The Shots at Sarajevo: Fresco of the Tragic History of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Novel June 28, 1914, by Zlatko Topcic

Abstract

Zlatko Topčić has built the identity of a novelist who openly tackles new techniques and literary procedures in the wake of postmodern ways of writing. This is supported by the novels created during and after the last war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the shadows and traumas of the war are deep in the elements of the text, and the characters are caught in its whirlwind in different ways, prisoners of traumatic conditions even in the time when the storm of events subsides, but remains a long sediment of painful experiences. This text aims to show how a great historical event - the Sarajevo assassination - is artistically transposed in the novel 6/28/1914 (novel, revision), and how the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war in the period 1992-1995 can be traced through its outlines. With a collection of characters, historical and fictional, narrative organization of space and time, intertextuality, and an ironic relationship with metanarratives, Topčić creates a text as a product of personal stories from which a novelistic mosaic of historical events is created.