Abstract
Writing in 1994, Dubravka Ugresic remarked that the east European writer now lives
without a firm roof over his head, his literary house (whatever that meant) has been destroyed, and with it his personal and literary biography. ... He is a representative of a world which no longer exists, a tragi-comic being, a tightrope-walker overburdened with mental baggage, the citizen of a ruin, an eternal exile, neither here nor there, homeless, stateless, a nostalgic, a zombie, a writer without readers, a travelling salesman selling goods either nibbled by moths or peppered by shells. ... He is a loser, a seller of souvenirs of a vanished epoch and vanished landscapes, an incompatible being, both despairing and deceiving at the same time, former, from every point of view.1
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Notes
Andrew Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 4.
Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism: From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. William E. Yuill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 162.
Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Perennial, 2001), p. 155.
Milan Kundera, The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 38.
Philip Roth, Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (New York: Vintage, 2002), p. 75.
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See Zoran Milutinovic, ‘Mimesis under Socialism’, Essays in Poetics, 24 (1999), 202–12
Andrea Zlatar, Tekst, tijelo, trauma: ogledi o suvremenoj zenskoj knjizevnosti (Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2004), p. 123.
Quoted in Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 82.
Velimir Viskovic, ‘About Dubravka Ugresic’, trans. Miljenko Kovacicek, Relations, 1–2 (2004), 129–34
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), The Visual Culture Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 229–36
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 22.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 313.
Christa Wolf, Parting from Phantoms: Selected Writings, 1990–1994, trans. Jan van Heurck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 286.
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 66.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 246.
Hana Pichova, ‘Milan Kundera and the Identity of Central Europe’, in Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (ed.), Comparative Central European Culture (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2002), pp. 103–14
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Slobodan Prosperov Novak, Povijest hrvatske knjizevnosti: od Bascanske ploce do danas (Zagreb: Golden Marketing, 2003), pp. 594–7.
Umberto Eco, ‘An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!’, PMLA, 100.3 (1988), 254–61
Dubravka Ugresic, Thank You for Not Reading, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003), p. 135.
Quoted in Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), p. 290.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 128.
Michael Hanne, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change (Oxford: Berghahn, 1994).
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© 2013 David Williams
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Williams, D. (2013). ‘The Citizen of a Ruin’. In: Writing Postcommunism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330086_2
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