Liminal Balkans

Onoga dana kad sam navršila osam godina, moja sestra – koja nije podnosila da i na sekundu maknu pogled s nje – iskapila je cijelu šalicu izbjeljivača. Abi je imala tri godine. Prvo se osmjehnula, možda baš od gađenja, zatim je nabrala lice u preplašenu grimasu bola. Kad je mama ugledala praznu šalicu kako joj visi iz ruke, problijedjela je kao i ona.„Abi-moj-bože”, bilo je sve što je mama rekla. „Abi-moj-bože.” I još je prošlo nekoliko sekundi prije nego što se pokrenula.Prodrmala ju je za ramena, ali Abi nije reagirala. Povikala je na nju, ali Abi ni tada nije reagirala. Otrčala je do telefona i nazvala tatu, a kad je dotrčala natrag, Abi je i dalje stajala, sa šalicom što joj je visjela iz ruke. Mama joj je istrgnula šalicu i bacila je u sudoper. Otvorila je hladnjak, izvadila mlijeko i nalila ga u čašu. Zagledala se u čašu, potom je pogledala Abi pa uopet čašu te je na kraju bacila i čašu u sudoper. Tata, koji je radio jako blizu kuće, smjesta je stigao, ali mama je svejedno stigla...

5 June 192312 June 192317 June 192319 June 192319 June 1923Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and began to publish in her teens, to multiple good reviews by Russian literary critics. She was a working contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke, all of whom were important to her as rival, lover, correspondent and mentor, respectively, and as they should have been, in her view, from time to time, as her views of their roles in her life were changeable.Tsvetaeva left the Soviet Union in 1922 to reunite with her husband after a four-year wartime separation during the Russian Revolution. She lived as an exile in Berlin, Prague and Paris through 1939. The period of exile in Prague, lasting from August of 1922 to May of 1925, was a very productive period, with new poems arriving every other day or so, or sometimes two poems a day, until her son Georgy (nicknamed Mur) was born in 1924, when the poems slowed to a relative trickle.

This paper discusses Téa Obreht's 2010 novel The Tiger's Wife within the context of transmigrations and post-national conceptions of both the real and mythical translocality. Through analysis of Obreht’s discourse of disremembering, which is in Aleksandar Hemon’s definition a recognition of one’s own experience under the new narrative, the paper will explore the transnational dimensions of the Slavic-American identity of The Tiger’s Wife. The aim of this paper is to focus on the new understanding of transnational relationality as well as on a reconception of reality that disremembers Obreht’s or, on a larger scale, human experience within the mythical realism of The Tiger’s Wife.Keywords: transnationalism, the Slavic-American identity, disremembering, Aleksandar Hemon, Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife, mythical realismTo disremember, according to Aleksandar Hemon, a celebrated Bosnian-American writer with an immigrant experience, is to recognize one’s own experience under the new narrative...

Sudbine ljudi s ruba portugalskog društva – koji tešku muku svakodnevice žive iz dana u dan, boreći se protiv gladi i neimaštine, svaki na svoj osobit, a opet sličan način – životne su priče koje nam u trećem dijelu tetralogije prikazuje mladi portugalski književnik Valter Hugo Mae. Godine 2004. objavljen je prvi dio tetralogije, pod naslovom o nosso reino (naše kraljevstvo), u kojem je protagonist dječak. Već dvije godine kasnije, 2006., izlazi o remorso de baltasar serapiao (kajanje baltasara serapiaoa), priča o mladosti glavnog lika, a tetralogija završava romanom stroj za pravljenje španjolaca (máquina de fazer espanhóis), objavljenom 2010. godine, koji pripovijeda o sudbini 84 – godišnjeg Antónia Silve, koji starost provodi u domu za umirovljenike.

In Croatia, the political changes involving most of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s included a war fought between 1991 and 1995. This paper aims, by examining the press releases and newspaper articles published in the Italian daily La Stampa in 1995, to show how this influential newspaper worked on shaping Italian public opinion about the war in Croatia, and to examine the extent to which well-rooted stereotypes about the Balkans played a role in the process. The application of the methods of Critical Discourse Analysis on the material has confirmed the occurrence of stereotypes expressed through several types of polarized representations, for example, the one between the good (Italy/Europe/West) and the bad (Croatia/the Balkans – associated with “primitive” nationalism and chaos). It has also shown that Italy (as part of Europe), largely saw itself as the “appointed” Western civilized neighbour towards one of its Balkan neighbours, Croatia, and worked on trying, as To...

This article examines the Tirana Independence Monument, first inaugurated in November of 2012 on the hundredth anniversary of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire. The monument, designed by Visar Obrija and Kai Roman Kiklas, swiftly fell into disrepair until it was recently renovated in November of 2015. The article analyzes the monument’s function in terms of its doubled existence as a sign of perpetual natality (the possibility of the rebirth of national consciousness) and as a ruin with a spectral pseudo-presence (as an object that continually reminds us of the disjunctures that divorce the present from its historicity). It considers the way the monument’s inauguration relates to the politics of monumentality in contemporary Albania, and argues that the monument’s gradual ruination between 2012 and 2015 can be read as a particular manifestation of the history of the image in late capitalist society.Keywords: spectrality, natality, monumentality, Albania, Tirana, independenc...