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.
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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.
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Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 22.
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Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 66.
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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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