Abstract

Background: This work compares the story Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš and novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić which were written outside the homeland of their authors. It is used the definition of the literary cosmopolitanism as a kind of cultural cosmopolitanism which is characterized raising the issue of identity of heroes in the perspective of world citizenship, often depicting the coexistence of different identities without the specifying a national one. The article studies the influence of Kiš's poetics on Ugrešić's poetics, intertextual relations in the mentioned works. Purpose: The similarity at the level of motives, symbols, worldviews, structure, genre features, artistic techniques as main characteristics of the literary cosmopolitanism is studied in this article. Results: The Central European literary cosmopolitanism in the works by Kiš and Ugrešić is reflected in narration, images and symbols, motives, quotations of the other texts with the similar, cosmopolitan themes. Here the authors set the task of preserving and reconstructing the past by the various "reservoirs of memory" such as memories, photographs, artifacts, customs. The topic of freedom is extremely relevant as a fundamental one for totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, which is manifested here either through the censorship of memory, or through the fantastic visions of freedom from censorship. Keywords: museum, encyclopedia, library, memory, cosmopolitanism. Assman, A., 2012. Spaces of memory. Forms and transformations of cultural memory. Kyiv: Nika-Tsentr. (In Ukrainian) Birth Certificate, 2021. [online] Cornell University Press. Avialable at: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801448881/birth-certificate/ [Accessed September, 6, 2021] (In English) Gvozden, V., 2002. Danilo Kiš as a Central European writer: contribution to writing and reading identity. In: B. Zieliński, ed. National and Supranational model of culture: Central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, s.83–94. (In Polish) Kiš, D., 1979. The Anatomy Lesson. Beolgrade: Nolit. (In Serbian) Kiš, D., 2008. The Book of the Love and Death. L’viv: LA “Piramida”. (In Ukrainian) Kosmos, І., 2015. Mapping of Exile in the Works of Post-Yugoslav Authors. PhD thesis. University of Zagreb. Zagreb, Croatia. (In Croatian) Miedzielski, E., 2014. Unity in difference, differences in unity. Mapping the cultural space of contemporary Croatia on the basis of Croatian prose from the pre-millennium. Poznań: Nauka i innowacje. (In Polish) Milutinović, Z., 2014. Territorial Trap: Danilo Kiš, Cultural Geography and Geopolitical Imagination. East European Politics and Societies, 28, 4 (2014), pp.715–738. (In English) Nedeljković, M., 2016. Kiš's vigilance: ethics as aesthetics in the prose of Danilo Kiš. PhD thesis. University of Westminster. London, United Kingdom. (In English) Pantić, M., 2002. The variations on a theme „Danilo Kiš and Central Europe“. In: B. Zieliński, ed. National and Supranational model of culture: Central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, pp.77–82. (In Polish) Richter, A., 2002. The Central Europe with Danil Kiš. In: B. Zieliński, ed. National and Supranational model of culture: Central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza, pp.95–101. (In Polish) The Conversation of Iurii Andrukhovych with Dubravka Ugrešić about the experience of the land that runs away from under your feet, 2021 [online]. Chytomo. Avialable at: https://chytomo.com/rozmova-iuriia-andrukhovycha-z-dubravkoiu-ugreshych-pro-dosvid-zemli-shcho-vtikaie-z-pid-nih/?fbclid=IwAR1OQgoqcQQ9-xSbn6dvwO0UX6Oc_p0U2k-wWnqTWB3nlZHR-TmLIqaJ8Mo [Accessed in June, 1, 2018] (In Ukrainian) Thompson, M., 2014. Birth Certificate. Belgrade: Clio, pp.475–477. (In Serbian) Ugrešić, D., 2020. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Chernivtsi: Knyhy XXI. (In Ukrainian) Vanuska, K., 2009. Citizen of Literature: Dubravka Ugrešić. The Quaterly Conversation, 17, 2009. [online] Dubravka Ugrešić. Avialable at: https://www.dubravkaugresic.com/ writings/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Karen-VanushkaThe-Quaterly-Conversation.pdf [Accessed September, 6, 2021] (In English) Veličković, V., 2015. “Justabit-Racist”: Dubravka Ugrešić. Cosmopolitanism and the Post-Yugoslav Condition. In: L. Platt and S. Upstone, ed. Postmodern Literature and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.145–159. (In English) Veličković, V., 2019. Eastern Europe and Race: Cosmopolitanism and the Post-Yugoslav Condition in Dubravka Ugrešić’s Essays. In: Veličković, V. Eastern Europeans in Contemporary Literature and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.167–186. (In English) Vervaet, S., 2016. Ugrešić, Hemon and the Paradoxes of Literary Cosmopolitanism: Or How to “World” (Post-) Yugoslav Literature in the Age of Globalization. In: A. Marčetić, Z. Bečanović-Nikolić and V. Elez, eds. Encompassing Comparative Literature: Theory, Interpretation, Perspectives. Belgrade: Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, pp.161–169. (In English)

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