Dubravka Ugrešić and Contemporary European Literature: Along a Path to Transnational Literature

Abstract

WORLDLIT.ORG 61 I n 1997 I was offered a job to teach English to adults in Croatia. Of course I had been following the events that had torn Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 1995; and just as I was learning what I could about the newly independent country of Croatia, Dubravka had already left it behind, in 1993, to go into exile first in Berlin and then Amsterdam . The irony is that I ordered two of Dubravka’s early books, to learn more about a country that, in fact, no longer existed, and where she no longer lived nor could feel at home. But these two books were a good introduction nevertheless: Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life and Fording the Stream of Consciousness are both works of fiction and belong to a tradition of playful satire and black humor that was prevalent all through Eastern Europe during the communist era. As a student of Russian I had read both the classics and the Soviet-era satirical work that followed, so there was something that felt wonderfully familiar about her fiction and new at the same time. Were it not for the accident of history, so to speak, Dubravka might have gone on writing novels in this satirical vein, poking fun at her fellow writers, or lovesick women, or life in the little republic of Croatia when it was part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is significant that the breakup of the country drove her into exile only four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall; it is also significant that the once-“dissident” writers of the Soviet cover feature Dubravka Ugrešić and Contemporary European Literature Along a Path to Transnational Literature by Alison Anderson 62 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 bloc suddenly found themselves in a literary context that was utterly changed—they had freedom of expression at last, yes, but not necessarily the freedom to publish or be read; market forces suddenly determined everything that was published throughout the former Eastern bloc. The breakup of Yugoslavia meant not only the transition to a capitalist culture but also a severing of ties among the former republics that at times bordered on the absurd, as new dictionaries were created for each republic’s “language”—no longer known as Serbo-Croatian but as Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (and sometimes Montenegrin). Now Dubravka found herself living in Western Europe but writing in Croatian, living in, as she calls it, a literary out-of-nation zone. Who would read her? Who was her audience? Whom was she writing for? Back then, perhaps only a few dissenting Croats or fellow exiles, unhappy with the nationalistic regime of the 1990s; her Yugoslav audience had virtually vanished. Would the Germans, the Dutch read her in translation? Could she find a place as a European writer ? These were some of the questions I asked myself as I began to learn both about Dubravka’s biography and about life in Croatia in the late 1990s. After the year I spent in Zagreb, I returned to the US and was heartened to see that Dubravka’s books were appearing regularly in English: Have a Nice Day, The Culture of Lies, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender , Thank You for Not Reading, Ministry of Pain, Nobody’s Home, etc. I realized too that she had found a new voice—the voice of exile, one might call it—and that the bubbly, sardonic novels of her youth had given way, for the most part, to incisive, often heartfelt and angry, but always ironic and cautionary essays about life in post-Yugoslavia, in Europe, and in the wider world. Her works appeared not only in English but in many countries, in translation, and she has, so fortunately for us, found her place, at latest count, in twenty-seven languages. I would like to focus briefly on her novel from 1997, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, because it is the pivotal work written from her first exile in Berlin, and it is also a work that echoes and reflects the events of the late 1980s and ’90s in Europe. Before 1989 Berlin was a divided city, the very heart...