Liminal Balkans

Albania lies at the crux of the doubly oriental identity of the Balkans on account of its Ottoman and Socialist past. This paper examines the role of the Ottoman Empire in literary works that engage with history in an effort to articulate a conception of Albanian identity as fundamentally European. The Kosovar epic ballads of Millosh Kopiliq and Ismail Kadare’s novel The Siege both portray the medieval conflicts between Albanians and Ottomans. Yet the works do not simply assert the cultural superiority of Albanians in the face of “oriental barbarism”. Instead, the Ottomans serve to dramatize the ambiguous cultural and geographical positioning of Kosovo and Albania. Using Lucien Goldmann’s method of genetic structuralism, this study understands the particular identity articulated in each text as a response to the geographical, cultural and political environment of its author.Keywords: identity, nationalism, Kadare, Albania, Kosovo, orientalism, Ottoman Empire, Millosh Kopiliq

Sjecka peršin, sitno, sitno. Peršin mora biti sitno nasjeckan jer ako nije, mali neće mesne okruglice, a mesne su okruglice Pacovo omiljeno jelo. Sitno sjecka peršin, a poslije i češnjak, tako sitno da se gotovo ne vidi; nevidljiv češnjak da ga mali ne vidi i da ne kaže da ima češnjaka, što Paco najviše voli kad je riječ o mesnim okruglicama. Pa s rukama u smjesi mljevenog svinjećeg i junećeg mesa, pola-pola, mijesi kao nekad, kad je imala vremena mijesiti blato i izrađivati vrčeve, tanjure, pepeljare. Mijesi, posoli i malo popapri, tek toliko da Paco primijeti, a mali ne, pa još jaje i krušne mrvice. Mijesi, a na televiziji, u pozadini, svira ona pjesma za koju ne zna kako se zove, ali koja ide ovako pa pjevuši. Izgleda gotovo sretno dok s čistom pregačom mijesi, pjevuši la-la-la dok joj fluorescentno svjetlo s televizora u pozadini bliješti u oči, mijesi smjesu koju više sigurno ne treba mijesiti, ali koju ona i dalje mijesi jer voli zariti ruke u vlažno meso i osjetiti ga među prsti...

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...

Dogodilo se to u srijedu, to prosvjetljenje o kojem svi pričaju. Utorkom je Pedro bio Srce i razbijao gubice. Laka kategorija, žestok borac. S crvenom maskom i trokutastim crvenim boom na glatkim prsima. Uhvatio bi protivnika u polugu i stezao, sve dok se ne prestane opirati, i tek tad rekao sucu – Broji! Nema veze što sudac ne bi brojio ili bi brojio prebrzo, sve je to bilo samo predstava. Publika želi adrenalin, svjetla, galamu s tribina, divlju eleganciju borbe koja ga je svakog utorka navečer pretvarala u zvijezdu. Svakog bi utorka izlazio u noć, ozaren od pobjede.Zatim bi tu energiju ispucao s Marinom u najbližem motelu, ali vrlo brzo, dok bi je vozio kući, stvarnost bi počela nagrizati taj sjaj: jednosoban stan, Marinin stari, sav podbuhao od jeftina alkohola i buljenja u televizor, s poraženim izrazom lica, kao netko tko je svjestan koliko je zapravo jadan, tko neprestano smišlja kako da se izvuče, ali se nikako ne usudi napraviti prvi korak. Tad bi se Srce opet pretvorio u Pedr...

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.

Ne, kažem.Znam, kad kažem „ne“, to je to s nama, čist račun, rekli smo, karte na stolu, vino, keksi, humor – presuhi; klima, poljupci, zemlja za cvijeće – prevlažni. Dogovori umjesto sapunica kao kod drugih. Ne gubimo vrijeme na stvari koje nikoga ne zanimaju, čak ih ni na televiziji ne gledamo, nemamo televizor, imamo pametnijeg posla, i zabavljamo se jer znamo da se svijet ne može spasiti, mi smo spašeni samo privremeno, vremena je malo i nikada ne bismo skočili, ali osjećali smo se tako živima dok su nam se noge klatile preko ograde na terasi zgrade. Gledala sam vrhove svojih tenisica, stražnja svjetla automobila koji su se tamo dolje redali jedan za drugim poput crvenih mrava, gurali se u kolonama kroz uske ulice, noge mi još nikada nisu djelovale toliko kratko.Kao na moru na madracu na napuhavanje, rekla sam i ugrizla se za jezik, koji je viski razvezao jer nisi izgledao kao da imaš madrac na napuhavanje.Samo te voda nosi kad padneš, objasnio si, zrak te ne nosi, a ipak si bio tak...