Abstract
This article deals with the ideas of Central Europe in the writings of two Yugoslav and Serbian writers Danilo Kiš (1935–1989) and Aleksandar Tišma (1924–2003). Central Europe is, in metaphorical terms, a transitional, central region, an area of passage that is filled with opposites. It is demonstrated that in Kiš’s Hourglass and Tišma’s The Book of Blam (both novels were published in 1972), the region forms a complex literary image of the world of dispersal and disintegration, both in terms of form and content. On the one hand, views of these two writers can be summarized in a well-known and tragic fact that in Central Europe, the heart of Europe, there is also the heart of European darkness symbolized in the Central-European village of Auschwitz. On the other hand, Kiš’s and Tišma’s poetics undoubtedly belong to the geographical and cultural space of a literary Central Europe (marked by Kafka, Musil, Broch). This paper will try to explain how this ambivalent position works as a complex and rich foundation of their fictional work.
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Notes
For an elaborated critical attitude towards Naumann’s conception in particular and the conception of “Central Europe” that stems from Germany in general, see Zoran Konstantinović’s article “Sistem srpske književnosti u sistemu srednjoevropske literature” (“Serbian Literature System as a part of the Central European Literary System”) (Konstantinović 2000, pp. 322–335).
On the basis of the interwar experience, J. P. Stern notes that the Central Europe includes all those European states created at the end of the World War I, which at the crucial moment proved incapable of defending their independence (Stern 1992, p. 2).
If it is not indicated otherwise, all translations from Serbian are mine.
“Small nations. This concept is not quantitative; it signifies the situation; destiny; small nations do not know the happy feeling that they are there forever; they have all passed, at this or that particular moment of their history, through the gate of death; […] because their existence is a question” (Kundera 1995, p. 222).
This term was proposed a few years ago by a Dutch comparatist and art historian Ernst van Alphen: “When I call something a Holocaust effect, I mean to say that we are not confronted with a represetation of the Holocaust, but that we, as viewers or readers, experience directly a certain aspect of the Holocaust or of Nacism […]. The Holocaust is not made present by means of a constative speech act—that is, as a mediated account, as the truthful or untrutful content of the speech act; rather, it is made present as performative act. The performative acts ‘do’ the Holocaust, or rather, they ‘do’ a specific acpect of it” (van Alphen 1997, p. 10).
Kiš himself uses the following terms for his activity of writing: reconstruction, research, creation of the world, compression.
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Gvozden, V. Amphibolic space of Central Europe in the writings of Aleksandar Tišma and Danilo Kiš. Neohelicon 47, 603–614 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00553-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00553-y