majka. Zaprepašćeno
piljim u magnetofon’ [‘The reels are turning, the tape is becoming taut. I’m
tired. “Don’t tell me about tiredness,” says Mother. I gaze at the tape recorder in
astonishment’].41 His mother, as if speaking from beyond the grave, answers his
current thoughts and state of mind with an admonishment. The mother’s voice
haunts the narrator as an effect of the present, not just an effect of the past which
has become insinuated in the present. It brings with it the fact of its own spectrality,
its ghostliness as a signified absence. Her words do not close the gaps in the present
but constantly open them wider as reconstructions of memories from a former
world. The narrator says, ‘Zemlja se raspadala, ja sam se raspadao, uspomene su
bile balast koji je silovito vukao prema dnu’ [‘The country was falling apart, I was
falling apart, memories were the ballast that pulled one violently toward bottom’].42
Albahari’s narrator lives with the words of his mother not as a challenge to come
130 Making War Real
to terms with his own world but as affirmation that the present menace cannot
be overcome.
The discussions between the narrator and his mother include references to the
inadequacy of language in the face of death when she repeats the sentence, ‘ “Kada
neko nestane, nema tih reči koje ga mogu vratiti.” ’ [‘ “When someone passes away,
there are no words that can bring him back” ’].43 When he wants to react, she says:
‘ “Ne treba da se ljutiš”, rekla je majka, “i ja sam, kada sam bila mlada, verovala da
se svet može opisati, ali onda su se odigrali događaji koji izmiču svakom opisivanju,
i više ne mogu da verujem u to.” ’ [‘ “You shouldn’t become angry,” said Mother.
“I, too, when I was young, believed the world can be described, but then events
occurred that defied all description, and I can no longer believe in that” ’].44 The
narrator eventually agrees with this state because of his own experience as he sits
in Canada ‘beskrajno udaljen od svega što me je nekada činilo onim što jesam, ili
što sam mogao biti, ili što sam bio’ [‘infinitely far from everything that once made
me what I am, or what I could have been, or what I was’]. He deliberates on the
meaning of his own words: ‘I taj haos gramatičkih vremena potvrđuje u kojoj meri
se nalazim izvan života, u kojem postoji samo sadašnje vreme i nema gramatike’
[‘And that chaos of grammatical tenses confirms to what extent I find myself outside
life, in which only the present tense exists and there is no grammar’].45 Language
is not life; it distances the immediacy of action which is constantly slipping by and
erases personal identity which is constantly changing.
The inability of words to describe the world in all its fullness goes beyond the
words and grammatical structures available in natural language. All attempts to give
sense and meaning to the world in sign systems dissolve. The narrator often talks
to his Canadian friend, Donald, about what is happening in his homeland, trying
in vain to explain the history behind current events and give greater depth to help
Donald understand what is really taking place. As they pore over maps to make out
the names of small places, short rivers, and mountains bunched closely together,
their hands inadvertently assume grotesque dimensions:
Povremeno je moj prst klizio preko stvarnih i nestvarnih granica, povremeno
se Donaldov dlan spuštao na Jadransko more ili pokrivao Makedoniju. Skrenuo
mi je pažnju da Hrvatska liči na razjapljene čeljusti, Srbija na debelog prerijskog
glodara koji čuči iznad svoje rupe, dok ga je Bosna podsećala na izlomljeni
trougao.
[Occasionally my finger slid across borders real and imaginary; occasionally
Donald’s palm came down on the Adriatic Sea or covered Macedonia. He
called my attention to the fact that Croatia looks like gaping jaws, Serbia like
a fat prairie dog sitting over its hole, while Bosnia reminded him of a broken
triangle.]46
The consequences of actions in the world cannot be substituted for a structure of
signs. The realities of history and geography constantly dissolve into the signifying
practices of which they are made and lose any meaning. Albahari’s novel is a
negative model for the expectations that literature about war can give order to
conf lict by imposing, among other things, ‘discursive order on the chaos of conf lict
and so to render it more comprehensible’, to make a record of what happened, to
Making War Real 131
memorialize and inform about events.47 His narration demonstrates that language
is an inadequate tool for conveying the meaning of war. Those who were not there
will not understand, while those who were there cannot be given substitutes in
words and pictures for the suffering experienced.
In her discussion of the uncanny and the ghost story in her study of the fantastic
in literature, Rosemary Jackson draws attention to the ghost as a disturbing
signification of absence. The uncanny in literature represents fear and dread, which
is returning to the present from a repressed and unknown source. It is a negative
sign undermining the logical presence from which systems of signification develop:
‘The cultural, or countercultural, implications of this assertion of non-signification
are far-reaching, for it represents a dissolution of a culture’s signifying practice,
the very means by which it establishes meaning.’48 Albahari’s novel, combining
an obsession with signification with its inability to articulate the chaos of war,
enacts this process of negative signification in the uncanny relationship between
the narrator and his mother’s voice from beyond the grave. In those moments when
the uncanny comes to dominate, the structure of the present is in ruins and all that
remains is absence, the signified absence of the disembodied utterances from long
ago. Albahari’s narrator loses the ability to create in words, to replace harsh reality
with significant sequences of language marking his understanding of the world.
Narrative fiction about the Wars of Yugoslav Succession treads a fine line between
narrative structures to tell a coherent story and, in the same narrative structures,
to express the emotional and physical chaos and senselessness of events being
described, their essential incoherence.
Monsters of War
In the 1990s writers used the familiar worlds of moving into a new f lat, a night out
with friends, a bus journey in town, the soap-opera reality of urban spaces, a parent’s
voice and family history, to provide a basis for a story and then distorted the familiar
world, pushing the narrative beyond everyday expectations, allowing the turmoil
brought by war to show through.49 Mileta Prodanović also works with aspects of
a known environment, one recognizable to his audience from different discourses
and areas of experience. He combines layers of meaning by reference to a broad
range of texts from factual and documentary sources, making a narrative collage.
It is no surprise that he is also a painter and visual artist, applying bold intertextual
references, highly metaphoric representations, and complex, multi-layered meanings
in his paintings and art installations.50 He exploits many different types of cultural
memory in his work, often reshaping or deforming it, making intricate narrative
patterns from a series of intertextual links. Nikola Strajnić, writing about
Prodanović’s shorter prose works in his essay ‘Leptirova krila’, emphasizes how he
brings together these different worlds always underpinned by a sense of reality but,
in effect, creating a new fictional world: ‘U njegovom svetu je ono iracionalno,
ono akauzalno, ono prekoredno dovedeno do racionalnog, kauzalnog i uređenog,
mešajući se i poistovećujući se s tim, čineći, na oksimoronski način, jednu novu
stvarnost’ [In his world, the irrational, the haphazard, the extraordinary is brought
to the rational, the causal, and the ordered, combining and equalizing with it,
132 Making War Real
making, in an oxymoronic manner, a new reality].51 Tihomir Brajović, noting the

growing political engagement in Prodanović’s literary output, sees in Prodanović
a writer ‘koji se, u žanrovskom rasponu od parodije do anti-utopije, bespoštedno
bavi uzrocima i posledicama intelektualnog i moralnog sloma miloševićevske Srbije’
[who, in a generic range from parodic to anti-utopian, is concerned with the causes
and consequences of the intellectual and moral fall of Milošević’s Serbia].52 In his
fiction, historical and political themes are only ever equal to, if not subordinate to,
all semiotic processes by which meanings are created, circulated, and exchanged. In
his novel Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku (Dance, You Monster, to my Soft Music,
1996) he evokes depictions of Serbian history and culture through a wide range of
intertextual references combined in dense narrative layers, using quotations as a way
of mediating the unreality of war, finding points of convergence for his readers to
comprehend at least something of events.
The main character in Prodanović’s novel is Marko, alias Vladimir or Miša,
born shortly after the Second World War in Belgrade. His father, Radovan, is a
communist who fought for the Yugoslav Partisans in the war but who takes Stalin’s
side in the 1948 dispute between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. His ideological
conviction leads him to try to leave the country and he is shot while crossing the
border into Romania. Marko’s mother commits suicide four years later, leaving
him alone with his maternal grandparents, who have little affection for the boy.
He grows up wandering the streets of Belgrade, making friends with other boys
living on the edge of the law and involved in petty crime. Killing a policeman in
a robbery which goes wrong, Marko is arrested and taken into custody where he is
befriended by a senior member of the state security service, a former Partisan and
friend of his late father. The officer’s nickname is Stari (‘the Old Man’, a colloquial
term for ‘father’ in Serbian) and he arranges for Marko to leave Yugoslavia, despite
his crime, even supplying him with a false passport and new identity. Marko
continues his criminal career abroad, but he is also required to carry out political
assassinations for the state security service now acting as his protector.
While living an opulent lifestyle abroad, Marko has affairs with two women,
with Eva in Vienna and Laura in Florence. He fathers two children with his lovers.
At the beginning of the wars in former Yugoslavia he is recalled to Belgrade to
lead a paramilitary formation over the border into Bosnia, continuing to serve
the state security apparatus which is now an institution of the new Serbia. From
his stay in Paris he acquires the services of two brothers who become his loyal
factotums. Returning with him to Belgrade, they become embroiled in the political
and criminal circles in the city. One of them shoots Marko on the orders of the
new chiefs of the state security service. After his death, it is discovered that Marko
has collected artworks and bequeathed six paintings by the Swiss artist Paul Klee
to the local museum in his father’s birthplace, Dubrovica. The novel opens with
the news of this generous legacy and the stir it caused in the international media
agencies reporting from the conf lict in the region. The subsequent events of the
novel are related from the points of view of different characters: Stari, Laura, Eva,
and from Marko’s perspective as he lies dying after being shot. The figure of Marko
is presented in a different light in each variation of the story, and each portrayal of
Making War Real 133
the character is underpinned by intertextual references to other narratives linking

him to the founding myths of socialist Yugoslavia, to the documented records
of the activities of criminals working for the state security service in the 1990s,
to glamorous fictional characters from popular culture, and to the dark world of
Dragoslav Mihailović’s well-known novel Kad su cvetale tikve (When the Pumpkins
Blossomed, 1968).
Marko’s family background inscribes him in a circle of historical time, linking
the crisis of the 1990s to the Second World War and the emergency situation in
1948 when the existence of Tito’s Yugoslavia was threatened by a conf lict, both
ideological and pragmatic, with the Soviet Union. Stari tells Marko about his
parents, their wartime activities and what happened after the war while he was still
a baby. Stari and Radovan fought together for the Partisans and later they continued
to work together, but now with responsibility for, as Stari calls them: ‘drugačiji
zadaci’ [different tasks]. Asking Marko if he knows where his name came from,
he tells him that he was named after their commander who had the conspiratorial
name Marko. Speaking of him, Stari adds, ‘ “Neki misle da je bio ubica, neki da
je kovao nekakve zavere u vlasti . . . Gluposti.” ’ [‘Some think that he was a killer,
some that he hatched certain plots in the government . . . That’s rubbish’].53 Marko
was the conspiratorial name of the Partisan commander Aleksandar Ranković, an
important member of Tito’s inner circle during the war who became head of the
state security service, the UDBA, after the war. The historian Stevan Pavlowitch
describes Ranković’s post-war duties: ‘He was in overall charge of the security
police, which exercised unrestrained power to arrest, imprison and execute political
opponents without police charges or trials.’54 These are the enigmatic ‘different
tasks’ of the state’s secret police to which Stari alludes in his story told to Marko.
Radovan, a staunch communist, takes the side of Stalin against the leadership of
the Yugoslav Communist Party in 1948. He resolves to leave the country for the
paradise of the Soviet Union and heads toward the border with Romania. The
secret police, discovering Radovan’s intentions, wait for him on the border where
he kills six of them before being shot himself. The affair mirrors an actual historical
event from 1948, which Fred Singleton describes in his history of Yugoslavia: ‘One
prominent ex-Partisan, the former chief of staff, General Arso Jovanović, was shot
whilst attempting to f lee to Romania on 13 August.’55 Stories about the Partisan
victory in the Second World War, the activities of the secret police, the role of
Ranković, the crisis of 1948, and Jovanović’s death are cardinal elements in the
founding myths of socialist Yugoslavia, but here incorporated in the novel as part
of Marko’s familial story. Marko, ironically, returns at the end of the novel to take
part in the events which will mark the end of the once united country.
Other connections between the establishment of the new state in 1945 and
its demise in the 1990s are exploited in the novel through the naming of Stari.
Josip Broz Tito was also known to his wartime associates by the nickname Stari.
Prodanović’s character comments on his own name when he introduces himself to
Marko, saying:
‘Moje ime je Stjepan, zovu me Stipe . . . A mislim da bi mogao da me zoveš
i “Stari”. Drug Stari. Ne zato što i našeg Maršala tako zovu . . . to je slučajno
134 Making War Real
poklapanje, ali ne mogu da kažem da mi nije milo. Tako su me zvali i u ratu,

iako tada nisam bio star.’ 56
[‘My name is Stjepan, they call me Stipe . . . And I think you could even call
me “Stari”. Comrade Stari. Not because they call our Marshall that . . . that’s
an accidental coincidence, but I can’t deny that I like it. That’s what they called
me in the war, although I was not old then.’]
His name is not only a happy coincidence with a historical counterpart but also
replicates his function in his relationship to Marko. Supplying him with false
identity papers and sending him abroad to begin a new life, Stari is cast in the role
of a spiritual father to the orphan Marko. Stari’s real name, Stjepan shortened to
Stipe, is typically Croatian and is also the name of the Croatian representative on
Yugoslavia’s Presidency Council in late 1991, who also used the shorter form of
Stjepan, Stipe Mesić. As President of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s he ‘declared that
Yugoslavia ceased to exist’ amidst the military and political turmoil of the time.57 In
Prodanović’s prose, Marko’s surrogate father contains allusions both to the creator
of Yugoslavia and to the herald of its demise. These references in Prodanović’s novel
are thickly interlaced with historical myths of the Yugoslav regime. The historical
record is less important than what Prodanović suggests by similarity and analogy;
for example, concerning Marko and his father. Marko and his father both work
for the state security service, the son following in the footsteps of the father; their
lives are governed by the times of chaos and political instability in which they live;
they are both struck down by killers from their own side. The difference between
the two is that Radovan fought for and believed in the ideology of the communist
authorities while Marko is completely estranged from the political rhetoric of the
early 1990s.
With his future secured by Stari, Marko, holding his new passport in the name
of Miroslav Zlatanović, goes abroad where some of his friends from the Belgrade
streets have already been sent. The state will allow Marko to do as he pleases, but
he will be expected to carry out tasks as an assassin of émigrés opposed to socialist
Yugoslavia. The manner of Marko’s recruitment echoes stories documented by
journalists and circulating in Belgrade in the 1990s about the role played by
criminals in the Yugoslav security service. An officer employed in the service for
twenty-five years, Božidar Spasić, was interviewed by Aleksandar Knežević and
Vojislav Tufegdžić for their book Kriminal koji je izmenio Srbiju, which appeared
the year before the publication of Prodanović’s novel. According to Spasić, ‘ljudi
iz podzemlja za likvidacije počinju da se koriste naročito 1972. godine’ [people
from the underworld begin to be used for liquidation work specially in 1972].58
He also admits: ‘ “Izdao sam 90 lažnih pasoša, toliko je bilo dobrih saradnika
iz podzemlja. Najboljima sam davao i vozačke dozvole.” ’ [‘I issued ninety false
passports; that was the number of good associates from the underworld. I also
gave driving licences to the best of them’].59 The manner in which Marko finds
his way into the service closely ref lects the evidence of another interviewee
from the state security apparatus, who tells the journalists how they would enlist
such people:
Making War Real 135
‘Oko devedeset odsto likvidatora Služba regrutuje iz redova kriminalaca.

Postoje tri osnovna metoda kako se sa njima pregovara. Prvi bih mogao naz-
vati ucenom: kriminalac je učinio nešto “nevaljalo” i policija je to saznala.
Predočava mu da će to biti zaboravljeno, ako izvrši određeni zadatak.’ 60
[‘The Service recruited about 90 per cent of its assassins from the ranks of the
criminals. There were three basic methods of negotiating with them. I would
call the first one blackmail: the criminal did something “dishonest” and the
police found out. It’s pointed out to him that it will be forgotten if he carries
out a certain task.’]
Under the pressure of impending war and given the links which already existed
between the state and organized crime, the support of those who were already
involved in covert government activities was sought. After Slovenia’s successful bid
for secession from the Yugoslav federation in 1991, Vuk Drašković, leader of the
Serbian Renewal Movement (SRM), called for the creation of a Serbian Guard to
defend the interests of Serbs in Croatia. The Guard was a paramilitary formation
and, although it was not formally part of Drašković’s SRM, the two were closely
connected. Its first commander was Đorđe Božović ‘Giška’, while its main financier
was Branislav Matić ‘Beli’. Božović was a known criminal who had operated in
Serbia and abroad, serving a six-year sentence in Italy: ‘During his time in Western
Europe he was reported to have worked for the SDB [Služba državne bezbednosti
or State Security Service — DN] carrying out covert operations against dissident
émigrés.’ Matić was a wealthy businessman with interests in scrap-metal dealing:
‘However, like his friend and colleague Giška, he was believed to be close to
“underground” criminal circles in Serbia.’ 61 Almost all such leaders of criminal
gangs in Serbia were murdered; Matić lost his life on 3 August and Božović on
15 September 1991. Marko’s fictional career recounted in Prodanović’s novel bears
close similarities to some of these documented events.
One of the most famous criminals associated with the State Security Service is
Željko Ražnatović ‘Arkan’, leader of the paramilitary formation known as the Tigers
and ‘a criminal wanted in Europe for political assassinations and drug trafficking’.62
Some aspects of Marko’s professional and personal life follow the contours of what
has been reported about Arkan’s career. In his study of the effects of the wars of the
1990s on the urban landscape of Belgrade, Prodanović says of Arkan:
Grobnica Željka Ražnatovića — Arkana, kriminalca na visokom položaju
u policiji/državnoj bezbednosti, poslastičara i ‘biznismena’, kolekcionara
umetničkoh slika i vlasnika fudbalskog kluba, osumnjičenog ratnog zločinca,
narodnog poslanika i narodnog heroja, ubijenog 15. januara 2000. godine u holu
beogradskog hotela ‘Interkontinental’, nalazi se na prestižnom Novom groblju.
Ta grobnica se može videti kao završni element u konstrukciji identiteta
(neko bi rekao ‘imidža’) ovog važnog protagoniste političko-policijsko-ratno-
kriminalno-estradno-sportskog života.63
[The grave of Željko Ražnatović — Arkan, a criminal with a high position in
the police/state security, an owner of cake shops and ‘businessman’, collector
of art pictures and owner of a football club, a suspected war criminal, member
of parliament and national hero, killed on 15 January 2000 in the hall of
the Belgrade hotel ‘Intercontinental’, is to be found in the prestigious New
136 Making War Real
Cemetery. The grave can be seen as the final element in the construction of
the identity (some might say ‘image’) of this important protagonist in political-
police-war-criminal-fashionable-sporting life.]
Prodanović’s Marko does not own cake shops or a football club, but he is recruited
by the Yugoslav secret police, leads a life outside the country as a professional
assassin, returns as a war criminal leading a paramilitary unit in the war in Bosnia,
is assassinated in the luxury surroundings of his private jacuzzi, and is a collector
of paintings by Paul Klee. Under the isolated conditions of Serbia subject to a
regime of international sanctions from 1992 to 1995, such criminals became the
new celebrities with their rich lifestyles in direct contrast to the drudgery of daily
routine experienced by most citizens. They were seen to ‘have dared to take an
unconventional and daring path in life’ following which they were now ‘equally
daring in their patriotic commitment’.64 Arkan in particular was singled out as ‘the
glamorised villain’.65 He provided his fans with a calendar showing photographs of
himself in 1994, while in the following year his marriage to the singer Ceca was
a huge media spectacle watched by the whole country on TV and sold on video
afterwards. For his wedding performance Arkan wore a uniform in the style of a
Serbian officer from the First World War. In the world of modern celebrities, real
identities are exchanged for media constructions, blurring lines between factual
documentary and fictional creation. Prodanović’s inscription of a circle of historical
time deliberately plays on intertextual references to documentary, historic, mythic,
and media sources, creating a succession of frames through which the character of
Marko is projected. These references when combined in the context of his fictional
world are ontologically equal to the others taken from entirely fictional sources and
which are outlined next.
Prodanović’s novel is permeated with references to characters and types taken
from fictional worlds invented by others. Marko’s Viennese lover, Eva, one day
receives notification of a large amount of money paid into her bank account. She
realizes that this means that her lover from the past, whom she knew as Miša, is
dead. She decides to tell her son, Martin, that his real father is not the man he
believed him to be, but an enigmatic foreigner. Eva knows very little about Marko,
but she falls in love with him, describing him to their son in glowing terms as a
very handsome man who was different from other men. Martin reacts angrily, and
accuses his mother of imagining the whole affair with Marko, as if a piece of kitsch
fiction. He says:
‘Šteta što nisam čitao one ljubavne romane koji se kupuju na kioscima, možda
bi mi sve ovo bilo blisko . . . One sa doktorima i špijunima. I medicinskim
sestrama. Kao što vidiš sve se poklapa. Još uvek nisam sasvim siguran da se ovo
stvarno dešava. Meni. Nama. Ponovo te pitam da li mi ti to prepričavaš neki
film koji si videla televiziji [sic] juče, prekjuče? Nešto što je, ovako, ostavilo
utisak na tebe . . .’66
[‘It’s a pity that I haven’t read those romantic novels which you can buy in
kiosks, perhaps all this would be close to me . . . The ones with doctors and
spies. And hospital nurses. As you see, it all fits. I’m still not entirely sure this
is really happening. To me. To us. I ask you again, are you retelling the story of
Making War Real 137
some film which you saw on television yesterday, the day before? Something,
you know, which left a big impression on you . . .’]
The image of a glamorized villain is reborn in Martin’s reaction to his mother’s
admission of his paternity. A similar strategy is employed in the story of Marko’s
affair with Laura in Italy, except that the reference becomes a more elaborate
evocation of a specific fictional character, James Bond.
The second chapter of the novel opens in Florence with Laura Rondi taking
her little daughter, Ana, to school. Laura discovers that a substantial sum has been
deposited in her bank account and, at first, she is at a loss to understand where it
might have come from. Then, she realizes that the unexpected gift of money could
only mean that Vladimir, Ana’s father and her lover, is now dead. She first met
Vladimir, another of Marko’s aliases, some years before by chance on a train going
from Venice to Rome. She remembers their first encounter when she was attracted
by his appearance, although she could not guess his age. He reminded her of another
ageless character from fiction, ‘Dorijan Grej: čovek izvan svih generacija’ [Dorian
Gray: a man outside every generation].67 Prodanović uses the same reference in one
of his short stories, ‘Moj teča Bond, Džejms Bond’ (‘My Uncle Bond, James Bond’),
in which the narrator imagines that his uncle is James Bond, but as the years rolled
by ‘on, moj nesuđeni teča, je, kao kakav srodnik Dorijana Greja, ostajao zauvek
mlad’ [he, my would-be uncle, like some relative of Dorian Gray, remained forever
young].68 This sentence appears in a section of the story subtitled, in English, ‘From
Serbia With Love’.69 Laura and Marko’s first meeting is recounted as if a replay of one
of Bond’s adventures, From Russia with Love. In this 1957 novel by Fleming, Bond
returns from Istanbul on the Orient Express with his lover from the Soviet Embassy
in Turkey, Tatiana Romanova. Their journey takes them through Yugoslavia and
they enter Italy on their way to Venice. Arriving at Trieste, the two travellers
in Fleming’s novel see a marked difference between the sights of Italy and their
journey through the Balkans: ‘They gazed down at the holiday crowd. The sun
shone through the tall clean windows of the station in golden shafts. The sparkling
scene emphasized the dark and dirt of the countries the train had come from.’70 In
Prodanović’s novel, Marko has travelled from Belgrade, following the same route
as Bond and Tatiana, but with Laura waiting at the station in Venice from where
the train turns south. This train looks different from the Italian ones, with Laura’s
thoughts echoing Fleming’s novel: ‘Vagoni su bili bugarski, jugoslovenski, grčki,
prljavi, ali su ipak bili nekakvi vagoni’ [The carriages were Bulgarian, Yugoslav,
Greek, dirty, but still they were carriages of a sort].71 Laura, taking the place of
Tatiana, enters Marko’s compartment where they are alone and their affair begins.
The place of their first meeting is typical of a James Bond story in which travel,
as Umberto Eco remarks in his study of Fleming’s novels, is one of the ‘archetypal
situations’.72 Laura leaves the train in Florence and Marko continues his journey
to Rome, but they agree to meet again. The following weekend, he drives to
Florence in an impressive car, a 1960s black Lancia, an expensive, prestigious
vehicle of a type often associated with his fictional prototype. Laura knows very
little about Marko, who is often in Italy but frequently absent travelling abroad as
a businessman. He allows Laura into selected parts of his life, without divulging
138 Making War Real
the whole story, since, like the British agent, Marko has secrets which he dare
not tell.
There are further points of similarity between the two worlds inhabited by
Marko and James Bond. They are both dominated by an authority figure: Stari
brings Marko into the service while ‘M’ is James Bond’s controller. Bond has an
ambiguous role as a state-sponsored killer with ‘official legitimation to destroy the
enemies of his country (a “licence to kill”)’.73 However, Bond kills from a sense
of duty and in order to prevent crimes against humanity which are not ‘directed
towards individuals or individual communities, but rather towards entire nations,
whole continents, and, often, the human race itself ’.74 The villains in the Bond
stories are intent on world domination, for which they are willing to initiate acts
of mass destruction and use everything and anything to achieve their goals. Marko,
on the other hand, kills individuals who are political opponents of the regime in
Yugoslavia, and, on his return to Serbia in the early 1990s, he becomes part of a
military machine implicated in crimes against humanity. In their study of the James
Bond figure, Bond and Beyond, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott see him as one
of a breed of popular heroes who
break free from the originating textual conditions of their existence to achieve
a semi-independent existence, functioning as an established point of cultural
reference that is capable of working — of producing meanings — even for those
who are not directly familiar with the original texts in which they first made
their appearance.75
Prodanović taps into this rich seam of cultural reference points, inscribing his
character with ambiguous connotations from the world of James Bond.76
Marko is linked not only to the glamorous signifying potential of James Bond,
but also to Dragoslav Mihailović’s novel When the Pumpkins Blossomed. Mihailović’s
narrator is a Serbian émigré living in Sweden, Ljuba Sretenović, recalling his
youth in Belgrade and the reason why he left the country. His adolescent years are
marked by poverty and a life on the edges of criminality. The novel is regarded as
an example of the new, gritty realism in Serbian prose of the late 1960s, depicting
a critical picture of urban deprivation in socialist Yugoslavia at odds with the
rosy images of constant economic and social progress promoted by the regime.
The narrator takes up boxing, joining a Belgrade club, where he falls under the
inf luence of the local official from the Communist Party, a man called Perišić but
more commonly known by his nickname Stari. He refuses to help when Ljuba’s
brother is arrested for allegedly taking Stalin’s side in the 1948 dispute. Ljuba is
called for his military service, where he learns that his sister has committed suicide
after she was raped. He discovers the identity of the rapist, the leader of one of
the local gangs, Stole Apaš, and resolves to kill him. On his discharge from the
army, he finds Stole and beats him to death. For fear that the police are close to
discovering the truth of his crime he f lees the country, marrying and settling
down in Sweden. He is homesick, but even when he receives dual nationality he
is disturbed that he is not invited back to Yugoslavia. Feeling unwanted by his
own country, he has only one dark hope, ‘da će najzad izbiti neki mali, pametni
rat’ [that at last some small, clever war will break out].77 This thought gives him
Making War Real 139
some comfort as he considers that only under such circumstances will they call
him back.
Details from Mihailović’s novel are repeated in Prodanović’s. The main
characters in both stories are members of street gangs, on the edge of the law, and
who frequent the local dance halls in order to preen themselves in front of the
girls. One of Ljuba’s favourite venues is called the Zvezdino, where he meets a girl
from Kragujevac who has come to Belgrade as a student, a cut above Ljuba’s usual
friends.78 Marko, recalling his youth, also remembers the dances at the Zvezdino
and the ‘devojke iz finih kuća koje vole da koketiraju sa tvrdim momcima’ [girls
from good families who like to f lirt with the tough guys].79 Ljuba remembers that
the boys all used to carry ‘specijalne utoke u džepu’ [special pistols in their pockets],
while in Marko’s time there arrive ‘prvi proizvodi sa Zapada, odeća koja postaje
statusni simbol, vespe, ali i prve utoke’ [the first products from the West, clothes
which became a status symbol, motor scooters, and the first pistols].80 The names
of boys in Ljuba’s gang: Mita Majmun (Mita the Monkey) and Dragan Stojiljković
(called Draganče), echo the names of those in Marko’s gang: Miki Orangutan (Miki
the Orang-utan) and Drakče Dorćolac. Ljuba’s brother, Vladimir, leaves Yugoslavia
after his release from prison and goes to Italy; while Marko adopts the alias of
Vladimir when he meets Laura on his journey through Italy. Finally, the war which
Ljuba hopes for, which will provide him with the opportunity to return home,
becomes the cause for Marko’s controllers to recall him to Belgrade after many years
living abroad. The complex collage of discourses through which the character of
Marko emerges combines the myths of socialist Yugoslavia with the darker world of
Belgrade’s urban reality, the ambiguous glamour of the criminal underworld with
the new political class leading Serbia into war. Prodanović’s narrative technique
and the range of his interlaced references express not only the unsettling experience
of armed conf lict but also the wider social and political events, which form an
inescapable part of that war. Using already known narratives as cultural reference
points, he produces iconic images of the 1990s in wartime Belgrade.
Prodanović’s narrator ref lects on the traditions of making war when he comments
on the conf lict in Bosnia at the beginning of the novel:
Neko je rekao da je to ‘postmoderni rat’, rat sastavljen od samih citata istorije
svetskog ratovanja: masovna ubistva civila, opsade gradova slične srednjove kov-
nim, ali sa upotrebom najsavremenijih oružja, ratovanje lažima, taoci i njihova
trampa, vezivanje protivničkih vojnika za objekte od posebne važnosti da bi
se sprečilo bombardovanje tih ciljeva, orijentalni specijaliteti sa odsečenim
glavama, silovanja i logori.81
[Someone has said that it is a ‘postmodern war’, a war composed of the very
quotations taken from the history of world warfare: mass killings of civilians,
sieges of towns similar to those in medieval times but using the most up-to-date
weaponry, warfare by lies, hostages and their exchanges, tying enemy soldiers
to facilities of particular significance to prevent their being bombed, oriental
specialities with heads cleaved from their bodies, rape and camps.]
His thoughts echo those of Elaine Scarry that the structure of war is endlessly
repeated. Kate McLoughlin links this repetition to a tendency toward intertextuality
140 Making War Real
in war writing: ‘Likeness of experience has itself become a trope: a complex

meeting of representation and reality capable of further exploitation. The result
is that representations of wars — like the wars themselves — are often heavily
inter textual (or interbellical).’82 The reality of war exceeds comprehension and all
codes of normal behaviour are abandoned. By drawing on narratives from docu-
mentary, historical, cultural, fictional, and media sources, Prodanović appeals to
wider horizons of expectations available to his audience through activating their
knowledge of these intertextual layers. The strange and unreal events of this war
are brought closer through their connections to other motifs within cultural
patterns taken from a general social encyclopaedia. The construction of Marko as
a monster of war is realized through similarities and analogies with other fictional
characters and historical persons. The war as given in this narrative can only be
understood amidst the totality of a semiotic system generated by the whole of
cultural experience.
The link between Prodanović’s novel and the reality of the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession is sealed by uncanny and bizarre coincidences between the main char-
acter, Marko, and the activities of actual war criminals from Serbia. The novel
opens with the news that six pictures by Paul Klee have been left mysteriously
to a small museum in Serbia. They are a bequest from Marko. This reference
strangely echoes reports of real connections between Serbian war criminals and
the art world. In July 1994 two paintings by Joseph Turner, on loan from London’s
Tate Gallery, were stolen from a museum in Frankfurt. Finally, their safe return
was negotiated in 2002. In 2000, a few years after the publication of Dance, You
Monster, to my Soft Music, it was reported that the paintings were taken by thieves
who delivered them to Serbian gangs operating in Germany but controlled from
Belgrade. A British journalist, Nigel Rosser, mentioned the name of the recently
murdered figure of Arkan in connection with the theft: ‘Serb criminals linked to
assassinated warlord Arkan generally act as middlemen transporting drugs from the
near-east into Europe. They are also known to have been involved in various art
thefts in the former Yugoslavia and eastern Europe.’83 A former employee at the
Tate who was closely involved in the recovery of the paintings and later published
a book on the subject wrote that the suggestion that Serbian gangs were involved
‘was fanciful’.84 The full story of the theft and the whereabouts of the paintings in
the intervening eight years have not been disclosed. Criminals from Belgrade may
or may not have been involved, but the connection of organized gangs from Serbia
to a major art theft is evidence of the shifting world of the social encyclopaedia,
exploited by Prodanović in his novel, in which fanciful suggestions slide into media
commentary. Another occurrence took place some years later. On 20 July 2011
the last major war criminal from the conf licts of the 1990s, Goran Hadžić, former
President of the Republic of Srpska Krajina, in hiding since July 2004, was arrested
in northern Serbia. In an article the following day in the newspaper Politika it was
maintained that he returned to Serbia in order to claim a painting by Amedeo
Modigliani entitled ‘Portrait of a Man’ which he had left in the care of a friend.
The Politika journalist writes:
Brzo je utvrđeno da ta slike pripada Hadžiću i da je kupljena u Francuskoj
Making War Real 141
tokom devedesetih. Utvrđeno je i da je slika plaćena novcem od šverca nafte,

čime se, između ostalog, bivši predsednik RSK bavio tokom ratova na području
Hrvatske i Bosne.85
[It was quickly established that the picture belongs to Hadžić and that it was
bought in France during the nineties. It was also established that the picture
was bought by money from smuggling oil in which, among other things, the
former President of the RSK was involved during the wars on the territory of
Croatia and Bosnia.]
In their investigation into Hadžić, the police concluded that he was running out
of cash and decided to wait for him to collect his painting in order to sell it. The
reference to Modigliani’s painting was soon dropped, but the story of Hadžić’s arrest
implicating the role of his interest in the art world again narrows the gap between
fiction and reality, almost as if Prodanović was not quite making it up. The author
animates the link between war and criminal gangs, the involvement of government
channels, the state endorsement of a licence to kill, and the unimaginable horrors
of the conf licts of the 1990s, in order to portray the activities of the monsters of the
Wars of Yugoslav Succession.
New Language of New War Fiction

Ghosts and uncanny motifs in Serbian literature of the 1980s expressed a disjuncture
between past and present; they were signs that the past was not properly buried
and was making its presence known. The unresolved social violence represented
by these spectres could not be entirely resettled since the past is too immense:
events do not belong to a single chronological series but to complex sequences of
interlocking occurrences; memories of what happened are too fragile and changing
while the traumas of history defy inclusion in normal categories of comprehension;
there is no one way of representing the past, rather it appears through a combination
of different discourses covering real and imagined histories. However, the ghosts
passing from past to present made the border between the two an uncanny
realm, a place of return to the unsettlement of what was thought to have been
resolved. Ghosts revealed an attempt to reconnect the past and the present in a
new continuity, making a fresh narrative to accommodate the gaps. Of course, the
attempt is illusory in that literature cannot fill the lacunae in historical knowledge,
but it can creatively explore the consequences of the holes and discontinuities in
and between the different narrative orders. The haunted stories of the 1980s offer
the opportunity to revisit past conf licts and reconsider the meanings of the past as
a literature of new historical fiction. The uncanny motifs of the 1990s continue the
path of the previous decade, but with different results focusing on the ghost as a
sign of the absence of signification unable to compensate for the cracks and fissures
in comprehension of the present war.
All war fiction feeds on and contributes to the traditions of writing about war as
it searches for a new language in which to express the experience of the particular
conf lict. Although containing few echoes back to the literary models of the Second
World War, Serbian war literature of the 1990s exploits motifs and imagery taken
142 Making War Real
from the broad traditions of war writing. It tells private stories of events which
do not ref lect great heroics or the grand stories of history, but each little event
is expanded through intertextual links and metaphorical connections to broader
semantic levels supported by general references to the pity of war. The narratives
give suggestions of order and meaning to events in order to conduct a minimum
narrative communication. However, discursive order is constantly challenged by
the difficulty of supplying logical connections between events in sequence: whether
it is the incompatibility of happenings in the graveyard with the death and burial of
the narrator’s brother-in-law in In the Hold or the mother’s ghostly voice disrupting
the narrator’s thoughts in Bait. The constant shifts between intertextual references
from both documentary and fictional sources in Prodanović’s novel act to blur
distinctions between the reality and unreality of the war. At the same time, the
force of this citation stream makes events more accessible to the general field of
cultural experience. Other works bring the war closer to home by the human scale
of their stories: young people are surrounded by danger on what should be a simple
social occasion; the constant discourse of war inf luences everyday life; family stories
about the past assume new dimensions in the disturbing atmosphere generated by
mass conf lict; there is a palpable disruption of ordinary life by extraordinary times.
These novels and short stories, as examples of modern war literature, confirm and
amplify the reasons for the necessary articulation of war in narrative fiction.
Writers of this literature offer a new language for a war which is not connected
to previous instances of conf lict, but expressed only in the general traditions of war
literature. Their prose is fragmentary, containing uncanny elements disrupting the
seamless continuity of ordinary life, now punctuated by deaths and disasters. The
war begins with no cause, except the inability of people to stop it. It is presented
as a chaotic series of events with no aim, no purpose which would draw it to a
conclusion if achieved. As such, the war is devoid of meaning. It produces no heroic
acts, no sacrifices for the greater good, no myths to punctuate its progress. It is a
war with no social participation or consensus to justify its level of barbarism and
violence. The war is fought for the purpose of reinforcing the power of the apparatus
of state and the criminal elements which support it and which have been created by
it. It is a war imagined as a compendium of twentieth-century crises compressed
in one small space, described by Knežević and Tufegdžić: ‘Beograd je u sebi sažeo
Čikago dvadesetih godina, ekonomsku krizu Berlina tridesetih, obaveštajne spletke
u Kazablanki četrdesetih i kataklizmični hedonizam iz Vijetnama šezdesetih’
[Belgrade encapsulated Chicago in the 1920s, the economic crisis of Berlin in
the 1930s, the conspiratorial air of Casablanca in the 1940s, and the apocalyptic
hedonism of Vietnam in the 1960s].86 The death of the city, Vujović’s urbicide, is
represented by the open presence of criminals attacking the fabric of urban life,
sacking and destroying the achievements of modern civilization. Communities are
infected by the logic of war spreading through the streets, breaking them open to
reveal monsters below. The city is presented as a haunted structure, underpinned
by the semantic function of uncanny elements when the familiar world becomes
deformed, recognizable but changed, making refugees even of those who stay at
home. The narrative fiction about the Wars of Yugoslav Succession is written in a
language of negation in which the sense of events is ultimately annulled and their
Making War Real 143
memory is on the point of erasure. This is a war for which prose fiction provides a
form of reluctant remembrance.
The narrators and characters of these novels and stories appear as victims: their
lives are ruined by the collapse of civilization taking place around them; their
world is coming to an abrupt end and as a consequence they have no option but
to f lee; they are killed by their own side because of conspiracies and corruption.
At the same time, they are not innocent victims with at least a suggestion of
ambiguity regarding their complicity in the face of events. Some characters, while
not supporting the war, do not act against it except by hiding from it. Their lives
before the war are blind to the danger signs that conf lict is approaching. Some of
the characters take part in the events of the conf lict, being both victims and agents
of war. Events are constructed as if the narrators and characters are playing a role
in someone else’s story. The structure of a family soap opera serves to distance the
narrator of In the Hold from the critical urgency of what is happening around him.
In Bait the narrator lives in his present world through the memories of his mother
while he listens to her relating experiences from the past. Prodanović’s monster
of war is constructed through the lives of other characters taken from history and
fiction and inscribed in his story. His character, Marko, is invited to return to
Serbia to take part in a war as wished by another fictional character, Mihailović’s
narrator in When the Pumpkins Blossomed. Authors explore the distinctive conditions
of knowledge in relation to this particular conf lict and how signifying systems are
activated which make the circumstances associated with war part of the horizons
of expectations. This is particularly the case in Dance, You Monster, to my Soft Music
but also implicit in other works. They incorporate the meaning of events relating
to this particular war into the wider social and cultural patterns of reception. They
draw attention to chains of events linking the characters to the wars in Croatia and
Bosnia, to the political structures in Serbia promoting the country’s involvement in
the crisis, and to the mythic narrative of socialist Yugoslavia. The characters are part
of the system of signification, part of the meaning-making systems which surround
and permeate the conf lict, communicating the record of events and integrating
them on the semantic level.
The sense of unhomeliness provides the dominant uncanny tone in the literature
of the new war fiction of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession. The displacement of the
reality of everyday life in the short stories and Arsenijević’s novel, the ghostly voice
of the narrator’s mother in Bait, and the many layers of fiction and documentary
record alternating in the world of Prodanović’s novel erase the surface coherency
of these works, leaving characters both in and out of place at the same time.
These are known and unknown spaces and times giving rise to a distinct unease,
or ‘dis-ease’, of uncanny and grotesque proportions. The signifying practices of a
whole culture are destroyed, replaced by a cacophony of voices culled from family
stories, documentary sources, and popular culture. Literature’s new language
communicates the essential unreality of the human experience of the conf lict. This
kind of uncanny literature signals the approach of fear and dread, unlike the ghosts
generated by the next war, NATO’s phantoms, whose carnivalesque laughter is
discussed in the next chapter.
144 Making War Real
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, p. 123.
2. Ibid., p. 155.
3. Ibid., p. 124.
5. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1996), p. 7.
6. See Chapter 2, p. 32.
7. Sean Hogan, ‘Ghosts of War’, in Under Fire: A Century of War Movies, ed. by Jay Slater
(Hamersham: Ian Allan Publishing, 2009), pp. 243–56 (p. 244).
8. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 6.
9. See Chapter 5, pp. 95–97.
10. Vladimir Pištalo, ‘Bomba’, in Vitraž u sećanju (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1994), pp. 62–70 (p. 62).
11. Ibid., p. 63.
12. Ibid., p. 70.
13. Miodrag Maticki, ‘Pisac i rat’, in Srpski roman i rat, ed. by Pantić, pp. 17–22 (p. 21).
14. Sreten Vujović, Grad u senci rata: Ogledi o gradu, siromaštvu i sukobima (Novi Sad: Prometej;
Belgrade: Institut za sociologiju Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu, 1997), p. 12.
15. Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), p. 3.
16. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), p. 234.
17. Nicholas Abercrombie, Television and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 48.
18. Vladimir Arsenijević, U potpalublju: sapunska opera (Belgrade: Vreme knjige, 1995), p. 10; trans.
by Celia Hawkesworth, In the Hold: A Soap Opera (London: Harvill Press, 1996), p. 6. In the
1995 version of the text the word oblik (‘shape’) is used, but this was changed in later editions to
oblak (‘cloud’).
19. Ibid., p. 11; p. 7.
20. Ibid., p. 45; p. 41.
21. Ibid., pp. 46–47; p. 42.
22. Ibid., p. 60; p. 56.
23. Ibid., p. 62; p. 58.
24. Ibid., p. 30; p. 26.
25. Ann Patten, ‘Edith Wharton’s Wartime Ghosts’, in The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the
Twentieth Century, ed. by O’Briain and Stevens, pp. 216–28 (p. 218).
26. Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 49.
27. Arsenijević, U potpalublju, p. 52; In the Hold, p. 48.
28. Royle, The Uncanny, p. 23.
29. Abercrombie, Television and Society, p. 54.
30. Piette, Imagination at War, p. 5.
31. Arsenijević, U potpalublju, p. 107; In the Hold, p. 101.
32. Radoslav Bratić, ‘Priča o događaju koji se nije zbio’, in Zima u Hercegovini (Belgrade: Srpska
književna zadruga, 1995), pp. 19–25 (p. 19).
33. Ibid., p. 20.
34. Ibid., p. 23.
35. David Albahari, Mamac (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 1997), p. 18; trans. by Peter Agnone, Bait
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 11.
36. Vladislava Ribnikar, ‘History as Trauma in the Work of David Albahari’, Serbian Studies, 19.1
(2005), 53–81 (p. 67).
37. Albahari, Mamac, p. 68; Bait, p. 42.
38. Ibid., p. 185; p. 115.
39. Zoran Milutinović, ‘The Demoniacism of History and Promise of Aesthetic Redemption in
David Albahari’s Bait’, Serbian Studies, 19.1 (2005), 15–24 (p. 16).
Making War Real 145
40. Albahari, Mamac, p. 5; Bait, p. 3.

41. Ibid., p. 64; p. 40.
42. Ibid., p. 162; p. 101.
43. Ibid., p. 111; p. 69.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., p. 122; p. 76.
46. Ibid., pp. 147–48; p. 92.
48. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 69.
49. An earlier version of this section appeared as an article ‘Writing about War: Making Sense of the
Absurd in Mileta Prodanović’s Novel Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku (Dance, You Monster,
to my Soft Music)’, Modern Language Review, 108 (2013), 597–618.
50. For more on Prodanović as an artist see Lidija Merenik, Mileta Prodanović: Biti na nekom mestu
biti svuda biti (Belgrade: Fond Vujičić kolekcija, 2011).
51. Nikola Strajnić, ‘Leptirova krila’, in Mileta Prodanović, Agnec: priče, parabole, bitter-sweet . . ., 2nd
edn (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2008), pp. 305–08 (p. 307).
52. Brajović, Kratka istorija preobilja, p. 90.
53. Mileta Prodanović, Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 1996), p.
198.
54. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Serbia: The History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press,
2002), p. 163.
56. Prodanović, Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku, p. 188.
58. Aleksandar Knežević and Vojislav Tufegdžić, Kriminal koji je izmenio Srbiju (Belgrade: Radio
B-92, 1995), p. 239.
59. Ibid., p. 241.
60. Ibid., p. 238.
61. Thomas, Serbia under Milošević, pp. 100–01.
63. Mileta Prodanović, Stariji i lepši Beograd, 3rd edn (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2004), p. 190.
64. Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: BFI, 2001), p.
178.
65. Ibid., p. 181.
66. Prodanović, Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku, p. 111. There should be a preposition na before
televiziji.
67. Ibid., p. 49.
68. Mileta Prodanović, ‘Moj teča Bond, Džejms Bond’, in Agnec, pp. 163–91 (p. 184).
69. Ibid, p. 180.
70. Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), pp. 177–78
72. Umberto Eco, ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’, in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the
Semiotics of Texts (London: Hutchinson, 1987), pp. 144–72 (p. 155).
73. James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: Tauris,
1999), p. 30.
74. Christopher Lindner, ‘Criminal Vision and the Ideology of Detection in Fleming’s 007 Series’,
in The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader, ed. by Christopher Lindner (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 76–88 (p. 79).
75. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (New
York: Methuen, 1987), p. 14.
76. In a strange coincidence of fictional lives, the British secret agent is on a mission in Serbia at
the beginning of a later Bond novel. See Jeffery Deaver, Carte Blanche (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 2011).
77. Dragoslav Mihailović, Kad su cvetale tikve (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1968), p. 141.
78. Ibid., p. 40.
146 Making War Real

80. Mihailović, Kad su cvetale tikve, p. 59; Prodanović, Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku, p. 180.
83. Nigel Rosser, ‘Closing in on the Stolen £24m Turners’, Evening Standard, 24 November 2000.
Quoted in Sandy Nairne, Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners (London: Reaktion Books,
2011), p. 101.
84. Nairne, Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners, p. 102.
85. Dušan Telesković, ‘Uhapšen Goran Hadžić’, Politika, 21 July 2011, p. 1.
86. Knežević and Tufegdžić, Kriminal koji je izmenio Srbiju, p. 3.
CHAPTER 7
❖
NATO’s Phantoms
1999
The Secretary-General of NATO issued a press statement on 23 March 1999 to
announce that the alliance was about ‘to initiate air operations in the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia’ and that this action ‘is intended to support the political aims
of the international community’. The aim was to prevent further violent attacks by
the Serbian security forces in Kosovo and so avert a humanitarian catastrophe.
He was most emphatic that ‘NATO is not waging war against Yugoslavia’ and
that NATO has ‘no quarrel with the people of Yugoslavia’.1 From the Serbian
perspective, NATO’s military action was directed against the country, as described
by Mlađan Dinkić in the ‘Preface’ to the book Final Account:
There is no doubt that with its aggression on a sovereign country, NATO has
violated numerous provisions of international law. What makes it tragic is the
fact that in this case the victim was a whole nation and its future.2
Dinkić does not refer to the action as war but as ‘the NATO bombing’, a reference
to the alliance’s exclusive use of an air campaign against Serbia and Montenegro
and which corresponds to the term commonly heard in Serbia at the time and later,
bombardovanje.3 Dinkić’s reaction is muted compared to other politicians more noted
for nationalist outbursts who have spoken about these events. He was one of the
founding members of the liberal G17 Plus group and served in various coalition gov-
ern ments following the fall from power of Slobodan Milošević on 5 October 2000.
Much has been written on NATO’s decision to take military action and on
Serbian tactics in Kosovo against the Kosovo Liberation Army and its supporters.
Some commentators have sympathy for NATO’s aim to prevent violence in the
region, but they oppose military action. For example, Kyril Drezov and Bülent
Gökay write: ‘Bombing Yugoslavia, however, is the wrong method by which to
achieve this desirable objective. It is wrong in international law, and wrong in
practice.’4 Others consider the campaign justified as ‘a military response to this
humanitarian outrage’, citing atrocities of the Serbian authorities in Kosovo and
their lack of response to calls for a peaceful solution.5 Most agree that when the
attack began it was assumed that it would soon be over: ‘In fact, in the weeks and
months running up to the bombing almost everyone predicted that any campaign
would be short.’6 NATO leaders felt that Serbia would not be able to resist an
air campaign by the world’s most powerful military alliance and that Milošević
148 NATO’s Phantoms
would find the attack a useful cover to justify his government’s acquiescence
to the demands of the international community. NATO bombing lasted longer
than anticipated, from 24 March to 9 June. The majority of NATO’s bombs and
rockets were launched from aircraft using technologically advanced guidance
systems of the kind which has been used with great effect in other localized
military campaigns such as during the Gulf War in early 1991. NATO initially
targeted army installations, including military airfields, barracks, storage facilities
for arms and munitions, command and communication centres. Some sites were
in the countryside away from populated areas, while others were in towns, such as
military headquarters in the centre of Belgrade. The Serbian army was not large,
and after a short period, when these targets were exhausted, the list of legitimate
objectives was expanded to include bridges, industrial sites which might produce
arms, and other possible centres of logistical support: ‘When Milošević’s expected
early collapse did not come, NATO’s original 51-item target list was expanded on
28 March. That NATO increasingly aimed at demoralising Serbia’s population is,
of course, correct.’7 On 23 April, the news studio of the state television station in
Belgrade, RTS, was destroyed on the grounds that it provided the government
with propaganda support. I am not concerned in this chapter with the political and
military aims of the NATO bombing but, as in previous chapters, with the literary
responses to the demands of this very particular kind of conf lict.
The nature of the conf lict with NATO was very different from the Wars of
Yugoslav Succession although they share certain literary features. Serbian fiction
about the events of 1999, as before and elsewhere in the European tradition of war
writing, relies on earlier discursive models about war and, at the same time, has
to find a new language in which to express this experience, to convey its reality,
or its absurd unreality. Literary representations of war are one of the forms of
discourse providing a basis for future cultural memory. Novels are important, like
the documentary records left by journalists, academics, and political stakeholders,
for providing a conf lict with an acknowledged set of iconic images which serve to
condense and convey the experience of the period. They shape a structure of feeling
about the war, not just the preservation of key events marking the progress of the
conf lict, but a structure in which to commemorate the status of those events as part
of a national narrative. The traces of wars are important in linking the present stage
of the community to its past, to actions which have formed the development of
community identities and their shared cultural perceptions of self. At the same time,
narrative fiction at the beginning of the twenty-first century was enriched by the
legacy of the two preceding decades during which Serbian literature faced similar
issues relating to the changing memories of the Second World War and to the Wars
of Yugoslav Succession. Certain types of narrative structure and literary motif are
repeated, but in the new context they developed different semantic results. Stories
of the NATO air attacks of 1999 contain references to myths and legends, personal
and family memories, small stories rather than grand historical narratives trying to
make some kind of coherent sense of events which appear to those involved to have
little meaning. Ghosts once more begin to return, revealing that all is not well in
the world, while the literature of this war renews uncanny and fantastic elements
NATO’s Phantoms 149
among complex narrative levels. Serbia is haunted again. The first novel to feature
events from 1999 was Miroslav Josić Višnjić’s Pristup u počinak (Approach to Peace,
1999), where počinak means ‘rest’, but with connotations of ‘eternal rest’.
In the Beginning Was the Word

Josić Višnjić’s Approach to Peace is the last of five novels published over a period of
twenty-five years to form a cycle of works. The first to appear was the ill-fated
Pristup u svetlost (Approch to Light), published in the journal Književnost in 1975 before
being the subject of a literary scandal and remaining unpublished for many years.
There followed three more novels, Odbrana i propast Bodroga u sedam burnih godišnjih
doba (The Defence and Fall of Bodrog in Seven Turbulent Seasons, 1990), Pristup u kap i
seme (Approach to Drop and Seed, 1992), and Svetovno trojstvo (The Holy Trinity, 1996),
each one devoted to a particular place, time, and plot but remaining linked on a
number of levels which not only provide pathways to negotiate from one text to
another but also internally, as a network of connections within each work. These
links are both themetic and generated through characters and their families who
reappear in the stories. The points of connection evolve into accumulating traces in
the prose cycle, providing additional mass to the constantly expanding individual
universes associated with the author’s densely populated fictional worlds. These
five novels also bring together stories which cover crucial points in the Serbian
national narrative. The first three relate respectively to events concerning student
demonstrations in 1968, the Serbian rebellion against Hungarian rule in 1848, and
the creation of an island prison camp for women, similar to Goli Otok, after 1948.
The coincidence of dates in these works provides a historical framework which is
expanded to incorporate other times of revolt, war, defeat, myth, and legend. The
Holy Trinity includes events about the war in Bosnia and its conclusion at the Dayton
peace talks in 1995, an event viewed as a betrayal from the point of view of one of
the narrators, a police agent by the name of Vuk Trojanović. Each novel with its
linked familial, thematic, and national references is presented through the voices,
words, and writings of the characters themselves as witnesses. Josić Višnjić’s poetic
origins are tied to contemporary Serbian literary practices, which his works serve
to develop.
The last novel of the cycle, Approach to Peace, is set at the end of the twentieth
century and includes NATO’s air attack on Serbia. The novel contains a series
of letters and documents presented as parts of so many intertwined stories. Josić
Višnjić was completing his manuscript when NATO operations began. During the
NATO bombing, the author corresponded on a daily basis with friends via email
messages which he collected together after the conf lict and published as a book with
the title Ratna pošta (War Post, 2003). He mentions the manuscript of his novel for
the first time in an email of 14 April 1999: ‘Još verujem da ću stići na kraj Počinka,
a poslednje poglavlje ima datum 27. jun. Ovaj rat mi je već uleteo u dva pisma,
neće valjda i u ostalih sedam koliko ih do poslednje tačke još ima’ [I still believe
that I’ll get to the end of Počinak, the last chapter of which has the date 27 June.
This war has already found its way into two letters, hopefully it won’t get into the
other seven, the number remaining before the last full stop].8 The novel has thirty-
three letters, or chapters; the first one is dated 5 October 1997, while the last one
was already planned with the date 27 June 1999. The NATO bombing does creep
into the remaining chapters in ways which link this war to previous events in the
structure of Josić Višnjić’s cycle and to works by other authors featuring the conf lict
of 1999.
These thirty-three records are written to, about, or are in some other way
connected to Stojan Janković, a writer who returns from Paris to his native village
of Stapar in northern Serbia during the winter of 1995–96. The first letter is penned
by the manager of Stapar’s local library. He is writing a report in his capacity as an
agent of the security services, for which he has worked for some years, in order to
inform his superiors of Stojan’s return. Stojan is regarded as a dissident and enemy
of the state, as the manager states: ‘u sukobu je sa svima, pa i sa državom’ [he is in
conf lict with everyone, even with the state].9 The manager’s domain, the library,
functions as a microcosm of the larger security organization. Describing his sources
of information, he ascribes to it greater weight and authority. He cites in his letter
the evidence of three people: an anonymous but reliable person, the librarian
Milka Bevina and the postwoman Slobodanka Kovačeva. He also gives the names
of those who are not willing to provide evidence such as the parish priest, Miloš,
an old friend of the writer. Stojan is presented an an enigmatic figure. The library
manager does not mention his name directly but refers to him as ‘izabranik’ [the
intended, or the target], ‘naš junak’ [our hero], potentially either a mythic figure
or a character from literature, and most often simply in the third person as ‘on’
[he]. No-one knows why he has returned from Paris except that ‘ovde se priča da
je umešan i u nekakvo ubistvo’ [around here it is rumoured that he was mixed up
in some murder].10 The local rumour links the current story to the previous novel,
The Holy Trinity, and through it to the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, which feature
in that work.
On one level, Approach to Peace operates as a thriller, with numerous elements
which would indicate a spy story unfolding in its first few pages as the manager of
the local library submits his surveillance report. Clive Bloom links the emergence
of the spy thriller to both the imperial adventure story and the detective novel:
The spy thriller coming early in the twentieth century (in its fully developed
form) was, more than both its predecessors, the genre tied to international
political and social tensions. Indeed, more than any other form the spy thriller
responded to a need to represent covert activity by state organisations.11
The genre offers a referential framework for the development of stories in which
the state, and along with it the values associated with that body, is to be defended.
Stojan lives alone on a smallholding, receiving few visitors and rarely venturing
to the village. The riddle of Stojan’s return and his activities in Stapar is further
complicated by the discovery of a piece of paper in his home with some writing
which the library manager cannot understand. He suspects that it is written in a
secret code. Patricia Waugh in her study on metafiction comments on the reworking
of popular genres in contemporary literature, particular the thriller:
Thus the thriller, for example, may be regarded as ‘popular’ because of its
stereotypical characters, plot and situations, escapism and often sensationalism,
and its simplistic moral affirmations. In an age of uncertainty, however, it can
be seen to contain within its conventions the potential for the expression of
a deep ontological insecurity through its central image of a man or woman
threatened and on the run.12
Bloom’s ‘covert activity by state organisations’, broadened by Waugh into ‘the
expression of a deep ontological insecurity’, are elements woven into Josić Višnjić’s
novel about a dangerous and threatening world in constant transition as it leaves
behind one war and rapidly approaches the next. He uses the generic features of the
spy thriller, as outlined by Bloom and Waugh, to deepen other semantic levels in his
work: particularly concerning the role of the individual in times of historical crisis
and literature as a contributory element to the creation of cultural memory.
The penultimate chapter of Approach to Peace contains the only example of a letter
from Stojan himself. He has written it by hand and passed it to his friend, the priest
Miloš, to type and to post on his behalf. It is to an émigré Serb who now lives in
Sweden, where he has changed his name from Janko Mitrović to Jan Mitrovson.
His son, Gustav, is at the centre of the embedded narrative in the novel. Gustav
served with the United Nations in Croatia, where he saved a baby whom he and his
wife subsequently adopted. The baby is the child of another Stojan Janković, not the
enigmatic writer from Stapar but a Serb from Croatia who was a journalist killed in
the war. Jan is trying to discover more about the identity of his adopted grandchild.
The journalist Stojan Janković from Croatia claimed that he could trace his family
history back to the legendary hero also called Stojan Janković, a figure celebrated
in many epic ballads and stories from the Serbian oral tradition. He was the son
of the equally mythic Janko Mitrović. The intertwined stories bring together this
group of families across different centuries and countries, divided by their varied
paths, inf luenced by diverse historic pressures, but potentially from the same roots.
Stojan Janković from Stapar has spoken to refugees who f led to Serbia at the end of
the Wars of Yugoslav Succession when the Croatian army overran the area around
the town of Knin, a region of Croatia with a substantial Serbian population. From
those conversations he can confirm that the baby taken to Sweden is the son of the
journalist, Stojan Janković, killed by Croatian forces when they took Knin. This
information about near and far historical events is relayed over a number of letters
including other documents, archive sources from Croatia, records of conversations
with refugees in and around Stapar, letters from the journalist Stojan Janković to
his lover and mother of his baby, references to epic songs and legends. The total
sum of the information arises from a combination of different types of text and
over numerous discursive levels juxtaposing fictional contexts from the world of
the novel with myth and history, ultimately blurring the distinctions between
documentary and fictional sources. The narrative strategy deployed here reminds us
of similar strategies from the 1980s, but here in reference to the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession and the NATO bombing.
The bizarre if not uncanny connections between all the characters going back
over fourteen generations cannot be confirmed. What Stojan Janković in Stapar
can say is that Jan Mitrovson in Sweden is just one of many Serbs who have
changed their names and homes over the centuries, who have been blown to the
four corners of the world. The frontiers of Serbia have never been static, expanding
and contracting over time, while the territory has swapped different rulers on the
whim of its shifting historical fortunes. He enumerates occasions on which the state
changed drastically with the consequences of each war in the twentieth century;
including the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the German occupation in the
Second World War, then under the communists, and now ‘u ovom raspadanju i
bombardovanju’ [in this break-up and the bombing].13 However, in individual and
collective memory, in myth and in history, in stories passed through families, the
traces of what has been are kept alive. Vladislava Ribnikar notes the importance of
the resistance to forgetting both on the compositional and semantic levels in Josić
Višnjić’s opus: ‘Motiv pamćenja, i s njim povezan motiv pričanja kojim se zapamćeno
prenosi i čuva od zaborava, tiču se neposredno pripovedačkog metoda u drugom
i trećem delu ciklusa, pa i same suštine piščeve umetničke zamisli’ [The motif of
memory, and connected to it the motif of telling by which memory is transferred
and saved from forgetting, are of direct concern to the narrative method in the
second and third parts of the cycle, and to the very esssence of the author’s artistic
concept].14 Literature is an essential part of the challenge to the threat of cultural
amnesia. The novel in particular is the textual form which can embrace all others
and represent the past as archival fact, as personal memory, as a character’s dream
or as an imaginary place within the limits of its fictional world. These literary
possibilities may be distant from one another, exist in parallel or f low from one
level to another in a state of ontological equalibrium. The essence of Josić Višnjić’s
narrative fiction lies in making visible the shifting borders between different
discursive orders, between past and present. Stojan’s description of the country’s
constantly moving frontiers is a symbolic enactment of this process. The shifting
borders present an image of an uncanny zone, not marked by archival facts but
by the ghosts from stories moving back and forth along narrative chains linking
fragmented times and places.
Other letters of which the novel is composed are written by friends and family
concerned by Stojan’s sudden reappearance without explanation and by his lack
of communication. As they put their constant questions, they also disclose further
information about themselves, events in the family, and their attempts to get in
touch with him, filling out the context of the novel’s fictional world. The thirtieth
chapter of the novel is a letter dated 30 May 1999 from an anonymous well-wisher
who warns Stojan with the simple formulation: ‘pod prismotrom ste’ [you are under
surveillance].15 The unknown friend tells him to beware of the library manager,
who has already been responsible for the arrest and imprisonment of several people
in the village. He warns him of further contact with the librarian Milka Bevana
and the postwoman Slobodanka Kovačeva. However, in this letter we find many
references to characters and themes from other works in the cycle. The writer of
the letter tells Stojan he can consult Gospođa Stojanka to confirm the danger which
the library manager represents, since she has been watched ever since she returned
from prison. Stojanka is one of the characters in the earlier novel Approach to Drop
and Seed about women convicted as political prisoners for supporting Stalin in 1948.
He also advises him to stop communicating with refugees from the recent wars in
the following terms:
A nekome gore u vlasti nije to po volji, kvari im posao. U državnom vrhu
se vodi politička trgovina sa sudbinama i imanjima tih jadnih ljudi koji su,
mudrom politikom ovdašnjih glavešina i čistim nacionalnim programima
novih balkanskih državica, proterani, obezglavljeni i raskućeni u bivšim našim
republikama, najviše u Hrvatskoj i Bosni i Hercegovini.16
[Someone up there in government doesn’t like it, it spoils their aim. At the top
of the state, political trading is going on with the lives and property of those
poor people who, by the wise policy of the leaders here and the pure national
programmes of the new Balkan states, have been driven out, panic-stricken,
and made homeless in our former republics, mostly in Croatia and Bosnia and
Herzegovina.]
These bitter words echo the utter disillusionment noted by the secret policeman,
Vuk Trojanović, from the novel The Holy Trinity, when he was posted to Dayton in
November 1995. Vuk describes the talks between the political leaders of the former
republics in similar terms: ‘U toku je trgovina teritorijama, fabrikama, ljudima,
gradovima, ratnim zarobljenicima, putevima, političkim funkcijama, oružjem . . .’
[There is some trading under way of territories, factories, people, towns, prisoners
of war, roads, political offices, weapons . . .].17 Afterwards, his disappointment
leads him to question the values which he honestly if erroneously seeks to uphold,
and he commits suicide. Josić Višnjić links the two wars of the 1990s in which
Serbia is involved by reference to the unchanging world of covert state activity, a
world marked by its contrast to the refugees who are its victims and to the broader
ontological insecurity of shifting identities among different orders of discourse and
changing historical circumstances.
Josić Višnjić’s fictional world is populated by his fictional creations and by
references to real places and people from Serbia in the 1990s. For example, following
his lack of success to get information from the parish priest, the library manager
suggests that his superiors could approach the Patriarch Pavle or Bishop Irinej of
Bačka, the names of real officials in the Serbian Orthodox Church, because: ‘Ovde
sam u selu čuo da episkop ima dobre veze i odnose sa novom vlašću’ [Here in the
village I’ve heard that the Bishop has good connections and relations with the new
government].18 Other characters ref lect on opposition meetings and demonstrations
which took place during the 1990s. They comment on the state of contemporary
Serbian literature, mentioning the name of the author Milorad Pavić, the academic
and literary critic Nikola Milošević, and even the writer of the current novel
Miroslav Josić Višnjić. The librarian in his reports reveals his anxiety because of the
gathering war clouds during 1998 and early 1999. He asks his superiors for their help
in securing a safe position for his son away from any potential danger when he is
required to answer the call for military service. Specific mention is made of certain
events which have become iconic images of the NATO bombing: the diplomatic
talks at Rambouillet, the shooting down of one of America’s spy planes during
the conf lict, how people in Serbia would watch NATO news reports on satellite
TV about the bombing taking place around them, how crowds of people would
spend the night on bridges in Belgrade which were considered NATO targets, the
destruction of one of Serbia’s TV studios. Preserving these events in a literary form
might not correspond to the demands of historical accuracy, but it ensures their
survival within the variable demands of cultural memory.
The literary world of Approach to Peace incorporates references to numerous
possible worlds, equalizing their impact in the total composition of the novel. It
is a strategy which celebrates the ability of the literary text to produce meanings
as an index of life, being a reference to the real world but not strictly of it. The
author builds images of possible worlds and at the same time exploits his material
further by going beyond the boundaries of the generic conventions of the spy
thriller in which it is inscribed. At the end of the novel, there is no attempt to
resolve the many narrative threads, no reconciliation, no denouement to respond
to the enigma of Stojan’s return disclosed at the beginning. Instead, according to
the testimony of the library manager in his final report, Stojan Janković simply
disappears. On 6 June, visiting the smallholding where Stojan has been living,
he can find no trace of him. He sees what appear to be the tracks of a jeep,
but nothing else is out of the ordinary. He goes again two weeks later: ‘Nisam
rođenim očima želeo da poverujem. Sad je sve nestalo’ [I didn’t want to believe
my own eyes. Now everything has disappeared].19 The entire smallholding with
its house, barn, trees, well, and all signs of human habitation have gone. There is
an uncanny or even ghostly feature in Stojan’s disappearance, in the suggestion of a
supernatural event wiping out all notice of his existence. His untimely literary end
coincides with the closure of the NATO bombing and terminates Josić Višnjić’s
cycle of novels.
Refrains from the opening sentences of Approach to Peace are echoed at its end,
such that sentences are repeated: ‘Sedeo je pod orahom, sam, na salašu, i posmatrao
kako zemlja umire. Kako tone u san’ [He was sitting under the walnut tree, alone,
on his smallholding, and watching the earth as it dies. As it sinks into sleep].20
This repetition of beginning and ending is both a playful enactment of framing
the fictional world and a more serious reminder of the representational force of
literature. The possibility of writing a beginning and an end is no more than a
representation of alpha and omega, offering a pattern which gives an image of
sense, an alibi to satisfy the craving of purpose which is otherwise absent from
secular modes of life. This view is expounded by Frank Kermode in his study of
the novel, The Sense of an Ending, in which he writes that there exists ‘a need in
the moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end’.21
Literature in this way can offer something which life cannot; the echoing refrains
are simply an evocation of peace, a f leeting moment of connection in the vastness
of the world. Beginnings and endings take on an understated symbolic meaning,
points of departure and arrival, they are the frames of sense and purpose in the
middle of crisis, providing patterns for memory to preserve the traumatic events
of the present. Josić Višnjić’s novel, and indeed the whole cycle, is directed to the
articulation of the search for resistance to cultural amnesia. In an interview about
his work, Josić Višnjić comments:
Pisanje je za mene isto što i disanje, svaka reč je jedan trepet u damarima.
Odavno živim sa mišlju: da književnost ne postoji, morao bih je izmisliti. A
pamtim i kanonsku mudrost: ‘Na početku beše reč . . . sve je kroz nju postalo
. . .’22
[Writing for me is just the same as breathing, every word is a tremor in the
arteries. For a long time I have been living with this thought: if literature did
not exist, I would have to invent it. And I recall the canonical wisdom, ‘In the
beginning was the Word . . . all things came into being through it . . .’]
His quotation is taken from the St John’s Gospel of the Serbian Orthodox Bible,
which reads slightly differently in the English version: ‘In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God [ . . .] All things were
made by him.’23 Through the quotation, Josić Višnjić identifies the language of
narrative fiction as a means of framing and making events meaningful, and even
those that are almost impossible to believe can be given some shape in the form of
uncanny and ghostly motifs.
Serbia’s Twilight Zone

Đorđe Pisarev (b. 1957), in his novel Pod senkom zmaja (In the Shadow of the Kite,
2001), follows Josić Višnjić with his interest in the theme of literary representation,
although writing in a style based on a very different poetics. He also takes us back
to some of the uncanny motifs of the 1980s and 1990s by placing a ghost figure
at the centre of his work. In the Shadow of the Kite rekindles other structural and
thematic characteristics of the previous twenty years of literary legacy in that it is
set in the future and, thus, the war of 1999 is narrated as a historical event. The
written material providing the main source of information about NATO’s bombing
campaign is discovered in an old house in the year 2020. The use of letters and diaries
as material for a fictional narrative is an established mode of Gothic literature, and
is a literary device used in novels published in the 1980s and 1990s. By setting the
main narrative perspective in the future and involving ghosts, Pisarev manages
to represent the war of 1999 as if an image of unresolved social violence, harking
back to one of the central motifs of new historical fiction in Serbian literature.
However, the difficulty of narrating the past is less a matter of dispute about what
actually happened; after all, the events of 1999 are very close. Instead, the novel
explores how to narrate the experience of this war, turning to the parodic devices
and structures associated with postmodern literature.
Pisarev’s work opens with two friends who are sitting and drinking in a bar on the
top f loor of a ten-storey building, situated in an unnamed town, late one afternoon,
at some unspecified point in the future. One of the friends is called Dugi, while the
other is presented as an anonymous first-person narrator. Although the walls of the
bar are largely glass, the town is hidden behind black clouds and the constant drizzle
of rain outside. The atmosphere created by this isolated space is a fitting scene for the
subject of their discussion. Talking about the uncanny and fantastic effects achieved
in some stories, the two friends discuss Conrad Aiken’s short story ‘Mr Arcularis’
with its two temporal levels and seemingly quite separate stories. One narrative
level concerns the eponymous character as he lies on the operating table on which
he dies; the other tells the story of a sea voyage which he takes at the same time.
These concurrent events not only take place in completely different places, but also
over vastly different time scales. Next, they turn to the novel The Lost Domain (1913)
by Henri Alban-Fournier, published under the pseudonym of Alain-Fournier. It is
another uncanny story in which a young man disappears for a short period and on
his return claims to have met the love of his life in a forest clearing. Although the
whole event may have been a dream, he spends the remainder of his life trying to
find her. Dugi says that the author’s own life was even stranger; he disappeared in
a battle along with his whole platoon and was never seen again. He was, in fact,
killed at the beginning of the First World War and his body was not identified from
the battlefield until 1991. The first-person narrator jokingly comments, ‘ “Možda se
susreo s prošlošću, možda mu se svidelo pa je tamo i ostao.” ’ [‘Perhaps he met up
with the past, perhaps he liked it and he stayed there’].24 A voice pipes up behind
them, ‘ “Vi i ne znate koliko ste blizu istine.” ’ [‘You don’t know how close to the
truth you are’].25 Reference to these stories sets the scene for the remainder of the
novel and the unfolding of another uncanny tale. The stranger whose voice breaks
into the friends’ conversation introduces himself as Aleks and joins them at the bar.
They continue their topic about strange events in which people have what might
be termed an out-of-body experience in which they encounter themselves or have
incredible premonitions as if they have a meeting with the past which is really a
forecast of what is yet to happen. Aleks offers to read them a manuscript which he
claims to be better than all these other stories and about which he can confirm that
what is related is true. They order another drink and the two friends settle down
to listen to Aleks reading to them.
Aleks’s manuscript is the testimony of a young woman called Ana, who, on
taking a new job in Novi Sad, the main town of Vojvodina in north Serbia, decides
to live in a small village some fifty kilometres away. She is required to be at her
place of work just twice a week so the distance does not present a problem and
she has always wanted to work in town and live in more rural surroundings. The
place is called Vizić and the house she finds for herself is architecturally typical
for that area. The previous tenants have not left much behind, just a very large,
old cupboard made of mahogany in the pantry and one furnished room on the
first f loor, which she thinks encouraged her to choose that particular house. She
describes the room: ‘Izgledala je kao soba sa slikovnica iz kojih smo učili kako treba
da izgleda prava seoska kuća’ [It looked like a room from the picture books from
which we learnt how a real village house should appear].26 The room has a bed,
the walls are panelled in wood, the door painted in different colours, and the soft
furnishings decorated with red and white checks. Looking for places to store her
own belongings, she opens the cupboard in the pantry to discover a few cardboard
boxes filled with old newspaper cuttings, magazines, letters, and photographs.
She writes: ‘Svi časopisi poticali su iz doba početka našeg malog rata, davne 1999,
pre ravno dvadeset jedne godine . . . Isečci iz novina bila su skoro samo vesti o
borbama za Novi Sad. Očigledno je tamo na frontu bio neki član porodice’ [All the
magazines dated from the time of the beginning of our little war, in far-off 1999,
a full twenty-one years ago . . . The newspaper cuttings were almost all about the
fighting for Novi Sad. Obviously a member of the family was at the front]. She puts
the magazines back and the letters to one side. She looks at the photographs and her
eye is caught by a small boy, about eight years old, in a meadow, who holds a kite.
On the back of the photograph someone has scribbled ‘to sam ja’ [that’s me].27
The narrative’s full chronological reach spans from some point in the 1980s, the
time when the child’s photograph was taken, 1999 and the time of the NATO
bombing, and 2020 when Ana finds the boxes in the cupboard. She discovers that
the boy is called Saša and when she inspects the material from the cupboard more
closely, she finds the following types of documentary material: letters from Saša
as a soldier in 1999 to his mother, Mira; her letters to him with news from home;
Saša’s diary detailing individual events and how the soldiers lived under NATO’s
air attacks. Saša’s room on the first f loor is the one which attracts Ana’s attention
and persuades her to take the property. Living in the house and reading the material
from the cupboard, Ana begins to have strange dreams connected with Saša’s
childhood and she feels increasingly drawn to him. She learns that he was killed in
the conf lict of 1999 when his unit was redeployed to another site. She resolves to
save him and travels back in time to delay him joining his unit for that fateful attack.
However, she has not saved him as Saša, full of remorse when all his comrades lost
their lives, commits suicide. The war will not be cheated of its victims. However,
the novel’s more important impact is in the manner of its narration rather than in
the telling of a supernatural story about a soldier whose life cannot be saved from
the threat of death that awaits all soldiers in times of war.
The novel contains three different narrative levels: on the first level the events
of 1999 are related by Saša and Mira, who write about their experiences from the
front line and from home; the second level concerns the events of 2020 in which
Ana takes up residence in Vizić, reads the material about the NATO bombing, and
writes her own testimony of what happens to her; the chronologically latest level
contains Aleks’s reading of Ana’s manuscript at some unspecified temporal point
and the discussions between him, Dugi and the first-person narrator. Each level is
linked to the others in a narrative chain but they are also discretely characterized
by specific patterns of discourse, each enclosing other embedded narratives. Thus,
the levels are simultaneously connected and displaced from one another. The first
level is made up of Mira’s letters to her son in spring 1999 during the conf lict, his
letters to her and his diary. Mira’s letters are chatty, covering a variety of subjects
including how they cope at home with shortages and lack of money, the ways in
which the war visits their village and her ironic comments on the political situation
often aimed against their leader. When her neighbour’s grandson asks her why the
bridge was destroyed, she writes to Saša, ‘Poslaću ga kod Vođe, pa nek njega pita!’
[I’ll send him round to the Leader, and let him ask him!].28 In her last letter she
comments: ‘Mi smo zaista lud narod: po ko zna koji put slavimo pobedu koja se
zove kapitulacija’ [We really are a mad people: who knows for how many times
we have celebrated a victory which is called a capitulation].29 In her letters she
combines her mild-mannered outlook on life with cynical remarks about the war,
and finishes with one of her recipes for different types of dumplings. There is an
element of humour in her caring maternal tone towards her child, who is a soldier
on the front line. Her son’s letters to her are quite different.
Saša is a forward observer for an anti-aircraft battery whose job is to warn the
gunners when NATO planes approach. He writes about his disappointment at the
general situation in which he and the other soldiers find themselves. His sentences
are measured, even literary, trying not to frighten his mother at his proximity to
military action, positioned in the middle with the Serbian guns behind him and
NATO’s planes in front. In one of his letters he describes visits by old women
with young children bringing hot doughnuts to the soldiers in the field. A soldier
sits a three-year-old child on the barrel of one of the loaded guns pointed at the
house where Saša is stationed. He refers to Serbia as ‘zona sumraka’ [a twilight
zone], a place where things are happening which could get your head blown off
‘tako jednostavno i smešno’ [so simply and comically]. He also refers to Serbia as a
postmodern space, but not in the sense of ‘pastiš’ [pastiche], but as a space governed
by variable points of view, multiple centres of consciousness, narrow and extended
meanings. His comment on the semantic range of what Serbia represents can be
itself interpreted to refer both to specific events of the period and to symbolic levels
of connotation and association. This is a fragmented and provisional world which
has lost its innocence, and which ‘nikakav realizam ne može više oblikovati u
idealizovanu, pastoralnu, celovitu početnu pazlu’ [no realism will be able to shape
any more in an idealized, pastoral, whole elementary puzzle].30 Saša’s digression on
literary representation is a prelude to the significant theme of how to articulate the
experience of this war in literary terms.
In his diary, Saša describes details of particular events. His sentences are shorter
than in his more literary letters and with the emphasis on the verbal elements
revealing rapid and random action. The tone of his narrative here is more frenetic
and fragmented than in his letters to home. He dwells more on the dangers he and
his comrades face with each air attack, their joy at being sent to a new site where
they have proper toilets, hiding in a rubbish container while on patrol to keep warm,
NATO’s daily attacks. They spend their time in constant anticipation of death, a
high state of anxiety in which they do all they can to avoid the threat of death
and drink copiously to numb their senses and their fear at the proximity of death.
His descriptions ref lect the traditions of describing combat in twentieth-century
war fiction and sometimes appear almost as clichés, as if taken from an anthology
of similar fictional stories about soldiers in wartime with numerous references
to underline the sameness of experience for all fighting men; for example, the
obsession with soldiers’ bodily functions in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on
the Western Front. The novel’s narrator, the German soldier Paul Bäumer, comments
on one of the rare comforts of life in the trenches during the First World War.
Survival rewards Paul and his friends with ‘double rations of sausage and bread’.31
The explanation for this sudden and unexpected largesse is really quite simple. Paul
and his friends were part of a company of a 150 men sent up the line as relief troops.
They were sent to a quiet sector from which they were all expected to come back
in a short time so full rations were drawn in readiness for their return. However,
the company was caught by heavy enemy artillery fire on their last day on duty
and only eighty returned; hence, they were treated to double rations of everything.
The narrator follows his account of how they fill their bellies with their visit to the
communal latrines.
There is a sense of gallows humour in some of Saša’s testimony about the war.
McLoughlin discusses such humour in the war zone, arguing that it is not always
the result of an absence of logic:
But the zone can equally be driven by an excess of logic. This is the excessive
logic of the military regime which, due to differences in scale between
organisational and personal needs, comes to seem to the individual soldier who
must bear the consequences of it a ruthless hyperlogic.32
The excess of logic required to maintain a military machine abounds in Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22, with the absurdities governing the regulation of the conf lict
zone. The main character in Heller’s novel, Yossarian, is a pilot who wants to be
transferred away from operational duties, to be sent home, anywhere not in the war
where he might be killed. In his attempts to appear insane in order to be relieved
from combat duty, he is interviewed by an army psychiatrist, Major Sanderson, who
comes to the devastating conclusion that Yossarian is sick, saying to him, ‘ “You
have a morbid aversion to dying. You probably resent the fact that you’re at war and
might get your head blown off any second.” ’33 However, since only a lunatic would
put himself in such a position, Yossarian’s actions are perfectly rational and he is not
relieved from combat duty. The absurdity of the hyperlogic of organized combat is
frequently underlined in Pisarev’s novel; for example, during surprise inspections
when soldiers are upbraided for their appearance, although they too might be killed
at any moment during NATO’s bombing.
There are many intertextual references in Saša’s diary to classic war novels such
as those by Heller and Remarque. One of Saša’s officers in his unit has the name
Captain Blek: his surname is not at all Serbian but it is the same name (Black) as
one of the commanders in Heller’s novel. In the last entry of his diary Saša recounts
the episode of his journey when his unit is redeployed. As he travels to their new
posting, he meets a girl on the bus who is carrying a copy of the novel All Quiet on the
Western Front: ‘Jeste da je mlada, mislim, ali je Remarka već morala prerasti, morala
bi čitati veće i ozbiljnije, vrednije knjige ali, šta to mari, nije to moj problem!’ [Yes,
she is young, I think, but she should have grown out of Remarque by now and be
reading more substantial and serious, more worthy books, but, so what, it’s not my
problem!].34 Saša’s observation on the status of Remarque’s work is striking because
it is often considered the quintessential piece of anti-war literature of the twentieth
century. It functions, however, to challenge the ability of the genre conventions and
the traditions of war fiction to articulate the experience of this conf lict.
The second narrative level set in 2020 is linked to the first level and also retains a
characteristic discursive style. The story of Ana’s arrival in the village and discovery
of the documents in the cupboard is a first step in the opening of a Gothic ghost
story with a found manuscript. The more she discovers from her neighbours about
Saša and the more she reads his letters and diaries from the cupboard, the closer
she feels to him. She is told by a neighbour how proud the boy was when he made
his own kite. But the same neighbour also tells her that the boy told a story of
how when playing with his kite it turned into a bird of prey and attacked him,
forcing him to fall into a brook. The word zmaj in Serbian may mean ‘kite’ or
‘dragon’ and is used metaphorically by the characters in Pisarev’s novel to refer to
NATO aircraft. Ana goes back in time twice to save Saša. On the first occasion,
Saša is a little boy playing with his kite in the meadow when Ana appears to him
and persuades him to go home, saving him from the kite which turns into a bird
of prey attacking him. This section may be interpreted as a symbolic reference to
the time of the impending break-up of Yugoslavia when Saša would have been a
child in the late 1980s. The second time is when she appears during his journey
to his new posting, a move which was to prove fatal for the other members of his
unit. Ana narrates this episode almost word for word as in Saša’s diary, including
the references to Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, except that it is from
her point of view. They spend the night together, according to Ana’s plan, in order
to save Saša from certain death. Her presence in both levels, first as a character in
Saša’s diary then as a narrator in the second level, draws attention to an uncanny
crossing of literary time in opposition to the otherwise realistic tone of the novel
and functions to both link and displace the two levels.
The novel’s first and second narrative levels are important for establishing the
parodic structure of the work and its central focus on the reality of the war of
1999. The documents left behind by Mira and Saša are themselves characterized
by citations of generic devices and intertextual references, only to be appropriated
again by Ana in her manuscript of events. Linda Hutcheon has described parody:
‘Parody — often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality
— is usually considered central to postmodernism both by its detractors and its
defenders.’35 The instability of semiotic structures is a topic in one of the episodes in
Ana’s narrative, drawing attention to their arbitrary nature and to the provisionality
of all attempts to produce meanings. Ana walks through the village with her
neighbour, an old lady, and they listen to the dogs barking. The bark of each dog
is graphically represented according to the countries in which their owners have
spent some time: the first dog’s bark is written as ‘wau-wau’ because its owner has
lived in Germany; the second dog makes the sound ‘gnaf-gnaf ’ because its owner
has lived in France. The sound made by the third dog is ‘bow-wow’, at which Ana
says: ‘ “Pretpostavljam da ovaj pas pripada nekom ko je dugo živeo u Engleskoj,
zar ne?” ’ [‘I suppose this dog belongs to someone who has lived for a long time in
England, is that not so?’].36 The onomatopeic representation of animal sounds varies
from language to language. A series of letters has a meaning, such that even the bark
of a dog can be decoded only according to the practices of one specific linguistic
culture. Representations and their meanings are non-transferable and provisional.
Parody, as the shift of one set of representations into another context, both reveals
the code embedded in an arbitrary semiotic system and releases the code into a new
context, challenging and disrupting the apparent stability of the processes by which
meanings are produced. Waugh formulates this productive process of parody as both
critical and creative: ‘The critical function of parody thus discovers which forms can
express which contents, and its creative function releases them for the expression of
contemporary concerns.’37 The fullness of this process in Pisarev’s novel is realized
in Waugh’s critical and creative functions and not in what is sometimes regarded as
postmodernism’s playful manner in a closed system of linguistic self-referentiality.
The parodic elements in In the Shadow of the Kite are only realized in a narrative
structure which simultaneously makes use of and undermines the conventions of
war literature to convey the experience of armed conf lict as essentially absurd.
The third narrative level is both linked to and displaces the other two levels. The
two friends interrupt Aleks’s reading and comment on the course of events from
the manuscript. Dugi is the first to interrupt, pointing out that the temporal order
of events could have a more coherent structure, and adding that they, the three
of them sitting in the bar, may too be characters in the novel since they talk and
Aleks reads the novel just as in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw; there are other
examples of stories in which a character reads a story written by another while
others listen, except that The Turn of the Screw is here fitting as it is a classic ghost
story. Aleks insists on further analysis of the points made by Dugi. Elaborating
on Dugi’s point about the temporal structure, he points out that there are three
different durations: they have spent enough time to finish three rounds of drinks,
in Ana’s story another night has gone by, and in Saša’s life many days have passed.
Regarding their likeness to situations in other literary works, Aleks begs to differ
and says of the three of them in the bar: ‘ “Ukoliko smo zaista u nekom romanu i
nas trojica, mora neko da ispriča i ovaj naš susret zahvaljujući kome saznajemo i sve
ostalo. Možda si to baš ti, kao četvrti pripovedač?” ’38 [‘If we three also are really
in a novel, someone has to relate our meeting, thanks to which we get to know
everything else. Perhaps that’s just who you are, our fourth narrator?’]. Aleks raises
the question of the identity of the overall, controlling voice, the one from which
all others derive their legitimacy.
This metafictional dimension exposes the different structural elements making
up the novel as a whole and by focusing attention on the parts displaces their
apparent order within the communicative process represented by the text of the
novel. It is parody of the highest order in which the conventions of the literary
system itself are the subject. The differences in temporal order disrupt causal
sequence and highlight the artifice of the text as a construction of narrative events.
Pisarev’s metafictional structure raises the question of the nature of the raw material
of the novel in relation to the process of its consumption; in other words, raises
the question of the relationship of the text to the narrative situation of its delivery
and production of meaning. Pisarev focuses on the position of the reader by laying
bare the functions of Aleks and the two friends listening to the story. All characters
are also readers: Saša and Mira read one another’s letters, Ana reads Saša’s diary,
Aleks reads Ana’s manuscript, Dugi and the first-person narrator introduce their
readings of literary theory. The displacement of characters among a number of roles
as writers, narrators, and readers destabilizes the separation of functions implicit
in the narrative process and repositions the reader in relation to the events of the
story. The real reader is required to enter the paradoxes of the novelistic structure
and question the relationship of these events to the historical world. When the two
friends hear Ana’s version of how she saves Saša, the two friends again interrupt the
reading and the first-person narrator thinks:
Sada smo definitivno prešli u sferu fantastike! U redu, u pitanju je tekst, gotovo
literatura — očekivao sam fikciju ali, ipak, nadao sam se da tu ima bar nešto
od istine. Želeo sam da verujem da govorimo o stvarnim likovima i stvarnim
događajima, toliko su mi postali bliski i dragi!39
[Now we have definitely passed into the sphere of the fantastic! Alright, it is a
text we have, almost literature — I expected fiction but, nevertheless, I hoped
there would be something of the truth in it. I wanted to believe that we are
talking about real people and real events, they’ve become so near and dear to
me!]
We can or want to believe the fiction is real because we understand the narrative by
recourse to the same faculties that we use in the real world. Pisarev’s undermining
of the stability of the narrated world eventually calls into question the state of its
referent, the historical world itself.
When Aleks finishes reading the manuscript to the two friends with the episode
of Saša’s suicide Dugi asks, since Ana had already gone back twice to change the
past, ‘ “zašto to nije učinila i treći put” ’ [‘why did she not do it for the third time’].40
The three finish their drinks, pick up their cigarettes, and leave the bar. They enter
the lift to go down to the ground f loor, but on the way down Aleks suddenly stops
the lift on the sixth f loor, the door opens and he steps out into a sunlit meadow
with boys f lying their kites where a young woman runs to greet him. Saša is Aleks
now returning to Ana in their ghost story, confirming the final realization of the
novel’s parodic structure. The humour in Pisarev’s novel and in other works about
the NATO bombing of 1999 evokes a silent smile, a wry mirth, the kind of quiet
laughter McLoughlin sees as characteristic for much of modern war literature:
Such laughter is the best available response to the machinic god of conf lict. As
a mode of war representation, writing has extraordinary power to depict and
to evoke this laughter and hence to make the reader feel the truth that war, or
at least some aspects of it, is beyond rational comprehension.41
There is no response to Dugi’s sad question why Ana did not save Aleks for a third
time; it is a necessary part of the narrated world. In Pisarev’s novel, NATO’s air
attack of 1999 is transformed into an uncanny tale. This is not to question that the
bombing actually happened, but that like all history it will only be available to
future generations in textual form, its narrative shape to be represented, interpreted,
and disputed. The parodic structure of this short work underlines that future
memories about the causes and events of the NATO bombing will be open to
narrative displacement, while its articulation as a ghost story ensures its place as a
figure of unresolved social violence. The elements of parody and humour combined
with NATO’s phantoms are a typical combination for novels about the bombing of
1999, in contrast to the dark atmosphere of the narrative fictions about the Wars of
Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s.
Dogs of War
Mileta Prodanović, whose novel about a monster from the Wars of Yugoslav
Succession was examined in the previous chapter, wrote a very different kind of
novel about the next conf lict. His novel, Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan (This Could
Be your Lucky Day, 2000), is centred on an uncanny motif which challenges the
limits of traditional war fiction, blurring lines between a literary fantasy and the
everyday construction of reality. The critic Vladislava Gordić Petković specifically
points to the link between the fantastic elements and representation of the historical
order in his stories: ‘Kao što su kritičari već primetili, Prodanović fantastiku koristi
da potcrta groteskno u političkom trenutku ili istorijskom poretku’ [As critics
have already observed, Prodanović uses the fantastic to underline the grotesque in
the political moment or historical order].42 He gives a long introductory chapter
to This Could Be your Lucky Day with the title: ‘Mi, Istočnoevropljani’ [We, East
Europeans] which opens thus: ‘Malo je onih na prosvećenom Zapadu koji znaju za
podatak da se ljudi u Istočnoj Evropi rađaju sa surlama i rogovima’ [There are few
in the enlightened West who are aware of the fact that people in Eastern Europe
are born with trunks and horns].43 These signs of an atavistic mentality are removed
at birth and such is the sense of shame which surrounds this physical trait that it
is never discussed and has never been properly researched. What is known is that
in those families who move to the West, these aberrations disappear with the next
generation. This is the beginning of a discussion on how East Europeans, with their
infamous inferiority complex, valorize everything from the West, and how people
in the West cannot understand their neighbours from the East. The differences
between East and West extend even to characters in literary fiction:
Na Zapadu književni likovi, baš kao i ljudi, postupaju odlučno, zbore kratko
i jasno. Reklo bi se — obeleženi su racionalnošću. Na Istoku nad stranicama
knjiga lebde monstrumi, psihički obolele ličnosti, fizičke i duhovne nakaze
koje se kreću kroz zastrašujuće ambijente. Oni neprekidno dovode ili sebe
ili svoju neposrednu okolinu u ponižavajuće situacije. Kao takvi, ti književni
likovi, povratno vrše presudni uticaj u formiranju novih naraštaja . . . To je
jedan od načina na koji se beskrajni krugovi prokletstva zatvaraju.44
[In the West literary characters, just like the people, behave resolutely, speak
concisely and clearly. It might be said — they are marked by their rationality. In
the East, monsters, psychologically sick personalities, physical and mental freaks
moving through frightening settings hover over the pages of books. They
constantly bring either themselves or their immediate world into ignominy.
These literary characters, in turn, exercise critical inf luence on the formation
of the next generations . . . That’s one of the ways in which the eternal circles
of damnation are closed.]
According to this description, the difference between literary characters playfully
ref lects stereotyped differences between the behaviour and speech of people in
the non-textual world. Even more dangerously this literature impacts on the
next generation to repeat the formation of negative behaviour and self-images.
Literature, and therefore language, is more than just a system of ref lection of a
non-literary reality, it actively constructs images of reality, preparing them for entry
into cultural memory. The chapter closes with the remark that in order to prevent
unwanted immigration of East Europeans, the West introduced visas since it is a
well-known fact that East Europeans are most afraid of draughts and regulations.
When applying to visit the West, East Europeans have to wait in lengthy queues, in
cold and unpleasant embassies, filling in a large number of forms. A visa application
to visit the West marks the beginning of Prodanović’s short novel.
The narrator of This Could Be your Lucky Day and his wife apply for a visa to
go to America. They decide to make the application for three members of the
family, and so include Milica in their application. The narrator is not hopeful about
their chances because he thinks that only those who know someone on the inside,
someone who can help them, will get a green card. When the postman brings the
letter from the Embassy, Milica is the only member of the family to receive a visa.
It is 24 March, the first day of NATO’s attack on Serbia. At this point, the narrator
introduces Milica to the reader as one of four children, born in a hut near the
Danube with the back of a broken armchair for her bed. It turns out that Milica is
the family pet, a dog. When the narrator turns to her and asks how she feels now
that she has this special piece of paper, she answers in a clear voice: ‘ “Činjenica da
sam postala deo najmoćnije, najbogatije, tehnološki najnaprednije, najodvažnije i
najpametnije nacije na svetu ispunjava me ponosom.” ’ [‘The fact that I have become
a part of the most powerful, the richest, technologically most advanced, most
important and cleverest nation in the world fills me with pride’].45 The narrator
admits to being doubly shocked that his dog has suddenly acquired the power of
speech and that she voices opinions which are so expressly pro-America, the nation
at the head of NATO’s military operations against Serbia.
Prodanović, like Josić Višnjić and Pisarev, produces a novel self-consciously
based on the traditions of critical thinking about the structure of the literary text,
the purpose of literature, and how it makes meanings. His novel with a talking
dog recalls Viktor Shklovsky’s inf luential essay, ‘Art as Technique’. In his essay, the
Russian Formalist discusses the device of defamiliarization, using the example from
narrative fiction of a short story by Tolstoy narrated by a horse. The animal observes
and offers his observations on the world of man from his equine perspective as the
horse tries to see the point of legal punishments by trying to fit them logically to
the crime committed. There seems to be no connection between one event and
another. The result is to create a distance, a textual estrangement between the
ordinary world and its representation from a highly unusual perspective; a result
already seen in this book in relation to the work of Jovan Radulović and Danilo
Kiš. Royle writes about defamiliarization in his study on the uncanny:
Russian formalism (at least as evidenced in the work of its best known
practitioner Victor Shklovsky) was impelled not by a desire to domesticate,
order and control that strange stuff called literature, but rather by a desire to
register and affirm the power of literature (especially poetry) to make strange,
to defamiliarize, to make unfamiliar all sorts of familiar perceptions and
beliefs.46
Royle considers ideas developed by Shklovsky and others to be relevant to the
uncanny in that they ‘allow us to sense in different ways the ineluctable significance
of the uncanny as a means of thinking about so-called “real life”, the ordinary, the
familiar and everyday’.47 Defamiliarization, as one of the fundamental effects of
literature, requires us to look again at the world, renewing our sense of perception,
viewing the ordinary from a different perspective. Like Freud’s unheimlich, the
defamiliarized world is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time and it draws
attention to what otherwise might appear to be a mundane or prosaic expression.
In the spirit of defamiliarization, Milica, the dog, attracts the reader’s attention to a
story about dilemmas concerning the NATO bombing campaign.
Milica not only echoes the view that the United States, as the most advanced
country in the world, represents the optimum model of modern civilization, but
she also expresses her canine opinion on the weaknesses of Serbs, saying among
other criticisms:
‘Obožavate autoritete, diktatore koji vam piju krv — vi ste istovremeno
kolektivni mazohisti i sadisti, što se čini nemogućim — ali je, opet, upravo
tako. Spremni ste da oprostite domaćim zlikovcima sve, vi čak i ne vidite
šta vama i drugima rade ti kojima se toliko divite i kojima pokušavate da se
dodvorite i kolektivno i pojedinačno.’48
[‘You worship authority, dictators who drink your blood — at the same
time you are collective masochists and sadists, which appears an impossible
combination — but it is, again, just so. You are prepared to forgive your own
evil-doers everything, you can’t even see what they, whom you admire so
much and on whom fawn individually and collectively, are doing to you and
to others.’]
When confronted with the possibility of punishment from her owner Milica does
not just comment on the type and extent of punishment as Tolstoy’s horse does, she
fights back because, as she says: ‘ “Tukao si me. Zaboravljaš da sada, kao američki
državljanin, mogu da se obratim bilo kojoj organizaciji za zaštitu prava životinja.” ’
[‘You used to beat me. You forget that now, as an American citizen, I can turn to
any organization for the protection of the rights of animals’].49 She is confident that
she will win her case, she can say that he fed her on meat spiked with razor blades,
and, as he is a Serb, no-one will believe what he says. Given the Western alliance’s
justification for launching military action, Milica adds that she can say whatever she
likes and, because he is already believed to be a murderer, he will not even have a
right of reply. Later, in response to his threats, she says, ‘ “One samo potvrđuju da
sam, ne svojom voljom, na svet došla u sredini prepunoj psihopata u koje spadate i
vi, na nesreću još uvek moje gazde.” ’ [‘They simply confirm that I, not by my own
will, came into this world surrounded by psychopaths to which group you, who
are unfortunately still my masters, also belong’].50 Milica is not intending to be a
bystander and observe the human world in all its ridiculous failings, like Tolstoy’s
horse; she will take part in it.
Milica considers studying at an American university, perhaps even for a doctorate.
In the end, she decides that she wants to become a writer, an artist of the written
word. The narrator finds it difficult to accept what Milica says and they begin to
spar. He points out that there is a real war going on, that Serbia is under attack from
the rockets of the criminal NATO alliance, that Serbia is not only defending herself
but all those countries who wish to resist the powers in Washington and their little
acolytes. He asks his former pet dog if she has not heard the saying: ‘ “Kada topovi
gruvaju, muze ćute.” ’ [‘When the cannons roar, the muses fall silent’].51 Milica
mounts a spirited defence of the contrary position, that such circumstances are
fertile ground for great art. The narrator finds her arguments compelling. But he
also objects that she cannot write; she cannot hold a pen nor use a computer with
her paws. Milica finally persuades her master to write down from her dictation into
the word processor. The discussions between dog and owner in the remainder of
the novel focus on the aesthetics of war writing and how best to portray the events
of armed conf lict. The narrator’s wife also participates in these discussions. They
consider that one advantage which Milica’s book will have is that it will be ‘prvo
delo koje bi se jasno odredilo kao pseći diskurs ili pseće pismo’ [the first work to be
clearly defined as canine discourse or canine writing]. They elaborate on this theme
mentioning that there have been books before in which a dog has been the narrator,
but this is merely a narrative trick. A book written by Milica would be something
quite different and the narrator’s wife opines that: ‘Ovo bi zaista mogao biti
pionirski proboj u oblasti životinjskog stvaranja’ [This could really be a pioneering
breakthrough in the field of animal creativity].52 They even consider whether the
book could be marketed as a subsection of feminist writing by Milica, or even as an
example of multiracial/multicultural literature, given her mixed parentage.
Having decided to be a writer, Milica next announces her intention to write
about the current war. Aside from the question of who is going to be interested,
the narrator points out that writing about such events will lead to naturalism and a
documentary style. Art, however, has to offer something more than simply giving
information. Milica retorts that her book will contain different aspects of the war in
the shape of a collage. Their discussion moves on to postmodernism and the ability
of literature to portray the truth of reality. Their dialogue rehearses some of the key
aspects of the debate over the appropriate narrative mode for the presentation of war
fiction. The narrator suggests that she write an action story involving an American
pilot whose plane is forced down. He finds himself surrounded by bloodthirsty
Serbian peasants who are about to kill him when he decides to save himself by
giving a speech about the advantages of democracy. The peasants realize their past
mistakes and evil ways and decide to commit mass suicide instead. The pilot is
saved by the arrival of a military helicopter to whisk him away. Milica rejects this
somewhat fantastic and simplistic plot, deciding that she wants to write a story which
offers multiple perspectives, something more artistic. The two main characters in
This Could Be your Lucky Day, the owner and his dog, include in their discussion
different perspectives on the war. The narrator repeats clichés from Serbian official
media sources referring to NATO as a criminal gang, that their attack is unjustified,
that they are killing innocent civilians, that Serbia is defending the civilized world
from NATO’s murderous dictates. Milica gives equally uncritical support for
the NATO operation, replying that NATO’s actions are legitimate in the face of
monstrous Serbian actions. However, their dialogue ultimately concerns the ability
of literature to represent war and becomes increasingly focused on a broader issue
about the construction of war’s reality in the twentieth century. In a way, they
ref lect on concerns similar to ones Jean Baudrillard rehearses in his polemical book
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. His argument is not that the violence of the attack
on Iraq did not happen, but that the representation of its reality was controlled by
military presentations of a highly stylized image of a war prepared for distribution
via the world’s media:
The Gulf War thus witnessed the birth of a new kind of military apparatus
which incorporates the power to control the production and circulation of
images as well as the power to direct the actions of bodies and machines. It
involved a new kind of event and a new kind of power which is at once both
real and simulacral.53
His ideas were criticized for their intellectual failure to engage critically with
the position of those military and political authorities promoting this policy. In
Prodanović’s narrative, and others depicting the events of 1999, the topic of war’s
modern simulated reality is the result of a combination of wartime technology and
the deliberate portrayal of a ‘clean’ war alongside the weight of the tradition of war
literature and film shaping the experience of a conf lict as it unfolds.
NATO’s air attack is described on many occasions in the novel as a television
show or some other form of popular entertainment. The narrator comments that
the war as prime-time entertainment is clearly evidenced by the timing of certain
types of action. During the evening, when the population is hunched over their TV
dinners, tomahawk missiles are directed against oil storage sites when the explosive
display of fire is at its most spectacular against the dark sky. At a later stage in the
conf lict, the narrator cynically comments on the visually dramatic art of war:
Vatromet je bio sjajan, ali tih. Nečujan. Oni koji su zamislili i snimili svemirsku
bajku nazvanu ‘Ratovi zvezda’ odlučili su da je prirede i za pozorište:
stroboskopski efekti, tako popularni u raznoraznim diskotekama, preselili su
se na nebo. Ceo horizont je svetlucao, izgledalo je kao da bljeskaju nekakvi
globalni blicevi, jata nevidljivih fotoreportera snimala su neku veliku i važnu
nevidljivu delegaciju koja nam je dolazila u posetu, delegaciju Neba ii možda
još pre — pakla. Kada se to završilo, cela zemlja utonula je u elementarno
stanje, u tišinu i u mrak.54
[The fireworks were wonderful, but quiet. Inaudible. Those who invented and
filmed the intergalactic fairy tale called Star Wars decided to arrange it for the
theatre: the effects of strobe lighting, so popular in all kinds of discotheques,
moved to the sky. The whole horizon was lit up, looking as if some global
f lash guns were shooting, a f lock of photo journalists were filming a large and
important invisible delegation come to visit us, delegates of the Heavens or
perhaps more likely — of hell. When it was over, the whole land sank into its
elementary state, into silence and darkness.]
These films and television shows for popular consumption of which the narrator
speaks were theatrical performances in which it was known in advance who was
on the side of good and who was on the side of evil. The staging of war plays an
important role in Prodanović’s text, revealing the intense mediation of an unfolding
conf lict, its recreation as a narrativized event for consumption by those not involved.
In war death is not all the same. War which can be fought from the sky without
danger to human life is, according to Milica, something quite different: ‘ “Neko će
reći da je smrt uvek smrt. Ali ne — digitalno ubijanje je nešto sasvim drugačije, ono
je savršeno, ne izaziva neprijatne posledice u vidu kajanja, kasnijih noćnih mora,
neplodnih etičkih preispitivanja. Ono predstavlja budućnost.” ’ [‘Someone will say
that death is always death. But no — digital killing is something quite different, it
is perfect, it does not produce unpleasant results like remorse, recurrent nightmares,
futile ethical questioning. It represents the future’].55 Prodanović’s novel plays on
the representation of war and the different meanings which a war can be made
to produce in the eyes of its spectators. As in other novels and films about this
conf lict, certain events are rehearsed more than others, confirming them as iconic
images of the conf lict: the sirens warning of an air attack, people watching Western
TV broadcasts about the latest air raids with real bombs exploding outside, the
destruction of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the rocket attack on a civilian train
described by NATO as collateral damage. Milica decides to give her book the title
Poker because, in the card game, the value of cards which you hold in your hand is
of less importance than the value which your opponent thinks you hold. It is not a
game of chance but a display of representation when all players only have a limited
view of what is being represented. By analogy, the NATO bombing is not visible as
war but as simulacra of scenarios of armed conf lict, a true theatre of war.
Prodanović’s This Could Be your Lucky Day elaborates a literary device for defami-
liarizing the world of war in 1999. The dialogue projected through the narrator and
Milica defeats expectations by presenting a multi-sided view of the language and
representation of the conf lict. At the same time, the focus of the novel’s concern is
not just with this conf lict but with the status and portrayal of war in the twentieth
century. The dog and her owner debate the moral side of modern warfare, the
ethics of new ways of creating destruction, and particularly the significance of the
sign systems generated by the war and presented to an audience whose world is
anyway saturated by visual and audio effects. As with Pisarev’s In the Shadow of the
Kite, the element of humour involving canine discourse about human conf lict has
a serious side to it, revealing a perspective on war’s circulation and reception in a
media-saturated world. Armed conf lict is no longer a narrative of heroics, exalted
purpose, and ultimate sacrifice but forms a new reality through laughter:
Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of
it an object of familiar contact, and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely
free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that fearlessness
without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.56
Bakhtin intended his comment on laughter to apply to the novel in general, but it is
particularly apt in the context of war fiction. The removal of fear allows literature
to exercise a cathartic effect and by evoking the absurd theatricality of modern
warfare to challenge the presumed aims and purposes of both sides in this conf lict
by media.
Laughter and Apocalypse

Literature which takes as its theme NATO’s air attack on Serbia in 1999 often
elicits an ambiguous combination of dread and laughter, the demonic and the
carnivalesque, each work evoking its own mixture of critical effects and semantic
levels. The novel Carigradski drum (The Byzantine Road, 2004) by Nenad Ilić (b.
1954) offers a specific series of uncanny and fantastic motifs, juxtaposing the
contemporary crisis to events from the near and distant past of Serbian history.
The main character of Ilić’s novel is a priest named Father Mihailo, who is known
to all his parishioners by the more colloquial monicker Pop Miki (pop being a
colloquial word for a ‘priest’ in Serbian). The work opens with a dual allusion:
‘Osmog dana od početka bombardovanja Srbije, otac Miahailo je posle ručka, a
pre večernje službe, namerio da se odmori’ [On the eighth day from the beginning
of the bombing of Serbia, Father Mihailo intended to rest for a while after lunch
and before the evening service].57 The priest resting on the eighth day refers to the
creation of the world as given in the Bible’s Book of Genesis with its account of
how God created the world and then, on the seventh day, rested. The mention of
the eighth day from the beginning of NATO’s air attack is significant in another
way too. Given that the first attack took place on 24 March, the action of the novel
begins on 1 April — or April Fool’s Day (Dan šale literally ‘Day of the Joke’ in
Serbian), the day on which nothing is to be taken seriously, the day on which it is
permitted to make fun of the most serious subjects, to rearrange the order of the
world. These twin allusions are important for understanding the ambiguity of the
novel placed between the gravity of what is happening, the demonic forces which
incite the serious matter of the death and destruction which war inevitably brings
in its wake, and the possibility of a teasing, parodic, laughing response which
challenges fear in the face of unavoidable catastrophe. The machinery of war goes
beyond human agency as neither side can do anything but pursue what has already
begun. Father Mihailo’s rest is disturbed by the visit of one of his neighbours who
lives in the same block and who goes by the nickname of Dear Devil (Dragi Đavo).
He has come to give the priest a box containing numerous old manuscripts which
he insists are important. The war has brought uncertain times and he is not sure
that he will survive, whereas a priest is more likely to outlive dangerous times and
keep the documents safe. The papers play an important role in the novel as the goal
which many other characters desire, mistakenly understanding the kind of value
they have. This misunderstanding is the source of much humour and comedy. They
are also important in the structure of the narrative since they contain the account
of a journey down the old road to Byzantium, nowadays Constantinople, but in the
title of the novel given in the older Serbian form as Carigrad or ‘Emperor’s Town’.
The account of this journey forms a secondary story which is revealed as the priest
reads the manuscripts, the two narrative levels slowly advancing toward one another
until they coincide.
A large cast of characters take up the chase in order to get their hands on the
manuscripts as the news leaks out that Father Mihailo has some valuable documents
in his possession. Excited by what he discovers when reading the documents,
Mihailo telephones a friend to consult with him about what to do with them. It is
the early hours of the morning and the priest’s friend is in no mood for talking about
what seem to be the ravings of a lunatic and dismisses Mihailo’s claims with the
remark that they probably refer to some kind of secret weapon. A neighbour, Zoran
Stošić (nicknamed Čombe) overhears part of the conversation through Mihailo’s
open window and completely misunderstands the nature of the documents in his
possession. Čombe is a member of a nationalist party who stays awake at nights to
gather information about the effects of NATO’s attacks on his district. Hearing
mention of a secret weapon, he concludes that the priest must be a NATO spy and
it is his duty to find out more in order to report Mihailo to his Party. This is the
beginning of a long, convoluted narrative set against the background of the NATO
campaign in 1999. Čombe manages to enter the priest’s f lat and steal some of the
documents as proof of his treachery. Unfortunately, most of the stolen documents are
mistakenly sold by Čombe’s wife as waste paper to a group of Romanies collecting
recyclable rubbish. He fails to retrieve the documents, which he is convinced are of
great value. Later, a group of Orthodox priests working at the Bishop’s library also
get to hear of some old documents which have come into Father Mihailo’s hands.
They are persuaded that the papers must be old and valuable manuscripts and want
them for themselves. They invite Mihailo to the library: ‘U tesnoj i prenatrpanoj
kancelariji uz eparhijsku biblioteku Mikija su dočekali tri bradata čoveka, pomalo
zlokobnog izgleda. Dvojica su bila u mantijama, a treći, najčetvrtastiji, đakon
Novica, bio je u kariranoj belo-zelenoj košulji, sa hozntregerima’ [In the cramped
and over-stuffed office by the Bishop’s library, Miki was met by three bearded
men with a somewhat malevolent appearance. Two of them were wearing cassocks
and the third, Deacon Novica, the stockiest of them all, was wearing a white and
green checked shirt and braces].58 The priests behave and speak in most unpriestly
ways, giving the impression more of being a criminal gang intent on making profit
for themselves than guardians of a church archive. Mihailo does not give up the
documents remaining in his possession after Čombe’s theft, but all the attention he
is receiving makes him think that he and his family are in great danger.
The novel contains numerous such events and characters creating a world ordered
according to false assumptions about the nature of the documents in Mihailo’s
possession and mistaken interpretations for why he is behaving in an unusual way.
This narrative level of the novel is based on the vastly panoramic world of the
eighteenth-century English novel made up of chance meetings, long digressions, and
events driven by mistaken opinions and identities. It is also a novel which assumes
an ironic perspective, infused with humour, on Serbian realities of the 1990s.
Another character who takes an interest in Mihailo’s manuscripts is Aca Selters.
He makes a career by working with the foreign Non-Governmental Organizations
which proliferated in Serbia during the 1990s as a professional Romany. He is not,
in fact, Romany but has a darker skin than others and can easily be mistaken for
one. His path in the novel crosses with Čombe and the priests all searching for
ways to obtain the documents given to Mihailo and he joins in the chase. The
irony characteristic of the sections of the story set during NATO’s bombing of 1999
highlights the humour in Ilić’s novel, when laughter comes close to the expression
of social defiance at the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness at the hands of a
greater enemy. Underneath such laughter, however, is the constant return to the
documents of the journey along the old road to Byzantium, which tell the story of
a different, alternative world, of the suffering brought by times of war.
The documents given by Dear Devil to Mihailo have been written at different
times and by different hands and in a language which changes but is recognizably
Serbian. They contain the record of a journey undertaken by a group of travellers
down the old imperial road connecting Belgrade to what was the centre of the
Eastern Roman Empire, the city of the Patriarch and Byzantine Emperor, then
the capital of the Ottoman Empire of which Serbia was a province for hundreds
of years. As their journey progresses, the number of travellers dwindles until there
is just one man and one woman left. The most peculiar aspect to the record is
that the entries detailing different episodes along the way appear to have been
written at very different times. The earliest recorded events take place in the
second century ad when Belgrade was a Roman fortress known as Singidunum
at the conf luence of the rivers Danube and Sava. At other points on their journey,
the travellers witness the catastrophes of the past which have marked the Serbian
national narrative: for example, refugees f leeing from Ottoman soldiers during the
great movement of population in 1691, the critical moments of the Eastern Crisis
of the 1870s, and the retreat of the Serbian army after its defeat by the Austrians
during the First World War. The travellers witness the destructive forces of history
on the land and the people. Their journey follows a logical spatial pattern down the
old road through Serbia towards Byzantium, but as Mihailo reads the manuscripts
the travellers jump backward and forward in time from one historical moment to
another. The documents suggest a great mystery and clearly hold great significance.
As Mihailo reads the accounts given on the documents he loses the distinction
between the events from history and his own day, and the border between them
becomes blurred.
Ilić constructs the story of war in general and the story of this war in particular
from the overlaps and coincidences of the two narrative levels which are, at the end
of the text, closely interconnected. Mihailo often loses himself when immersed
in the stories from previous times of conf lict. Dear Devil is killed during one of
NATO’s attacks and Mihailo is supposed to officiate at his funeral. However, he
has become so engrossed in his reading of one of the manuscripts that he forgets
the time and is late for the funeral. The events of 1999 begin to overlap in Mihailo’s
mind with events from the past. Many of the events from the past refer to the times
of Ottoman rule over Serbia and attacks by Ottoman forces on Serbs. Tired after
reading some of the documents, Mihailo goes to bed but cannot sleep as he keeps
turning over in his mind what he has read and what is happening in the reality
of 1999. He thinks: ‘ “Šta ako Turci baš noćas napadaju?” ’ [‘What if the Turks
attack this very night?’]. Then, he realizes that it is now a different war and the
Turks are not attacking: ‘ “Raketama nas tuku, ne topovima. Direktno s neba.” ’
[‘They are hitting us with missiles, not with cannon. Straight from the sky’].59 The
episodes from the past, unlike the events of 1999, are not related with any sense of
irony or parodic effect. Later in the novel, these overlaps are no longer the result
of Mihailo’s confusion brought on by mental fatigue, but are part of the textual
structure bringing the two worlds into closer proximity. On one occasion, Mihailo
has been wiping up the damage caused by a f lood in his bathroom, and when he
begins to read the next manuscript, the episode opens with a f lood on the road
in front of the travellers.60 During this same episode, just before he picks up the
manuscript to begin reading again, there is a discussion on television: ‘Na televiziji
su smračeni vojni analitičari razmatrali mogućnost kopnene invazije na Srbiju’ [On
television the dark military analysts were discussing the possibility of a land invasion
of Serbia].61 At the end of the next part of the manuscript he reads: ‘Turci dolaze!’
[The Turks are coming!].62 It is as if the reality of the discussion on television about
the possibility of a land invasion has taken place, but in a different historical time.
The tragic consequences of armed conf licts in history function as parallel events
to the reality of the NATO bombing, challenging the dominant tone of mirth and
laughter in the primary narrative.
Obsessed by the manuscripts, Mihailo cares little for the larger historical events
unfolding around him, but he eventually uncovers the secret of the travelogues.
Although the historical episodes to which they refer do not follow any chronological
order, the travellers continue their journey down the road in logical calendar time.
Mihailo is able to follow how many days they spend in particular locations and the
number of days they take to get to the next point along the old road to Byzantium.
He calculates that he can meet the remaining two travellers on their journey at
a particular point near Paraćin, a small town overlooking today’s Belgrade-Niš
motorway, on or near 25 August. He is accompanied by his wife, who is at a loss
to understand what is happening. They are in turn being followed by Aca Selters
in a white Golf VW, one of the priests in a red BMW, and Čombe who has taken
the bus to Paraćin. The priest takes up his vigil standing on a rock overlooking the
motorway. He is being watched by his pursuers and by the curious drivers passing
down the motorway who can just see an odd-looking fellow standing absolutely
still on a big stone. It is only a matter of time before an accident occurs involving a
car carrying four opposition politicians on their way to address a rally at Niš when
they hit Čombe, who has finally arrived and is trying to cross the motorway. In
the ensuing chaos, the priest disappears from his perch on the rock and is never
seen again. Father Mihailo leaves his story like Stojan Janković in Approach to Peace
and akin to the spectral Aleks stepping out the lift in In the Shadow of the Kite. As
they step out of history they become NATO’s phantoms. Their disappearances,
with a supernatural and ghostly imprint, have an important critical function as
an anticipatory ref lection on the NATO bombing as an instance of continuing
unresolved social violence. Their spectral transformation implies that the events of
the bombing of 1999 do not easily settle into known patterns of conf lict. However,
the ambiguous literary solution leaves the characters as figures waiting in the wings,
potentially to return as ghosts to reconnect interrupted histories, to repair disturbed
narratives, driven by a regenerative impulse.
Now that father Mihailo has left the novel, the last pages of the manuscript are
read by a member of the Romany family who bought the old papers from Čombe’s
wife. As he begins to read it, this final part of the account forms the last pages of
the novel. It is an account of an attack on a city carried out by an army of demonic
warriors trampling on civilization. It is written in the style of the Apocalypse and

with scenes and images reminiscent of the Book of Revelations, the last book of the
Bible. The narrator, witnessing the gruesome savagery and violence of the attack as
if the final Apocalypse, writes: ‘Ne plašim se, ali moja služba je da pišem. Teže mi je
sada da pišem. Da služim Logosu i da zabeležim poslednje ljudske reči užasa i nade
sve dok i mene ne pronađu’ [I am not afraid, but my service is to write. It is now
more difficult for me to write. I am to serve Logos and note down the last human
words of horror and hope until they discover me too].63 The narrator, whom we
guess to be Father Mihailo in another life, and like narrators of other novels about
1999, writes to preserve the memory of destructive tragedy since, in spite of all the
failings of language to recreate the truth of what happens, there is nothing else to
be done. Suddenly, the observer sees the people of the city coming together, joined
by all those who have travelled down the old road and whom the narrator has met,
and many others whom he has not met. The scene takes on the appearance of the
Day of Judgement, a turn to a regenerative impulse of life, underlined by the final
words of the manuscript, ‘Svetlost je sve jača! Kao da se otvorila zlatna kapija . . .
Dođi Gospode! Spremni smo za početak!’ [The light is getting brighter! As if the
golden gates have opened . . . Come Lord! We are ready for the beginning!].64 This
final page of the lost manuscript demonstrates again the ambiguity of uncanny
motifs in the war literature of the NATO bombing. The apocalyptic reference, with
its eschatological undertone also apparent in Josić Višnjić’s and Pisarev’s works, links
Ilić’s novel to an earlier tradition of war literature identified by Winter in his study
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
The reiteration and proliferation of apocalyptic images and metaphors in Great
War literature show how the conf lict expanded the literary space occupied by
an older set of icons carrying messages about the end of time, the collapse of
order, the final judgment.65
Reinvigorating imagery of the Apocalypse, which is ‘predicated on divine justice’,
Ilić’s novel suggests a form of redemption.66 The demonic forces of fear and
destruction are coupled with the contrary signs of a regenerative force, ghosts
signalling an end to the old narrative and the beginning of a new. Death is not only
the Freudian prelude to the uncanny, but also a celebratory moment in the cyclical
renewal of life.
The laughter in Ilić’s novel, as in Pisarev’s In the Shadow of the Kite and Prodanović’s
This Could Be your Lucky Day, is a fusion of Bakhtin’s concept of carnival humour
and Kayser’s description of the grotesque. In the medieval carnival, laughter denotes
freedom from fear as Bakhtin describes in his work on Rabelais:
This feeling is expressed in a number of characteristic medieval comic images.
We always find in them the defeat of fear presented in a droll and monstrous
form, the symbols of power and violence turned inside out, the comic images
of death and bodies gaily rent asunder. All that was terrifying becomes
grotesque.67
In Kayser’s scheme, laughter is produced on the borders of the grotesque: ‘Laughter
originates on the comic and caricatural fringe of the grotesque. Filled with bitterness,
it takes on characteristics of the mocking, cynical and ultimately satanic laughter

while turning into the grotesque.’68 The novels about 1999 are not written in the
tradition of pure carnival, nor are they written in the form of the pure grotesque.
They are stories about a particular conf lict produced in a line of war narratives
overlaid with uncanny and ghostly motifs. The demonic world, represented by
these motifs and stories of death, is never entirely conquered. The feeling of dread
at what might happen in war is present, accompanied by the fear at not being able
to overcome the terror excited by events. Laughter in these novels veers between a
regenerative liberation and grotesque cynicism directed at one’s own helplessness.
It is never completely one or the other.
A Few Concluding Remarks

Serbian literature since the death of President Tito in 1980 frequently turns to the
themes of history and war during this period of intense crisis in which one country
disappeared and others took its place along the contours of the former Yugoslavia.
These representations, rather than being treated as mimetic re-enactments of wars
and memories of wars, have been discussed in this study in relation to literary
theoretical frameworks developed outside the region. New historical fiction and
war fiction have been analysed in Western literatures and some of those models
have been adapted here in examining similar topics in Serbian literature. There
are some significant overlaps and some differences which can help in developing
these frameworks and models for other literatures. Other disciplinary fields have
been utilized in so far as they are relevant to the study of literature, particularly
from the fields of memory and trauma studies given that the language of narrative
fiction is one of the textual modes which preserves imagery in a condensed form
and replete with associated meanings taken from a broad range of other discourses.
Of particular interest in this study are the ways in which uncanny motifs, literary
devices of defamiliarization and ghosts, effect the representations of history and war
during this period of transformation. The appearance of uncanny motifs in various
guises, including grotesque and fantastic structures, is characteristic of historical
periods of great political and social change, when old beliefs and certainties are
undermined and new ways of conceiving worldly relations take shape. Serbian
literature records such an era at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the
twenty-first centuries.
Serbian literature, at the beginning of the 1980s, already had a legacy of
representing the Serbian and Yugoslav past, particularly the Second World War
and the victory of the communist-led Partisans against occupying forces and
internal enemies. Although a more liberal regime than in other East European
states emerged in Yugoslavia after 1945, literature and the other arts were utilized
as a political tool for the preservation of a cultural memory about the war,
remaining compatible with the aims of revolutionary socialism in Yugoslavia.
At the beginning of the 1980s, challenges to the official version of the past were
publicly discussed in academic publications and alternative memories of wartime
events surfaced. Literature, especially in Serbia, took part in this wave of historical
reinterpretations, but with different results from those of other discursive forms.
The literary text, not being investigative or explanatory like historiography, is
bound in a different epistemological relationship to the events portrayed. Rather
than recreate the past, fictional narratives search for the meaning of the past for
the present, sifting through unreliable evidence and variable memories, creatively
linking different historical times with myth and legend. The vastness of history and
its multiple depictions from various points of view and across different types of text
makes it a space impossible to appropriate in a single and unequivocal form. Many
writers of the 1980s assumed a role in the wave of re-evaluations spreading across
Serbian society, but the structures of their works reveal the limits and potential of
the literary text not in establishing new truths about the past, but in exploring the
construction of history and memory as narrative processes.
Ghostly shadows haunt the spaces of new historical fiction from the beginning,
standing for unresolved social violence and overtly signalling that the connection
between past and present has been ruptured. The ghosts depict the past intruding
into the present and disturbing its equilibrium, representing actions which it was
thought were settled but the effects of which refuse to stay buried. The narrative
disruption can be overcome, but any such restoration through symbolic secondary
burial only results in a partial and temporary recovery. The traces of history’s
violence are too complex and deep to be forever subdued. The ghosts are like
language itself, signifiers of other meanings, absent presences around and through
which structures of significance emerge. They are ambiguous in that they are needed
to renew the link with the unearthed past and feared for the traumatic memories
they preserve. The second function of uncanny motifs in the 1980s is to mark the
border between past and present as an uncertain and permeable zone composed
of multiple types of discourse where fact and fiction, authentic history and the
literary imagination, merge. This is the site where memories, stories, histories and
myths come together, struggling to extract meanings from the past. The border
is a spectral zone open to dreams and distorted memories. The history that hurts,
however, continues to be felt and the uncanny motif with its supernatural f licker
keeps it from cultural amnesia. The ghostly stories of the 1980s offer a far broader
range of responses to the crisis of those years than has hitherto been discussed by
scholars who have turned their attention to Serbian literary texts of the decade.
Countering the official teleological principles of Marxist ideology, writers of new
historical fiction represent history with no purpose and no possibility to legitimize
claims about the present.
The literature of the 1990s shifts emphasis from memories of a past war to
the intensity of a current conf lict during the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, with
many of the same narrative strategies found in war literature generally. There is
an emphasis on producing small rather than epic stories in order to articulate the
reality of the essential unreality and incomprehensible logic of conf lict. Some
scholars have pointed to the use made in war literature of the discourse of the
preceding war as a model for the current conf lict, at least in its early stages. This
inf luence is lacking in Serbian literature, because the literature from the previous
decade all but discredited the official narrative and myths of the Second World
War. Uncanny motifs again appear specifically evoking the sense of dread and
fear discussed by Freud as unhomeliness. The articulation of the experience of
the conf lict in Serbia focuses on the depiction of the consequences of war under
international sanctions and complete isolation. Signs of war are seen with the arrival
of refugees in Belgrade and the return of wounded and dead soldiers. The dominant
view is of public corruption, urbicide, poverty, destruction of law and order, moral
decline, an impression of the ‘dis-ease’ of a society in decline. The world seems
turned upside-down, nothing means what it once did, and systems of signification
break down. The familiar world looks the same but is now estranged. This is the
link with Freudian unhomeliness, a sense of being in and out of place at the same
time, in a place which can be suddenly transformed with monsters appearing from
beneath the street, or in a distorted space shattered by voices from the past intruding
into the present like ghosts. This kind of grotesque uncanny echoes unsettling
moments from the literature of the 1980s.
A significant semantic shift transforms the signs of the uncanny in the last phase
of literature examined in this study. On the one hand, the NATO bombing of 1999
produced a body of texts inhabited by ghosts of a more classical kind, reminiscent of
those from the beginning of the 1980s. On the other hand, these ghosts, and other
fantastic elements, not only demonstrate that the conf lict is incomprehensible, as
other conf licts, but also they reveal the utter absurdity of events. They are part of
narrative structures which provoke a quiet kind of wry laughter challenging the
official pronouncements of the contesting sides. They focus on war as a narrative or
multimedia event in which the logic of military conf lict hides behind its means of
production as a performance. Different aspects of this production are highlighted,
including the very traditions of war literature and the composition of edited images
ostensibly to inform the viewer about the course of the conf lict. This is the language
of war for a media-saturated society preparing for the future preservation of events
in cultural memory. Laughter challenges fear, while real war is replaced by a
parodic structure of the image of war in which point of view, narrative perspective,
and descriptions of time and place are manipulated to produce distorted meanings.
Characters from novels about the bombing of 1999 leave the historical stage with
eschatological undertones and apocalyptic imagery, suggesting a potential form
of redemption from the symbolic world of cultural haunting. Ghosts are feared
because they represent death, and desired because they offer to reconnect disturbed
narratives. They suggest the action of demonic powers, while they may also be
evoked to subdue demonic powers. The ambivalence of haunting runs through the
representations of history and war in Serbian literature during this whole period,
which is critically overburdened by moments of terrifying transition and of worlds
falling apart, creating gaps through which ghosts slip into the realm of the living.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. ‘Press Statement by Dr Javier Solana, Secretary-General of NATO, 23 March 1999’, in Kosovo:
The Politics of Delusion, ed. by Michael Waller, Kiril Drezov, and Bülent Gökay (London: Frank
Cass, 2001), pp. 162–63.
2. Mladjan Dinkic, ed., Final Account. Economic Consequences of NATO Bombing: Estimate of the
Damage and Finances Required for the Economic Reconstruction of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Stubovi
kulture, 1999), p. 5.
3. Ibid., p. 6.
4. Kyril Drezov and Bülent Gökay, ‘Bombing Yugoslavia: It Is Simply the Wrong Thing to Do’,
in Kosovo, ed. by Waller, Drezov, and Gökay, pp. 79–82 (p. 79).
5. Matthew Wyman, ‘Kosovo: Why Intervention was Right’, in Kosovo, ed. by Waller, Drezov, and
Gökay, pp. 104–10 (p. 104).
6. Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 229.
7. Ibid., p. 256.
8. Miroslav Josić Višnjić, Ratna pošta (proleće 99, e-mail) (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 2003), p. 108.
9. Miroslav Josić Višnjić, Pristup u počinak (ljubavna pošta) (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1999), p. 13.
10. Ibid.
11. Clive Bloom, ‘Introduction: The Spy Thriller: A Genre Under Cover’, in Spy Thrillers: from
Buchan to le Carré, ed. by Clive Bloom (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1–11 (p. 1).
12. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Routledge,
1988), p. 79.
13. Josić Višnjić, Pristup u počinak, p. 298.
14. Vladislava Ribnikar, ‘Pamćenje i “ljudska topografija” ’, in Zbornik radova o delu Miroslava Josića
Višnjića: Trideset godina, pola veka, ed. by Jovan Zivlak (Belgrade: Draganić, 1996), pp. 21–31 (p.
22).
16. Ibid., pp. 283–84.
17. Miroslav Josić Višnjić, Svetovno trojstvo (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1996), p. 184.
19. Ibid., p. 302.
20. Ibid., p. 9 and p. 305.
21. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford
22. Miroslav Josić Višnjić, ‘Pisanje je kao disanje’, in Đerdan od divana: razgovori (Belgrade: Narodna
knjiga, 2005), pp. 246–50 (p. 247).
23. St John 1.1–3.
24. Đorđe Pisarev, Pod senkom zmaja (Novi Sad: Stylos, 2001), p. 9.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 15.
27. Ibid., p. 22.
28. Ibid., p. 35.
29. Ibid., p. 46.
30. Ibid., p. 41.
31. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. by Brian Murdoch (London: Folio
Society, 2010), p. 5.
33. Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 384.
34. Pisarev, Pod senkom zmaja, p. 89.
35. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 93.
36. Pisarev, Pod senkom zmaja, p. 25.
37. Waugh, Metafiction, p. 69.
38. Ibid., p. 78.
39. Pisarev, Pod senkom zmaja, p. 96
40. Ibid., p. 109.

42. Vladislava Gordić Petković, ‘Žanrovske granice pripovetke: Isaković i Prodanović’, in Mistika i
mehanika (Belgrade: Stubovi kulture, 2010), pp. 121–30 (p. 127).
43. Mileta Prodanović, Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan (kolateralna knjiga opšte nekorektnosti) (Belgrade:
Stubovi kulture, 2000), p. 5.
44. Ibid., p. 17.
45. Ibid., p. 34.
46. Royle, The Uncanny, pp. 4–5.
47. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
48. Prodanović, Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan, p. 34.
49. Ibid., p. 100.
50. Ibid., p. 165.
51. Ibid., p. 97.
52. Ibid., p. 101.
53. Paul Patton, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. and
intro. by Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 1–21 (pp. 5–6).
54. Prodanović, Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan, pp. 130–31.
55. Ibid., pp. 121–22.
56. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel’, in The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 3–40 (p. 23).
57. Nenad Ilić, Carigradski drum (Belgrade: Plato, 2004), p. 7.
58. Ibid., p. 248.
59. Ibid., pp. 85–86.
60. Ibid., pp. 229–34.
61. Ibid., p. 233.
62. Ibid., p. 247.
63. Ibid., p. 494.
64. Ibid., p. 495.
65. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, p. 203.
66. Ibid.
67. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana
68. Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, p. 187.
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INDEX
❖
Abercrombie, Nicholas 122, 125 in Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan 165, 168
Agitprop 5, 7, 13–14 and uncanny 164, 165
Albahari, David, Bait 128–31 Delić, Jovan 66, 71
Andrić, Ivo 7–8 Del Villano, Bianca 33, 61
Apocalypse 169, 173 demons 34, 45, 83
apocalyptic 79, 80, 142, 173, 176 demonic 32, 64, 169, 172, 173, 174, 176
Arkan, see Ražnatović, Željko demonize 43
Armitt, Lucie 125 Denich, Bette 21, 62 n. 6
‘dis-ease’ 125, 143, 176 Deretić, Jovan 19 n. 24
Arsenijević, Vladimir 143 Dinkić, Mlađan 115 n. 14, 147
U potpalublju 120–26 Djilas, Milovan 5, 7
Association of Writers of Serbia 7, 17 Djokić, Dejan 18 n. 9, 21
document in literature 67, 71, 97
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 168, 173 in Bezdno 103–04
Banac, Ivo 20, 26 in Carigradski drum 169, 170, 171
Barker, Pat 30 in ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’ 68, 70, 71
Barth, John 27–28 in Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan 166
Baudrillard, Jean 167 in Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku 131, 133,
Bergland, Renée L. 33–34, 38 134, 135, 136, 140, 142, 143
Bloom, Clive 88 n. 37, 150 in Pod senkom zmaja 157, 159, 160
Bond, James 137–38 in Pristup u počinak 149, 151
Borges, Jorge Luis 27–28 in Ubistvo s predumišljajem 108, 109, 110, 111
Bosiljčić, Bojan 99–100 Doknić, Branka 11
Brajović, Tihomir 25, 28, 52, 132 Doležel, Lubomír 26
Bratić, Radoslav 11, 65, 85, 87, 100 Dragović-Soso, Jasna 22, 23–24, 62 n. 6
‘Priča o događaju koji se nije zbio’ 127 Drašković, Vuk 22, 135
Slika bez oca 78–84 Džadžić, Petar 48
Brogan, Kathleen 34, 39, 45, 61
Broz, Josip (Tito) 4, 5, 13, 15, 16, 17, 22, 25, 39, 47, 68, Eco, Umberto 27–28, 137
79, 81, 133, 174 Eekman, Thomas 9–10
Elias, Amy J. 28, 29–30, 78, 85, 87, 118
Calvino, Italo 27–28 historical fiction and myth 77, 83
catharsis: metahistorical romance 30, 35, 65, 84
cathartic effect 45, 168 Erll, Astrid 19 n. 23, 89 n. 80
cathartic relief 96
censorship 13, 14, 15, 16–18, 59 the fantastic 3, 39, 60, 174
Cooper, James Fenimore 92 and Armitt 125
Coover, Robert 27–28 in Carigradski drum 169
Ćopić, Branko 10 in Golubnjača 43
Ćosić, Dobrica 12, 22 and history 163
Daleko je sunce 10–11 and Jackson 32–33, 118, 131
Crane, Stephen 92 in Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa 106
in Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan 166
Davičo, Oskar 10 in Pod senkom zmaja 155, 162
DeCuir, Greg 12–13 in Sudbina i komentari 105
defamiliarization 41, 64, 84, 174 in war literature 148–49, 176
and Freud 118 Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub 43–44, 89 n. 57
in Golubnjača 41, 44 Flaker, Aleksandar 7
and Kiš 67 Foster, Kevin 108
Index 187
Freud, Sigmund: historical novel 22, 24–25, 60, 86–87, 97, 105, 107, 114
the uncanny 64, 65, 117, 173 literature of new memory 25, 28, 32
unhomeliness 118, 176 new historical fiction 2, 3, 28–31, 46, 52, 53, 66, 77,
Fussell, Paul 93, 107, 108 102, 103, 108, 155, 174, 175
new language of historical fiction 18, 32
gaps in history 2, 21, 26 and sublime 3, 35, 65, 77, 83, 85
gaps in literature 26, 61, 84, 112, 114, 141, 176 historical narrative and literature 25–27
ghosts 1–2, 3, 21, 28, 32, 33–34, 35, 39, 61, 64, 65, 91, historical research and literature 24
117, 152, 174, 176 historiography 18, 20–22, 60, 66, 175
in Bezdno 102, 103 Hoepken, Wolfgang 20–21
in Carigradski drum 172, 173 Hogan, Sean 144 n. 7
in Dorćol 52–59 Holton, Robert 28, 65
in ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’ 68 Hutcheon, Linda 28, 30
ghost stories 38, 39, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68 historical fiction and myth 77, 83
in Golubnjača 39–46, 59 historiographic metafiction 28–29, 31, 84, 105
and history 85, 86, 87, 99 parody 160
in Mamac 129, 131, 142 postmodern historical fiction 28, 29, 114
in Pismo/glava 46–52, 60, 108 Huyssen, Andreas 45
in Pod senkom zmaja 155, 159, 161, 162
in Pristup u počinak 154, 155 Ilić, Dejan 72
in ‘Silsila’ 107 Ilić, Nenad, Carigradski drum 169–74
in Slika bez oca 81, 82, 83, 84 Ilić, Saša 106
in Tren 2: 74 Iordanova, Dina 145 nn. 64 & 65
and unresolved social violence 38 46, 57, 61, 141, Isaković, Antonije 65, 85
162, 175 Paprat i vatra 72
and war literature 114, 118, 124, 141, 143, 148, 174 Prazni bregovi 72
Goli Otok 4, 15, 49, 51, 60, 72–73, 74, 75, 76, 149 Tren 1: 72
Gordić Petković, Vladislava 163 Tren 2: 72–77, 78
Gordon, Avery F. 33, 35, 46 Velika deca 72
Gorjup, Branko 66
Gorup, Radmila 47 Jackson, Rosemary 32–33, 118, 131
Goulding, Daniel J. 19 n. 27 Jameson, Frederic 65, 66
the grotesque 2, 35, 39, 46, 64, 70, 97, 143, 174, 176 Jelavich, Barbara 18 n. 3, 19 n. 11
and Kayser 32-33, 118, 173-74 Jeremić, Ljubiša 46, 62 nn. 13 & 30
in Mamac 130 Josić Višnjić, Miroslav 11
in Pismo/glava 48 Lepa Jelena 16
in Slika bez oca 82 Odbrana i propast Bodroga u sedam burnih godišnjih
Gruenwald, Oskar 47 doba 149
‘Pisanje je kao disanje’ 154–55
Hadžić, Goran 140–41 ‘Priča o žurki’ 101
haunting 1–3, 28, 64, 65, 141, 149 Pristup u kap i seme 149, 152–53
cultural h. 34, 39, 45, 59, 61, 176 Pristup u počinak 149–55, 164, 173
in Dorćol 52, 54, 57 Pristup u svetlost 16, 149
in ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’ 68, 70, 72 Ratna pošta 149–50
in Golubnjača 44, 45, 59 Svetovno trojstvo 149, 150, 153
in Lagum 86 Jovanović, Nebojša 100
in Pismo/glava 49 Judah, Tim 62 n. 32, 98–99, 177 nn. 6 & 7
in Tren 2: 76
and unresolved social violence 33, 34, 35, 87, 175 Kardelj, Edvard 8, 15
in U potpalublju 142 Kayser, Wolfgang 32–33, 118, 173–74
Hayden, Robert M. 21 Kermode, Frank 154
Heller, Joseph 101–02, 159 Kiš, Danilo 11, 65, 66
historical fiction 1, 20, 26, 27, 34 Bašta pepeo 11–12
border history and literature 31, 70 ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’ 67–72, 78, 85, 103, 164
border past and present 35, 65, 83, 87, 103, 118, 141, on literature 12, 66–67, 71
152, 171, 175 Knežević, Aleksandar and Vojislav Tufegdžić 134–35,
historical knowledge 28, 58, 83–84, 85 142
188 Index
Kovač, Mirko 11 postmodern(ism) 25, 27–30, 66, 70, 71, 105, 106, 114,
Krleža, Miroslav 8–9, 14, 17 128, 139, 155, 158, 160–61, 166
Krstić, Jovana 100 Price, David W. 28, 30, 87
prison literature 47
Lane, Richard J. 28, 30 Prodanović, Mileta 131–32
Lasić, Stanko 8 ‘Moj teča Bond, Džejms Bond’ 137
Lehan, Richard 144 n. 15 Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan 163–68, 173
Lilly, Carol S. 18 n. 5 Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku 132–41, 142,
Lukić, Sveta 15 143
‘Silsila’ 107
Marčetić, Adrijana 71, 105 Stariji i lepši Beograd 135–36
McLoughlin, Kate 93, 96, 118, 139–40, 159, 162 Pupovac, Milorad 59
Mićić Dimovska, Milica, Poslednji zanosi MSS 104, 115 Pynchon, Thomas 27–28
n. 27
Middleton, Peter and Tim Woods 85, 89 nn. 76 & 78 Radulović, Jovan 59
Mihailović, Dragoslav 11 Golubnjača 39–46, 60, 65, 100, 164
Kad su cvetale tikve 14–15, 72, 133 stage adaptation Golubnjača 59
and Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku 138–39, Zrna iz pleve 59
143 Ramet, Sabrina Petra 22, 23, 24, 62 n. 6, 66
Miller, Nick 9 Ražnatović, Željko (Arkan) 135-36, 140
Milošević, Slobodan 60, 98, 99, 132, 147, 148 Remarque, Erich Maria 101–02, 158, 159, 160
Milutinović, Zoran 4, 14, 129 Ribnikar, Vladislava 76, 128, 152
Misztal, Barbara M. 62 nn. 3 & 4 Royle, Nicholas 64, 70, 125, 164–65
Monleón, José B. 32 Rushdie, Salman 31
Morrison, Toni 31
Beloved 34, 65 Savić, Milisav 11
myth 31, 76, 77, 78, 80–83, 85, 87, 136, 148, 149, Scarry, Elaine 93–94, 139
151–52, 175 Scott, Walter 24, 92
CPY/LCY and m. 10, 20, 27, 134, 139, 143 secondary burial 39, 45, 52, 57, 59, 175
mythic structure and war 1, 94–95, 108, 142 Selenić, Slobodan 46, 60, 87
Partisan m. 12–13, 100, 108, 112, 175 ‘History and Politics as a Fate’ 25–26, 60
state’s founding m. 2, 17, 18, 24, 35, 133 Iskorak u stvarnost 60
Memoari Pere Bogalja 46
Nairne, Sandy 148 nn. 83 & 84 Očevi i oci 113–14
NATO, conflict with 1, 2, 3, 33, 56, 91, 147–49, 176 Pismo/glava 46–52, 60, 61, 65
in Carigradski drum 169–74 Ubistvo s predumišljajem 108–15, 119
in Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa 106 Shklovsky, Viktor 41, 164–65
in Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan 163–68 Singleton, Fred 4, 13, 133
in Pod senkom zmaja 155, 156–62 soap opera 121–22, 123, 125, 126, 143
in Pristup u počinak 149–50, 151, 153–54 Socialist Realism 5, 7–8, 9, 57
Norris, Margot 97, 118 Stalin 4, 7, 15, 46, 51, 66, 69, 72, 79, 81, 132, 133, 138,
Novaković, Aleksandar 19 n. 35 153
Stendhal 92
Palavestra, Predrag 24–25, 113–14 Stevanović, Vidosav 11, 89 n. 38
Pantić, Mihajlo 66, 106–07 Strajnić, Nikola 131–32
parody 31, 132, 160–61, 162, 169, 171, 176 the supernatural 39, 64, 70
Pavlović, Živojin 100–01 and Freud 117
Pavlowitch, Stefan K. 133 and history 71–72, 175
Pekić, Borislav 11 in Pod senkom zmaja 157
Peković, Ratko 18 n. 6, 19 nn. 18 & 20 in Pristup u počinak 154
and Slobodan Kljakić 19 nn. 13 & 17 in war literature 118, 172
Petković, Radoslav 104 Swift, Graham 30
Petrović, Goran 105–07
Petrović, Nenad 99 Tatarenko, Ala 27–28, 29
Piette, Adam 95–96, 118, 126 Taylor, Mark 36 n. 14
Pisarev, Ðorđe 155–62, 164, 168, 173 Thomas, Robert 21–22, 47, 145 n. 61
Popović, Danko 22, 23, 87 thriller genres 99, 114, 150–51, 154
Index 189
Tito, see Broz, Josip Vidler, Anthony 118

Todorov, Tzvetan 64 Vonnegut, Kurt 95
Todorović, Predrag 14 Vučetić, Radina 19 n. 29
Tolstoy 24, 92, 164, 165
trauma 1, 3, 31, 38, 84, 85, 91, 118, 141, 174, 175 Wachtel, Andrew Baruch 23, 24
in Beloved 34, 65 war fiction 91, 96, 100, 115, 127, 141, 143, 166, 168
in Bezdno 102 as record of events in war 96, 114, 130, 131, 140
in Golubnjača 39, 42, 44, 45 carnival(esque) in w.f. 143, 169, 173, 174
in Pismo/glava 52 expressing private stories of war 95–96, 115, 119,
in Pristup u počinak 154 127, 148
in Slika bez oca 83 expressing unreality of war 97, 118, 132, 140, 142,
in Tren 2: 72, 77 143, 148, 175
Tumarkin, Maria 42 humour in w.f. 157–58, 159, 162, 168, 169, 170, 173
icons of war in w.f. 95, 119, 139, 148, 153, 168, 173
the uncanny 2, 3, 32, 33, 35, 39, 60, 64, 65, 91, 97, 141, new language of w. f. 92–93, 100, 126, 141, 142,
165, 174, 176 143, 148
in Bezdno 102 traditions of w. f. 1, 92, 95, 101, 108, 114, 141–42,
in Carigradski drum 169, 173 148, 158–59, 163, 167, 173, 176
in ‘Enciklopedija mrtvih’ 67, 68, 70, 71 victimhood in w.f. 22–23
and Freud 64, 65, 117–18, 173 war as performance in w.f. 167–68, 176
and history 72, 84, 85 war film 23, 92, 167, 168
in Lagum 86 Partisan w.f. 12–13, 26, 111–12
in Mamac 128, 129, 131 Wars of Yugoslav Succession 1, 2, 3, 33, 87, 95, 97–99,
in Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa 106 148
in Ovo bi mogao biti Vaš srećan dan 163 criminal activity in 99, 119, 132, 134–36, 138, 139,
in Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku 140 140–41, 142
in Pod senkom zmaja 155, 156, 160, 162 in Mamac 128
in Pristup u počinak 151, 152, 154, 155 in Opsada crkve Svetog Spasa 105, 106
in Slika bez oca 81 in Pleši, čudovište, na moju nežnu muziku 140–41
in Sudbina i komentari 105 in Poslednji zanosi MSS 104
in Tren 2: 77 in ‘Priča o događaju koji se nije zbio’ 127
in U potpalublju 125, 126 in Pristup u počinak 150, 151
in war literature 115, 118, 124, 126, 127, 142, 143, in Serbian literature 96, 99, 108, 114–15, 131, 143, 175
148, 174 studies on 21, 97
unhomeliness 118, 143, 176 in Ubistvo s predumišljajem 109
in Ovo bi mogao Vaš srećan dan 165 see also urbicide
in U potpalublju 122, 125, 126 Waugh, Patricia 150–51, 160–61
unresolved social violence 91, 155, 172 The White Book 16–18, 47, 73
see also ghosts, haunting Williams, David 36 n. 13
urbicide 121, 126, 142, 176 Williams, Raymond 144 n. 16
Utješanović, Ljubiša 100 Williamson, Henry 101–02
Winter, Jay 118, 173
Velmar-Janković, Svetlana 16, 87 Winterson, Jeanette 31
Bezdno 102–04 Woodward, Susan L. 21–22, 145 nn. 57 & 62
Dorćol 52–59, 60, 61, 65
Lagum 85–86 Zogović, Radovan 5–6, 7, 17
Vickery, John B. 83 Žunić, Dragan 36 nn. 15 & 16, 116 nn. 39 & 40

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Haunted Serbia

Representations of History and War

The Modern Humanities Research Association (mhra ) encourages and promotes

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

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ISBN 978-1-909662-65-0 (hbk)

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© Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2016

Printed in Great Britain

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Copy-Editor: Nigel Hope

d.a.n., Nottingham, November 2015

Establishing the Function of Literature, 1944–1952

in social criticism, saying, ‘Posve je prirodno da je književnost u zemlji ostvarenog

Same Policy, Different Methods, 1952–1984

to a variety of interested parties including the Association of Writers of Serbia. The

Historical Fiction, Haunted Fiction

Literature and the Challenge to Yugoslavia’s Socialist Narrative

‘Današnja pojava srpskog istorijskog romana zato je prvenstveno kritička i

Novels also rely on an internal logic of plot development or symbolic function,

Why Haunted Serbia?

Pynchon, among others.29 Literature continued in this direction by articulating the

by the immediacy of a child’s unquestioning point of view on events as they unfold

[the severity of a hungry, meagre, everyday life burdened by illusions].13Lukica’s

ljuljalo od talasa podzemnog Dunava koji je proticao, nadohvat ukočene Jevremove

Velmar-Janković’s short stories are structured like Dositej’s journeys, trying to

The Politics of Haunting

39. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

camps speaks of the fallacy in understanding history as development, of the fallacy

bližnje nego, u prvom redu, svoju sopstvenu zaboravljenu prošlost. Ovaj će

problematizes our comprehension of the information: ‘Excluded from history

Čabrilović, Čabrinović, or Čubrilović. He is frequently subjected to the tortures of

84. Elias, Sublime Desire, p. 117.

In the Shadow of War

Writing War Literature

Piette describes two contradictory responses to the challenge of narrating war: on

a risky and unpredictable undertaking regardless of the narrative mode used.

Serbian War Fiction

Past and Present Conf licts

narrator recognizes it as the writing of Anastas Jovanović, which she verifies by

The Second World War and New War Fiction

i oci Selenić je u roman Ubistvo s predumišljajem gotovo doslovno preneo sliku

29. Marčetić, Istorija i priča, pp. 58–59.

Making War Real

War’s Small Stories

describes the dominant line in twentieth-century Serbian literature with literary

with tragic or tragicomic tones:

to uncanny images and events in order to articulate the unhomeliness identified by

Making Narrative Order

is not matched by the narrator’s inability to respond to the present. He is simply

making, in an oxymoronic manner, a new reality].51 Tihomir Brajović, noting the

the character is underpinned by intertextual references to other narratives linking

poklapanje, ali ne mogu da kažem da mi nije milo. Tako su me zvali i u ratu,

‘Oko devedeset odsto likvidatora Služba regrutuje iz redova kriminalaca.

in war writing: ‘Likeness of experience has itself become a trope: a complex

tokom devedesetih. Utvrđeno je i da je slika plaćena novcem od šverca nafte,

New Language of New War Fiction

40. Albahari, Mamac, p. 5; Bait, p. 3.