Dubravka Ugrešić is Yugoslavian.

When the country of Yugoslavia dissolved, she was

robbed of her national identity and forced to become a Croatian because Zagreb was her
home. Choices had to be made and to understand her choices one has to understand the
Balkans war, the war in the former Yugoslavia etween 1991 and 1999. So I hope you can
excuse me, tu first I'll try as quickly as possibly summarise those events.

1. The former Yugoslavia was a Socialist state created after German

occupation in World War II and a bitter civil war. A federation of six republics, it
brought together Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Slovenes and
others under a comparatively relaxed communist regime. Tensions between
these groups were successfully suppressed under the leadership of President
Tito.
2. After Tito's death in 1980, tensions re-emerged. Calls for more autonomy
within Yugoslavia by nationalist groups led in 1991 to declarations of
independence in Croatia and Slovenia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army
lashed out, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia. Thousands were killed in the
latter conflict which was paused in 1992 under a UN-monitored ceasefire.
3. Bosnia, with a complex mix of Serbs, Muslims and Croats, was next to try
for independence. Bosnia's Serbs, backed by Serbs elsewhere in Yugoslavia,
resisted. Under leader Radovan Karadzic, they threatened bloodshed if Bosnia's
Muslims and Croats - who outnumbered Serbs - broke away. Despite European
blessing for the move in a 1992 referendum, war came fast.
4. Yugoslav army units, withdrawn from Croatia and renamed the Bosnian
Serb Army, carved out a huge swathe of Serb-dominated territory. Over a
million Bosnian Muslims and Croats were driven from their homes in ethnic
cleansing. Serbs suffered too. The capital Sarajevo was besieged and shelled.
UN peacekeepers, brought in to quell the fighting, were seen as ineffective.
5. International peace efforts to stop the war failed, the UN was humiliated
and over 100,000 died. The war ended in 1995 after Nato bombed the Bosnian
Serbs and Muslim and Croat armies made gains on the ground. A US-brokered
peace divided Bosnia into two self-governing entities, a Bosnian Serb republic
and a Muslim-Croat federation lightly bound by a central government.
6. In August 1995, the Croatian army stormed areas in Croatia under Serb
control prompting thousands to flee. Soon Croatia and Bosnia were fully
independent. Slovenia and Macedonia had already gone. Montenegro left later.
In 1999, Kosovo's ethnic Albanians fought Serbs in another brutal war to gain
independence. Serbia ended the conflict beaten, battered and alone.

Dubravka Ugresic was born in 1949 in Kustina, a small industrial town near Zagreb. Her
father, Nikola, was a Croat, and her mother, Elisaveta, Bulgarian. Her father, a teenage
anti-Nazi partisan in the second world war, became the successful director of a factory
processing petroleum products. But the freeze on Yugoslav-Soviet bloc relations after
Tito's break with Stalin in 1948 meant the family was unable to visit her maternal
grandparents in Varna, on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast, until the thaw of 1956. Ugresic
thinks Yugoslavia's socialism was relatively benign, especially in its permissiveness about
foreign travel and Hollywood movies.

“We lived in a little house. My father ran a factory, which was an almost inseparable part of
our family life, because the workers would often come to our house to meet with my father.
We lived in model family houses, which were built as an example of what a socialist
worker’s home should look like. There were five or six small houses with vegetable
gardens in the back and small flower gardens in the front. Our neighbors were workers,
and they would accompany us on outings, celebrations, vacations on the Adriatic coast (at
so-called “socialist workers’ resorts”). Life was a sort of collective paradise, where, at least
at the beginning, images of everyday life matched the images in my first socialist primer,
which consisted of workers, peasants, and the “intelligentsia” building their “bright future”
together. (…)
We first visited my Bulgarian grandparents—they lived in Varna, by the Black Sea—when I
was seven years old. This was immediately after diplomatic relations between Bulgaria
and Yugoslavia were restored. My mother and I traveled to Varna and stayed there for two
months. I was completely unfamiliar with that strange new family constellation, but I
learned Bulgarian with ease. My mother hadn’t seen her parents for ten years because of
Informbiro, which excluded Yugoslavia from the Eastern Bloc established by the Soviets.
Being a Bulgarian in Yugoslavia in 1948 was equivalent to being a Serb in Croatia—or a
Croat in Serbia, or a Bosnian in either Serbia or Croatia—in 1991. As a child, I couldn’t
understand any of that stuff. However, I do recall an exchange with a boy my age from our
first stay in Bulgaria. He said: “That Tito of yours is a capitalist pig.” And I replied: “That
Stalin of yours is a pig.”
After studying comparative literature at Zagreb university, she spent a research year in
Moscow in the mid-1970s, helping to unearth and translate Soviet avant-garde writers of
the 1920s and 30s, whom she later anthologised. It was a "totally romantic time", yet the
encounter with Soviet communism also opened her eyes to abuses in Yugoslavia. From
1949 to 1956, hundreds of people suspected of pro-Stalinist loyalties were sent to Goli
Otok, the "Yugoslav gulag". "It was a culture of lies," Ugresic says. "Goli Otok was taboo;
people refused to talk about it until the 1970s."
“I began as a children’s writer. During the late seventies, the standards of literature for
children in Yugoslavia were exceptionally high. Belgrade poet Dušan Radović set the
highest aesthetic bar with this kind of writing. Then other young and talented writers
followed his example. Their enthusiasm influenced people involved in television as well as
publishers and artists. Suddenly great books for children started to appear alongside
intelligent, even experimental, magazines and radio programs. All in all, I was absolutely
enchanted by these new tendencies in children’s literature and I wanted to be a part of it.
That seemed to me a better and more authentic choice then imitating Borges, which is
what the majority of writers of my generation were doing at the time.”
“I think that the notion of a literary work ethic is extremely important, especially today when
practically anybody can write, produce, and distribute his or her own work. This work ethic
presupposes knowledge and a deep respect toward—and compassion for—your
ancestors and contemporaries, toward your trade. It also assumes a deep awareness of
what one is doing, why one is doing what one is doing, what the sense of the work is, what
it brings to the cultural context, what it brings to the reader, and so on and so forth. (…) My
first book, which appeared in 1978 under the title Pose for Prose, was a literary attempt to
answer at least some of those questions. At the center of this volume was a novella titled
Love Story. Although it could be read as a kind of romance, Love Story was a literary
manifesto. It begins with an epigraph taken from an interview of Gabriel García Márquez in
which he said: “I write in order to be loved.” The narrator is a young woman. She wants to
win the heart of a certain young man, the self-proclaimed literary critic Bublik.
Bublik claims that contemporary literature is dead. Our young woman offers him a few of
her fictions, works that “reanimate” dead literature, hoping to thereby seduce him. She’s a
postmodern Scheherazade, but her stories fail to win her Bublik. The couple meets again
ten years later. This time he offers her a story, and the game of seduction continues. Love
Story is a funny and benign novella, the work of a beginner. Today I am glad that I started
my writing career with this kind of literary self-positioning. True, I now see it as self-
positioning…I wasn’t so sure about it back then. But even at this early stage I was bracing
myself for a couple of things which would await me in my career as a writer.”

In 1981, while working as an academic, Ugresic wrote a postmodern romantic parody that
became a Yugoslav cult classic, Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life, for which she also co-
wrote a screenplay in 1984. It was published in translation by Dalkey Archive, as Lend Me
Your Character (2004). The typist Steffie searches for Mr Right amid a blizzard of advice
from friends, an elderly aunt and women's magazines, in a sewing pattern of a novel that
weaves threads of Madame Bovary into lessons in applying mascara. When a recent
Polish translation came out, readers unaware of when it was written thought it a hilarious
send-up of Bridget Jones's Diary.

Ugresic was teaching at Zagreb university when war broke out in 1991. After an autumn
spent in bomb shelters, she taught for a semester in Connecticut, and wrote Have a Nice
Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1993). Its vignettes skewer American
consumerism through the eyes of a woman whose homeland is disintegrating. War, she
writes, "is radiation. And we are all contaminated."

She was one of five women subjected to what she sees as a media witchhunt in Croatia:
four of them still live abroad. "It's a pattern in war," she says. "The first enemy is a woman."
Besides "nasty" attacks in parliament and the press, her mother received harassing phone
calls ("being Bulgarian was almost like being Serb"). "What saved me was that I was not
anonymous," says Ugresic. "Many who were less known were beaten or killed." She was
also ostracised by academic colleagues: "A funny human ballet was performed every day;
they'd not notice or greet me. They performed that for one year, then I left."

She was struck by how quickly people did the job of censorship. "There was such hysteria
and lying, pushing people into hatred. My fellow writers spat on their own history. But why
should you wipe out half your life because a bunch of criminals go to war to separate the
country? When one guy comes to power, others are erased.

This is anti-intellectual - to always destroy everything behind you." One casualty was
language. Serbo-Croat was "separated into Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian, which is tragic
when you're the bearer of a language that's split, tortured."
The war did not change my approach toward literature. I have always cared more about
how things are written than what is being written about. But the war changed me. It
brought with it new themes, preoccupations, and thoughts. And of course: exile, a changed
life, a deeper knowledge of human nature, fresh stimulations. These were powerful
experiences. However, I had no desire to convert them into a memoir or autobiography.
Her fragmentary novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996) is set mainly in
Berlin, with a return to a haunted love affair in Lisbon, and flashbacks drawn from her
mother's life in Bulgaria. Its title refers to a real monument to German capitulation in 1945.
Everything she saw in Berlin - "a traumatised city of debris, graves, bullet holes" - matched
her feelings about what had happened in Yugoslavia.

Yes, in 1991 (officially, though, it started earlier) my cultural environment split into six new
cultural environments (with the same pattern of cultural behavior based on ethnic hatred
and exclusion and denial of a common Yugoslav cultural past). This was the year when the
authorities took away my Yugoslav passport, gave me a Croatian one in return, and from
then on everybody expected me to behave as a “Croatian writer.”
When forced to apply for a Croatian passport, under "ethnicity" Ugresic wrote "none".

She now has Dutch citizenship, but still writes in Croatian, not because she thinks the
mother tongue is holy or romantic, but because it's the easiest language for her to express
herself in. No longer labelled an enemy, she is "published quietly" in Zagreb and Belgrade.
"I know I have devoted readers there," she says, but even if the rhetoric has softened with
Croatia's EU aspirations, "all those who declared me a traitor are still in power, still part of
the cultural life."

I left Croatia, I left my job -- I worked for twenty years at the university -- spontaneously. I
was so angry and so offended and so desperate that I simply quit my job and I left the
country, not knowing what would happen. I did that at an age where normal people don't
do that. Normal people, they think: 'How should I retire in ten years ?' They don't think
about exile. It is true that when I self-catapulted that I landed somehow softly, because
what was waiting for me in a few months was a grant in Berlin, a DAAD grant for the
writers and so on.

First I was in Berlin, then I was in the States, then I was invited to spend the year in
Amsterdam. By that time I got quite tired of traveling and renting places and not knowing,
so I thought maybe I should at least keep the place I am renting, as a kind of a permanent,
more stable address. Then I went back to Germany and then I went back to the United
States and in 1999 when I came back to Amsterdam I simply was so tired and somehow
desperate of all of that that I thought maybe I should make this town my home.
So that is why.

Among her inspirations is On the Edge of Reason, a 1938 novel by the persecuted Zagreb
writer Miroslav Krleza, about a man whose principled stand causes him to lose everything
and end up in prison. Yet, she says, "it was liberating for him to speak out".
Inspirations
Red Cavalry and Odessa Tales by Isaac Babel
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
On the Edge of Reason by Miroslav Krleza

Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1991), In the Jaws of Life (1992), Have A Nice Day:
From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994), The Culture of Lies (1998), The
Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998), Thank You For Not Reading (2003), Lend Me
Your Character (2004), The Ministry of Pain (2005), Nobody’s Home (2007), Baba Yaga Laid
An Egg (2009), Karaoke Culture (2011), Europe in Sepia (2014)