Dubravka Ugrešić: A Belated In Memoriam
The Wanderer, Witch and Witness to the Multicultural Epoch
“The culture of lies is most easily established if we have an opponent who lies more than we do, or who speaks the ancient palindromic language, ‘the devil’s verse,’ the one that is read the same backwards and forwards, from left to right. And the weary postmodern outside world, to which the nations doggedly direct ‘their truths,’ tries reluctantly and with difficulty to set up coordinates: both sides lie equally; or one side lies more, the other less; or one side lies, the other tells the truth…It is only the dead who do not lie, but they have no credibility.” - The Culture of Lies
Dear subscribers,
This post has become quite the monster, even by my standards! Thankfully I discovered Substack dividers now: about time, I know. So this essay can be digested more easily in bits. If anyone is pressed for time and wants to skip ahead and read what’s most interesting to them, the three sections as as follows: 1) my response to The Culture of Lies; 2) thoughts on writers and war; and 3) the artistry of Dubravka Ugrešić. I think number three is most interesting in terms of utility.
With that out of the way: enjoy! And if you’re reading this by email, I suggest you open this post on Substack in case this essay really is too long for the body of an email.
Almost exactly a year ago, on St. Patrick’s Day in fact - a month after I started Timeless - the literary world was quietly beset by the loss of Dubravka Ugrešić. The first of several great literary losses that year, as longtime subscribers to Timeless are aware. But unlike Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy, her fellow literary “diers,” (?) her death went virtually unnoticed. I didn’t learn about it until eight months later. While the fake news era doesn’t exactly compel me to comb through the media as thoroughly as I used to, I was annoyed I’d missed that date.
It seems the time has come to prepare for the marginalization of literary death. That, or we need to reconsider Yukio Mishima as a role model not only literarily, but in terms of going out with a bang. (Or should I say: a slice?) But until we writers can derive less painful ways of bowing out dramatically, I wanted to make up for letting Ugrešić’s death slip by unnoticed, just as I did last year with another important author I like: Tomás Mac Síomóin.1 (Who you all should go check out!) So sit back and enjoy a bit of popcorn as I reflect upon my experience with this author and why she is important. Because she is.
Aged 73 at the time of passing, Ugrešić was both well-known and unknown. Well-read Europeans knew of her as a talented contemporary author and especially as an essayist. Universities were well acquainted with Ugrešić due to her earlier career as a scholar and because there’s a demographic of literary authors only they know about. And naturally, she is known and read in her ex-Croatian homeland. It is through that connection that I came to know of her, and have known of her, for some time. There are a few other angles as well. But she never became a household name. An unsurprising development, perhaps, but also a pity.
Unluckily for me, the Croatian angle happens to be the most complicated. My first Ugrešić read was The Culture of Lies, a 1996 compilation of a series of essays originally published between 1991 and 1994. It was the first book related to Croatia I stumbled upon, courtesy of the free bookshelf at my university in Paris.
I came away simultaneously impressed in the same way one does after reading Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, for it belongs on the same shelf as that influential book. I also came away with a very sour taste in my mouth for her deciding that Croatia’s most existential moment was a great time to try and utilize her theory to attack the basic foundations of Croatian identity. An action that suggested not only selfishness but a huge lack of historical self-awareness. This at a time when I had just begun to seek out books to educate myself on that part of my heritage.
I will explain in a different segment of this post why I’m more than happy to not condemn gnarly Croatian nationalists for giving “the witch” a hard time. (And no, it’s not because she’s a woman) Though if they did burn her books as one news article claimed then I definitely disavow. I merely reject the ideologically-tinged premise that this was a saints and sinners scenario involving an innocent little lamb and a horde of hungry wolves. The Balkan conflict was one of wolves alone, and there are both male and female wolves.
In any case, the sour taste didn’t go away. I had one of either two choices: let it percolate in the part of my mind where the name Dubravka Ugrešić materializes, or the same but in the part of my mind where the love of heritage dwells. The choice was easy.
Best not to dwell too much on the negative, however. This is, after all, my problem and not one that will concern any of you as you read this book. Despite the circumstances of its creation, The Culture of Lies is very important for our time. More important than my little hangup. One need not think too much of Croatia while reading the most thematic essays: in fact, it would almost be escapism to do so in this dystopian time.
It is difficult to choose a leading theme in any one Ugrešić collection. But a major theme in this one is memory and its erasure. Lots of such erasure took place in the 90s when the populations of the region were curious about the Western culture they’d missed and could no longer care about the memories of the Communist era. Ugrešić is not the only one to have written about this, although those who did in the 90s were few and far between since it wasn’t popular to “salvage” what the Communist cultures had given each respective country.2 The motive in the Balkans was the hasty need to move on from Yugoslavia not only in Croatia but the rest of the ex-Yugoslav countries. It became especially easy once conflict broke out. The heroes of yesterday - like Gavrilo Princip among the Serbs and Bosnians - were forgotten. Yugoslavs “reverted” back to being Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, etc. Even the languages were purged of words with etymological roots in the language of the enemy.
To those there at the time, it must have felt like a form of amnesia: and in procedural social practice, it probably was. In retrospect, I think it was perfectly logical for a resurgent country to rediscover itself at the short-term expense of the recent past; in fact, it is better to discover oneself than adulate a foreign country with wide eyes and not know why, as has been a constant elsewhere in the region. It is not as strange as international observers found it to be, historically speaking. It just hasn’t happened all that often in recent history and the shifting of the status quo is always jarring.
To compare, let’s look at the Czechs. Even though the Czechs in 1918 had every right to gain their independence after the near-genocidal attempt to liquidate their culture following the Battle of Bila Hora in 1620, a lot of German-biased scholarship in English treats the Czech Revival in the 19th century like such a bad thing; those upstart, foolish Czechs were being all bad and nationalistic and saving their language while the poor, innocent Germans who would never hurt flies watched on in fear.
When the Czechs did gain their independence they, too, threw off the yoke of their previous overlords and reasserted their culture as was their right. At that time, no prominent intellectual in Czechoslovakia (that I’m aware of) felt the need to lament the absence of Maria Theresa statues in the squares or Franz Josef portraits in the pubs. The Czechs were independent, and now it was time to have long-postponed discussions about Czech affairs that had been suppressed for centuries. The Croatian situation isn’t that different: it just happened more recently and in a more martial context. And - most of all - it took place as a refutation of Communism. Ergo, the belief among Croats back then that Ugrešić was a Communist sympathizer.
Ugrešić, as one with Yugo-nostalgia, was sad about the country she no longer had. But in her criticism of the erasure of the Yugoslav portion of memory, Ugrešić made an important discovery that would come to define the post-1989 era, even if she didn’t exactly phrase it that way: the role of historical segmentation that accompanies national segmentation. Basically, she put her finger on what is happening right now with 1776 America and 1619 America.
When I phrase the process of national reassertion on the part of Croatians as I do, I am not just trying to be nice on behalf of Croatians: had Croatia broken away from an enduring Austria-Hungary or Ottoman Empire the exact same process of cultural and national reassertion would have happened as with Yugoslavia, sans the inter-ethnic violence. While I hesitate to reach this conclusion due to her having been very intelligent - and don’t see how she could have been ignorant of such a worldview for so long, unless she lived in an ivory tower in Zagreb - Ugrešić appears to have been completely oblivious to a “Croatian” point of view in these matters. This isn’t an intelligence-based criticism, however: she was a Yugoslav and that was her perspective. And from the Communist intellectual Yugoslav perspective, she could not comprehend that the non-Croatian elements of historical memory and culture she saw as going through an erasure process had nothing to do with the Croatia of King Tomislav, Marko Marulić, the Zrinskis and Frankopans, Josip Juraj Strossmayer and Ban Jelačić that had existed long before the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
This is exactly what we see with the severance of 1776 and 1619. The former’s most formative moment was the signing of the Declaration of Independence: the latter was the first slave shipment that arrived in Virginia in 1619. The philosophy of freedom innovated by the Founding Fathers is a fundamental cornerstone of 1776. The slave experience, in contrast, is a fundamental part of 1619; neither extreme can come anywhere close to being reconciled with the other, not unlike how the Croats and Serbs remain unable to overcome their current hatred; although oblivious Americans have made several attempts to storm the Isonzo River Valley with the same results.
1776 celebrates Thanksgiving, Columbus Day and the 4th of July. 1619 celebrates Black History Month, Indigenous People’s Day and Juneteenth. In the eyes of the latter, Thanksgiving is a commemoration of genocide (even though it objectively is not), Columbus Day commemorates a so-called “genocidal maniac,” (I believe those who say this uncritically. Don’t you? 😅) and the 4th of July is a “glorification of white supremacy.” The 1619 celebrations, excepting Juneteenth, are reactionary.
The heroes of 1776 are Founding Fathers, patriots, pioneers, explorers, abolitionists, military heroes, politicians, certain writers and philanthropic businessmen. The heroes of 1619 are slaves, slave revolt leaders like Nat Turner, underground railroad conductors sans the other abolitionists, Communists (due to a merging at some point in history with American Marxist thought), Black victims of police brutality like St. George Floyd and, most of all, activists. The 1619 canon does NOT include Martin Luther King Jr. As one who made peace with “the enemy,” he is not a hero to 1619. That honor would go to Malcolm X, who was not a Christian (meaning he didn’t worship “the White man’s religion”) and was militaristic.3
For those with the 1619 mindset, the Declaration of Independence means absolutely nothing. Nothing that 1776 cherishes means anything to 1619: at most, everything that symbolizes 1776 is a symbol of oppression. This became especially true once Marxist ideas were grafted onto the Black intellectual tradition like ticks onto the skin. (Most people don’t know how the Maoist W.E.B. DuBois singlehandedly turned Black intellectualism into a Marxist offshoot)
If a “national divorce” were to take place, it’s safe to say that the inhabitants of 1619 America would very quickly forget that Thanksgiving and the 4th of July ever existed. Whatever Yugoslav state holidays were commemorated in the old country, they too no longer matter to Croatians. Because the American race pathology is acute and refuses to die a quiet death, I must, as usual, stress that these forces, at the end of the day, have nothing to do with race. And everything to do with the human brain and culture in and of itself.
The Croatians were fortunate in that they had an historically distinct territory with which to break away. While the word ‘Balkanization’ might not technically apply, The Culture of Lies - an apt title for our time - acquaints the present-day American reader with a manifestation of historical amnesia taking place before our very eyes. Ugrešić’s essay collection is a great boon for the reader seeking the tools to make sense of our present-day situation.
I didn’t return to Ugrešić until after her death. While the sour taste still hasn’t gone away, as time went on I began to see Ugrešić as more of a tragic figure than a selfish one. Being in a kind of exile myself only amplified an otherwise elusive relatability that was not only experiential, but chalkfull of the kind of weltschmerz accompanying the exile experience. And when I discovered that the greatest authors were those who pursued the arts above all else, I began rehabilitating Ugrešić the author at least, if not that collection. There was a side to the story of her life I hadn’t fully comprehended. And when I did, I realized that as one of those “true” authors who lived for literature, I couldn’t avoid her any longer.
Now I am reading her recent essay collection, Fox. It’s a fabulous collection every author and literature lover should add to their shelf. It picks up where Isaiah Berlin left off with his literary metric of the fox (the versatile writer who writes all sorts of works but misses a greater truth) and the hedgehog. (the author who writes just one kind of literature stemming from a centralized vision)
What kind of author do you think you are, a hedgehog or a fox? Let me know in the comments below! There is no shame in either choice. (If my plans come to fruition, I will be known as a fox.)
Reconciling love of heritage (including Croatian) with the strongest aspirations for the art of literature (of which Ugrešić is a part) is a complication I’ll have to live with. But one thing’s for sure: Ugrešić’s loss is as great a loss for the art of literature as that of Kundera and McCarthy. And while the importance of these two authors had begun to recede by the turn of the millennium, it was clear that Ugrešić’s importance only began to rise following her 1993 exile. Where, after being called a witch, she “grabbed her broom and flew away,” to use her own words.
Ugrešić is the author of the multicultural era. For that reason alone - not to mention many other reasons - Ugrešić is a most necessary read. But she is also the last Yugoslav. And the last great literary intellect of the Slavic world who could be found in polite society, apart from the one-and-only
.Ugrešić is dead. But unlike the words she wrote in The Culture of Lies, the dead still retain credibility. That is the power of the written word.
Part 1a: Digressive Yet Important Thoughts on Writers and War
Recognizing that I am a minoritarian on the “witch” affair (and for even having a pro-Croatian perspective) who understands his view could well be misconstrued as “she got what she asked for,” I want to take a brief moment and share my thoughts on writers at war. This topic came up recently when the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert got into trouble for her recent novel about Russian Christians in the Siberian wilderness practicing their faith away from the Communist authorities. I didn’t comment at the time only because I had just written a lot of feuilletons about other issues and wanted to tone things down a bit. But it is a - dare I say it - timeless topic. War is always a constant in human history.
My simple answer is that what happened to Gilbert was bs, and she should have stood up for her novel.
was right: she behaved like a coward.“But Felix, you implied Ugrešić got what she asked for! How can you have such differing opinions on what must be the same situations?”
These two situations are apples and oranges. I will explain.
The first question one has to ask oneself is: when a writer is writing during a war in a public and/or official capacity, what purpose should that writing serve? It doesn’t have to, of course, serve any purpose if it doesn’t want to. If I’m writing pastoral poems about shepherds and the bucolic countryside like Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro and a war is going on, these poems don’t have anything to do with the war and are therefore no threat to the war effort. But that’s usually not an issue.
Of course, if a totalitarian regime expects writers to service the war that’s a different story. But for now, and even in most of the 20th century, there was enough wiggle room for non-martial topics to exist even in the hardest of times and the most intolerant of governments. Even the needs of a totalitarian regime change somewhat during a war, as was seen in the Soviet Union during WWII.
This leaves us with several approaches when it’s time to face the elephant in the room:
1) the war itself and the experience of fighting in it; (Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernst Jünger, etc.)
2) the effects of the war on people, society, etc.; (The Good Soldier Švejk, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms, Kenzaburo Oe’s wartime stories, Apocalypse Now!)
and 3) what we think about the war and its combatants. (1940s American cartoons, John Steinbeck’s Bombs Away! and The Moon is Down, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia to a certain degree) All three are vulnerable to propaganda, but number three is the most vulnerable.
(It is worth giving an honorary shoutout to Henryk Sienkiewicz, who succeeds at encompassing all three of these characteristics in his mighty With Fire and Sword: the experience, the effects and the meaning of that particular war, the Hmyelnitsky Uprising)
Gilbert falls into the second category in and of itself (the reaction of its characters to Communist oppression) but is inadvertently viewed as being of the touchy third category. (Russians, the enemies of Ukraine, are good people) By writing a positive novel about Russians completely unrelated to Ukraine and Ukrainians, her book innadvertently communicates to Ukrainians and hardcore supporters that “the enemy” is good, when she’s supposed to be saying “the enemy” is bad. Ukrainians at this time apparently cannot view the novel outside this basic, binary framework. And like Croatians in the 1990s, I don’t blame them. I think I’d feel similarly if I was Ukrainian, given that I feel similarly on Croatia’s behalf.
The Culture of Lies falls unquestionably into the third category both by intent and by perception: Ugrešić isn’t all that interested in Milošević or the Serbs, except insofar as mutual Balkan topics can be amplified to refer to them when she criticizes Croatians. (Such as when she seeks to belittle Balkan masculinity: I’m 50/50 about that essay) Rather, Ugrešić tries - and fails - to use academic theory to attack the intellectual and psychological foundations of Croatianness itself - the more organic identity, as mentioned - on behalf of the artificial construct she felt nostalgia toward.
Like I said: apples and oranges. That’s number one.
In the past, all of this was - apart from the world wars and exceptional conflicts like the Spanish Civil War - a transnational matter. Or a local one if it was a Civil War. How American writers write about American wars in the three manners listed has been by and large an American affair, with only the previous combatant having “the right” to comment. (And that depends on the outcome of the war) An example is Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot. Great movie. English viewers were not happy with the evil English antagonist in that movie. They, coming from the country of America’s ex-combatant, were within their rights to pass judgment on the movie. But it is, at the end of the day, an American movie. The British are completely within their rights to depict the Revolutionary War from their perspective in a different light.
Now, in a globalized world where Marxist thinking does not allow anything to escape the political, Gilbert’s faux pas is not merely a local matter. She isn’t Ukrainian, but in the past such a reaction would lead people to presume she was. What makes her controversy unique (at least for now) is that she has been canceled despite her not being an inhabitant or citizen of either Ukraine or Russia. While we all sympathize with the plight of the Ukrainians, they have no business telling an American author what to write about. And yet globalization appears to amplify the utilization of the masses to further cancel culture and take down those who say, write or do disagreeable things. The Ukrainians - gall or no gall - believe it is their business to tell American authors what to write about as if they are our target audience. And whether we like it or not, that’s the reality we’re currently living in.
Globalization and cancel culture enable Gilbert’s novel to stand on trial on behalf of potentially everyone in the world. It is the 2.0 stage of total war. In the First World War, the entire country was involved in the war: it was one of the ways WWI was unprecedented. We now see a similar upgrade taking place. It is a total war for Ukrainians (at least from everything I’ve heard) but now NATO in its totality must also be included in that “total” equation. Even if it means placing important principles at stake.
This was not true in Ugrešić’s case. Maybe it would have been if she had come from Ukraine? After all, this is the first war on European soil since WWII. I guess the Balkan conflict wasn’t a war or something, eh? Or it wasn’t, technically speaking, Europe. In any case, Ugrešić’s beef with Croatia was a local matter. While what Ugrešić went through may be no less egregious to some, the Croatians weren’t acting out of line by being upset with her, except for the uncouth reactions of some. Authors are always in negotiation with their own country and people, and sometimes it gets hairy. Every author aspiring for greatness has to make peace with that possibility, and with the possibility that a negotiation may well end in failure. The Ukrainians, however, have no business telling the author of another country - and a country that has been very generous with its resources - what they should write, just as we have no business telling the Ukrainians what they should do in their own literary scene. It would be their business if she was Ukrainian or Russian. But she’s not.
That’s number two.
My intellectual heritage includes geopolitical realism. And it is from this perspective that I don’t necessarily agree that it is ideal to just “write what you like” during a war. At least in the country or the sphere itself. I will explain.
We know from 20th-century history that propaganda is a real thing. And propaganda still informs us in many ways. What to do about propaganda is the million-dollar question for every society that cherishes (or used to cherish) freedom.
I lean toward tolerating it so as to preserve freedom of the press wherever humanly possible. But let me stress: to do so cannot be a willy-nilly thing. It is also easy to become hypocritical: claim to love free press, for instance, but celebrate the banning of Russia Today. (I assume all of you reading this are shrewd enough to recognize that I am not defending RT’s “reportage” when I say this) We have to be skeptical as hell to preserve this right at this stage in history, while at the same time transforming ourselves into a nation of intellectuals so as to make sure we can work out wrong from right. Especially now that AI is in the picture. It is comparable to the demands for literacy created by the Industrial Revolution. It’s a full-time job, however, and most people can’t keep up with it even if they want to. This is the great free speech challenge of our time.
How many of you believe that Pope Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope?” A lot of people do. They believe that because a play came out in the 1960s called The Deputy (or The Representative) that was massively popular and made the Pope out to be an obedient little Schaufensterpuppe of Hitler. Only thing is, it was total bullshit: a remarkable exercise in Brechtian historical revisionism. Pope Pius XII had, in fact, saved thousands of Italian Jews from deportation, placing the entire church apparatus at his service (insofar as he could under occupation); in terms of numbers, he was one of the most successful rescuers of Jews during the entire World War. And when he passed away in the 1950s, the Jews and Israelis remembered him not as a collaborator but a savior. But in the 1960s, in typical Communist fashion the German playwright targeted the next generation oblivious to this history. They watered the soil: and weeds started to grow.
I won’t dismiss the German playwright completely, as it seems he also wrote a play about the unresolved 1943 plane crash of Polish government-in-exile leader Władysław Sikorski; a play that may or may not be sympathetic to the tragic Polish leader. (Though that play led to a lawsuit from the pilot, who miraculously survived) But the damage caused by the Pope Pius play was considerable: according to Romanian defector Ion Mihai Pacepa - who also exposed the KGB’s role in creating liberation theology - the original idea to defame Pope Pius XII came from Stalin himself; and if the KGB hadn’t written the defamatory play, the Soviet Union did everything it could to promote it to smear his reputation. To this very day, anti-Catholic haters give voice to actual Stalinist lies and falsehoods.
The 1960s were, of course, an important moment in the Cold War. The Cold War was not, to be sure, the same as the “hot wars” in the Balkans and right now in Ukraine. On one hand, there is even less of an excuse for lethal criticism of the written word during a cold war since writing is less likely to lead to a hot catastrophe; the tradeoff is that propaganda disseminated throughout a society that can afford to kick the can of consequences down the road is capable of more sinisterly influencing society in the long run, as the KGB did when - a la Yuri Bezmenov - they inculcated ideas of demoralization in American society that have now made it ripe for stage 2: destabilization. (This is followed by crisis, and finally by normalization) But at the end of the day, Cold War or Hot War, the endurance of propaganda remains the same. As do its damaging effects.
Ugrešić’s book chose a weak point in Croatian society to intellectually destabilize Croatian independence while facing the existential threats posed by Milošević. In other words, whether she meant to or not, she sought to inculcate demoralization in Croatia. Gilbert - who isn’t Ukrainian or Russian - meant no disrespect to anyone, had no comparable agenda that I’m aware of and (if the book’s description is any indication) engaged in the simple pursuit of a popular yet unambiguous form of literary humanism. For all the kitschiness of the phrase “eat, pray, love,” it is a better way of going about life than furthering demoralization.
That’s number three.
Every case, like every author, is different. The question of whether to publish during a war must be made on a case-by-case basis. And the threat of propaganda - a very real one - must be taken into account. While the Ukrainians were in the wrong about Gilbert, their need to resist Russian propaganda that at times doesn’t even recognize the cultural distinction of “Little Russia” shouldn’t be dismissed or made light of either.
But the general direction we should aim toward is freedom of the press wherever necessary. Only let’s be real about it. While the theme of ideological erasure - the greatest takeaway from The Culture of Lies - is an important one, there is no indication in this work that Ugrešić even cares about things like free press conditions. Ugrešić is a lot of things, but not a romantic nor an idealist. Not even to the degree where benevolent phenomena that have their source in idealism - like basic freedoms - are taken seriously. It is one of the shortcomings of the otherwise great Eastern European intellectuals, although most of them make up for it in other ways. So weary were they of utopianism that they often didn’t have the stomach to stand for those increments of a better world that are within our power to realize. Ironically, KGB defectors like Bezmenov understood that kind of thing better than the dissident writers because attacking these freedoms directly was their mission. And spies are generally better at not losing themselves in ambiguities than writers. (At least if John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is any indication: fantastic novel!)
I will also end by giving a shoutout - loud enough, I hope - to the Slovak poet Pavol Orszagh Hviezdoslav. The greatest Slovak poet in the eyes of many Slovaks. (Though Slovakia has been blessed with several grand and influential poets) More than any other writer in history, Hviezdoslav was on the right side of history when it came to resisting war. In this case, World War I. His anti-war collection, The Bloody Sonnets, wasn’t written because the war wasn’t done by Christmas: Hviezdoslav was against the war from the start, even before anyone realized what a bloodbath it would be. He did not oppose it because of a cause, or even because of pacifism. But based on war being the fundamental evil it has become in the modern era. His poems were so important that on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, a copy of John Minahane’s excellent new translation was given personally to Queen Elizabeth II. I hope she read them before she croaked.
There is a right way and a wrong way to use literature during a conflict. Though his sonnets were published later - he’d probably have been executed for publishing them in 1914 - Hviezdoslav did it the right way. Perhaps a Hviezdoslav/Ugrešić spectrum would be a great way of assessing that kind of thing? I think I will use this spectrum - along with the O’Sullivan/Lampedusa spectrum - in the future. The Hviezdoslav side means the author reacted in the best way to conflict; the Ugrešić side means they reacted in the wrong way. Neither is a verdict on the literary quality of the work in question.
Part 2: The Artistry of Dubravka Ugrešić
Now that I’ve given my fair share of criticism, time to end on a good note. Thankfully there is more to Dubravka Ugrešić than this one book or her Balkan War stance. A lot more.
Ugrešić’s early career was driven by two constants: 1) a thorough expertise of Russian literature, especially the Russian avant-garde; and 2) a strong command of academic literary theory perfected by a twenty-year career at the University of Zagreb. While she wrote in the now-defunct Serbo-Croatian, Ugrešić owes infinitely more to the school of Vladimir Mayakovsky than the school of Ivan Mažuranić. A commonality shared with Milan Kundera, whose debt to Czech literature is either nonexistent or so cleverly disguised within his veneer of originality we’ll have to wait for that eventual enormous biography to come out answering those hidden questions. In the same vein, those looking for hints of Miroslav Krleža or Ivo Andrić will likely be disappointed.
I generally recommend writers stay away from academic theory and treat it like the bubonic plague; the directives of theory are extremely difficult to reconcile with the basic goal of telling a story. But those who, for whatever reason, wish to ignore this suggestion have a strong obligation to read Ugrešić: if there is a right way to utilize academic theory in literature, it is the Ugrešić way.
Synthesized, these two influences led to the greatest success of her early career: Fording the Streams of Consciousness (1988). Back in Yugoslavia, literature occupied two extremes: most often it had to do directly with the South Slavic domain. This was best represented by Ivo Andrić, whose name is criminally forgotten today despite his well-deserved Nobel Prize. On the other hand, there was literature completely severed from the Yugoslav land and completely free of geography in its aims. It was, perhaps, the only truly “internationalist” literature to emerge from the domain of an “internationalist” ideology. A truth that would certainly explain Ugrešić’s attachment to the old Yugoslavia from an artistic point of view. Though less common than the other kind, this “internationalist” literature had a famous representative in Danilo Kiš whose best-known work, A Tomb For Boris Davidovich, was a classic of the Cold War generation.4 While Kiš was beset by plagiarism charges I haven’t fully explored - but that I must, one day, because of what Jerzy Kosinski did - by the time Ugrešić published Fording the Streams of Consciousness that kind of literature was better tolerated.5
Fording the Streams of Consciousness takes place in the most familiar environment of all for academics and writers nowadays: the good old academic conference. Franz Kafka once said he found offices to be “magical.” Ugrešić, it seems, had found a similar sort of magic in the academic conference setting, one she would return to later in her career. (Including in Fox) The novel considered by some to be her best work (others say The Ministry of Pain) was one of the first in a brief, postmodern trend that tremored its way through the Eastern bloc both before and after 1989. Other novels that comprise this trend include Jachym Topol’s City Sister Silver (Sestra in Czech), the stories of Viktor Erofeev in the Soviet Union/Russia, and the novels of Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy.
The Balkan War was the catalyst for a major change in Ugrešić’s career, just as it was for the entire region in other respects. During the fighting, Ugrešić spent time in the United States. Her time there influenced the creation of American Fictionary (also titled Have A Nice Day), a series of short essays critiquing the myths of America. Despite (or perhaps because of) the importance of the United States in waging the Cold War against the evils of Communism, the great Slavic and Eastern European intellectuals have seldom written about America directly, which is a shame. (Exceptions include Czesław Miłosz’s Visions From San Francisco Bay) American Fictionary not only signaled her increasingly full-time focus on essays; but on topics related to multiculturalism and globalization, two constants in the “end of history” epoch that’s starting to die as we speak. While Ugrešić did not change in some respects, she never lost track of what was important to address.
After “flying away on her broom” from Zagreb in 1993, Ugrešić spent some time lecturing at American universities before settling in Amsterdam. The Dutch capital - whose literature originates from another fox named Raeynart - would be her home in exile until her death.
Following The Culture of Lies, ten more publications (at least ten available in English) were published from then until her passing. To make it convenient for interested readers, I’ve made two separate lists of those ten works along with the other aforementioned texts to help separate the novels from the essays. At one point in her career she wrote short stories, so not to worry short story fanatics: I haven’t forgotten about you.
Novels: Fording The Streams of Consciousness, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, The Ministry of Pain, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
Essay Collections: American Fictionary, The Culture of Lies, Thank You For Not Reading, Nobody’s Home, Karaoke Culture, Europe in Sepia, Fox, The Age of Skin
Short Stories: In The Jaws of Life and Other Stories
Uncategorizable (For Now): A Muzzle For Witches
It is worth keeping in mind that neither category is pure. There is a lot of overlap between the essay form and fiction. Ugrešić had gone from the brief blip of late-20th century East European postmodernism to synthesizing fiction and the essay form. Other authors from the region would do it too, and do it well: like underrated Slovak author Pavel Vilikovský. But Ugrešić - her theoretical knowledge no doubt a boon here - proved to be masterful at this kind of synthesis. So much so she abandoned the novel form (per se) around 2010 and stuck with her distinct essay form for the rest of her career.
Exile, it seems, had been a blessing as well as a curse. Even if the circumstances were ultimately tragic, God, it seems, had seen fit to save Ugrešić from the academy so as to become the sole worthy literary bard of the 1991-2022 period of history. In Yugoslavia, she had been an academic. In exile, she became a writer in the most dignified and artistic meaning of the term. The best writers don’t choose their profession: their profession chooses them. And Ugrešić is an extremely rare example of a writer who “recovered” (to use
’s phrase) from academia - though not completely - and joined the purely authorial profession that, today, has become like the Jedi at the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope.Before I move on to the conclusion I want to put the spotlight on a few other essay collections that - while I haven’t gotten to them yet - I strongly encourage aspiring writers to check out. If you want more input, however, let me know in the comments. It would be great to write separate posts for these collections in the future.
Thank You For Not Reading is objectively valuable to the writer since it’s about the publishing industry and what it has now become. While it was published in 2002, the transformation Ugrešić talks about is still valid in today’s world. And it’s always great to see where things like this come from, even if things change. It’s worth reminding all you twitterati that the rise of Facebook makes little sense without factoring in the rise of MySpace, now forgotten.
Europe in Sepia is Ugrešić’s exploration of Europe’s weariness in the post-1989 era and its inability to find anything to live for as a society. While the lack of a “utopian promise” is an observation one might expect an intellectual from the former Eastern bloc to reach, Ugrešić also explores ‘pastism,’ a fitting word for the weird nostalgia that has dominated our society since the 2010s began. When I’m done with Fox, it’ll be a tricky choice choosing between Thank You For Not Reading and Europe in Sepia.
Speaking of the devil, Fox is an unquestionable peak in Ugrešić’s views on literature itself. Revisiting Isaiah Berlin’s paradigm of the hedgehog and the fox, you will not walk away from this book without considerably enriching your reading list. The other day, I was chatting with
about the why of literature. While I can’t promise the answer will just dish itself out willy-nilly, Fox is essential for anyone on a quest to answer that fundamental question.And lastly, A Muzzle of Witches is Ugrešić’s final work. It is set to be released later this year but has already been released in Serbo-Croatian. It takes the form of an interview that may or may not be fictional, but interviews are also conveyor belts of nonfictional information. So what is it, a work of fiction or nonfiction? It’ll be interesting to see. But the title certainly suggests that Ugrešić, as an author, always took something with her from every stage of her life and career. Once a witch, it seems, always a witch. (And since she claimed the title as her own I’m allowed to say that 😇)
Conclusion
On Goodreads, a Croatian commenter named Marina had this to say about A Muzzle of Witches. English isn’t her native language, so no snide comments on the grammar here:
“I read this right after reading Rode Orm (The Long Ships), and have read this in one sitting. I wanted to read this in one sitting, cause from the moment I read few lines and pages of this book, I realized how true reality of Croatian postmodernism is so depressing, but that we still have some voices that should be read. I feel like discourse of interview of the book is appropriate form for criticism and enlightenment of general reader. I admire Dubravka Ugrešić and feel the same frustration as her.”
While the needs of Croatian readers may well be different from those of American readers, I like this comment because it indicates that readers aren’t a dying breed that just don’t care. Deep down, readers (and potential readers) want something more. Hell, they need something more. The emptiness of society ensures that they have to have something more. Because Marina’s right, and not only about Croatia: postmodernity is very, very depressing. It is shallow and vacuous. It does nothing for us as it suffocates all meaning from our reality. And it seems to work to stifle our need for intelligence and something greater and more meaningful with a childish banality none of us want, but that none of us either know (or want to know) how to get rid of. This is certainly true of America, but similar conditions exist in Europe as well.
While Ugrešić did have her own agenda and some of it was ideological - her feminism, for instance - it did not come at the expense of what was important for the formative years of my servile generation. And for the current world order. Ugrešić is to Europe what David Foster Wallace was to American literature: a stepping stone away from the postmodern quagmire. A philosopher too controversial to name here once posited that postmodernism can only be exited with the use of postmodernism. Ugrešić, whether she meant to or not, appears to have taken us a step of the way by waging war against European (and sometimes American) banality the way Foster Wallace struggled in the universe of ads. Her blend of fiction and nonfiction becomes, in this scenario, as much a survival mechanism as it is an artistic vehicle of individuality. There is enough fiction to preserve the “fiction” in her essays, but enough reality to purge the postmodern condition of its corruption; a corruption that originates, in part, from a cancerous and nonsensical use of literary devices. Ugrešić’s abandonment of the novel form is, in some sense, a damning of that most elastic literary form. But it’s a lesson we must ponder: after all, we authors haven’t treated the novel form with all that much respect. Ugrešić, at least, had the dignity to abandon it rather than mistreat it further.
In this context, I’ve very much come to regret my earlier feelings regarding The Culture of Lies and have recognized that Ugrešić and I are more alike than the labels would care to suggest. We have both lived the lives of exiles. And we both cared deeply about the art of literature (well, I still care since I’m still alive); that, I suppose, is good enough for me.
She was less well-known than Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy; but was equally, if not more, important. Authors (in my humble opinion) appear to have taken the wrong lessons from Kundera while the most American authors could really do in reaction to McCarthy is stand in awe of his greatness without knowing how to proceed from there. For writers with an intellectual bent, however, Ugrešić, even with her fox-like versatility, leaves a trail writers can more easily follow. One that doesn’t ignore the public’s need for something real without sacrificing the art of fiction at the altar of public demand. We all understand that the art of literature is in great danger. But no one understood the nitty-gritty of that danger better than Dubravka Ugrešić. We must benefit from what she understood.
With Ugrešić gone, another fox trail is vacated. It is time we writers start walking the path.
Authors that, incidentally, have a few things in common. Perhaps I will compare them someday? It would certainly be a curious pairing.
There were jewels to salvage, but many of them were jewels that weren’t strictly speaking, Communist in origin but tidbits of culture the Communists glorified.
For those who think I’m covertly talking about Black people, I’m not. The 1619 mindset does originate from the slave experience, and once upon a time 1619 was synonymous with Black people. But ever since the Civil Rights era the 1619 mindset has been disseminated throughout America via public schools. Most of my generation belongs to 1619 America despite their race; this hadn’t yet happened with Boomers and GenX. Though not racially Black as a demographic anymore, a heavily racialized vision still remains a given for the 1619 lens.
One of the less tendentious and more interesting tidbits of The Culture of Lies was Ugrešić taking note of how Danilo Kiš, despite his previous struggles with Serbian nationalists over his plagiarism accusations, was buried in Serbia with full ‘Serbian’ honors.
Of course, there is a strong possibility and likelihood that antisemitism played a role in the attacks on Kiš; but Kiš was also from Serbia, while Ugrešić was in the more West-oriented Croatia. The one certainty is that a novel with nothing explicitly to do with Yugoslavia offended a lot of “Yugoslavs.”
Thorough and fascinating, as always, with a great ending. Good to learn more about her.
Foster Wallace did push back effectively against Postmodernism, I think. Although I'm more a fan of his essays -- the best I've ever read by any writer -- than of his novels, other than Infinite Jest, which I think is one of the ten best novels since the greatness of the novel came to an end with the genius of James and Proust. (I'm not able to join you in appreciating Joyce.)
I did read a 2,000-page textbook about literary theory -- twice -- several years ago. But my worldview was quite well-established by then, so it didn't really shake me. I did find value in several strains, especially in reader response theory and classical literary theory ranging from the ancient Greeks and Romans -- I found real value in Longinus -- up to Matthew Arnold. But the exploration deepened my understanding around gender, race, and colonialism / post-colonialism. Historicism and the New Historicism are both interesting and of value to me. Most of the rest of it I either rejected or had no desire to understand, not even Formalism.
I'm definitely a hedgehog.
This essay was a substantial rumination which I listened to twice while driving a certain young lady to work. Among other things is an "I changed my mind" type which makes it dynamic. Ugrešić's war against banality is something for me to remember. Nonsensical use of literary devices is a satisfying pocket definition of postmodern literature that will slide in with my comb and switchblade. Essays about politics usually have a short shelf life or maybe fossilize quickly. Essays about literature stay fresh, I think... as will this one. About Elizabeth Gilbert, I wondered if I should start to pay attention to her given her recent book topic. Yeah the censorious mob was evil and stupid, it was cowardly of EG to cave in (particularly as she is already successful in all respects), but let's just mention that the psychological pressure of cancel culture is intense. I know you and your readers urgently need to know about my house pipes, yes there is a leak again. The old 110 year-old pipes are expiring. I had to tear open a ceiling. Literary devices fell out.