Dubravka Ugrešić’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, as a Female Critique of the Pan-Slavic Spa Novel

Abstract

Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, 2008; English translation 2010) represents an intertextually charged contribution to the world literary genre of the spa novel and its Slavic ramifications. The spa town is a traditional motif in world literature, standing at the crossroads of health and illness, love and death, treatment and entertainment, individual body and social norm. The spa novel in this instance features as “a novel-within-a-novel” portraying a transnational community of Croatian wellness tourists, Bosnian war refugees, American businessmen and Russian mafiosi. The novel charts their encounters in a Central European spa town in the late 1990s. By using a multiplicity of intertextual references to literary works from Russian (Dostoevsky) and Czech literature (Kundera), Ugrešić inspects the health resort under post-communist conditions, as a site of intercultural communication and geopolitical dynamics. The article proposes an attendant reading of the novel as an account of broader social changes from disciplinary (Foucault) to control society (Deleuze). It argues further that Ugrešić’s novel may also be read as a female critique of the pan-Slavic spa novel, which has hitherto been constructed in primarily male masterpieces from Dostoevsky to Chekhov or Kundera.