An Evening in Memory of Dubravka Ugrešić

The British Croatian Society and the Centre for Southeast European Studies at UCL SSEES invite you to an evening in memory of writer, SSEES friend and frequent guest, Dubravka Ugrešić. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she was based in Amsterdam since 1996; Ugrešić was identified as a Yugoslav writer. She majored in comparative literature and Russian language at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Arts, pursuing parallel careers as a scholar and as a writer. 

Dubravka Ugrešić published novels and short story collections. Her novella Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life (Croatian: Štefica Cvek u raljama života) was published in 1981. Her novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness received the NIN Award in 1988, the highest literary honour in former Yugoslavia. Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a novel about the melancholy of remembrance and forgetting. A female narrator, an exile, surrounded by scenery of post-Wall Berlin and images of her war-torn country Yugoslavia, constantly changes the time zones of her life, past and present. Set in Amsterdam, Ministry of Pain portrays the lives of displaced people. In the novel Baba Yaga Laid An Egg, Ugrešić drew on the Slavic mythological figure of Baba Yaga to tell a modern fairy tale. It concerns societal gender inequalities and discrimination.

At the outbreak of the war in 1991 in former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-war and anti-nationalist stand. She wrote critically about nationalism, the stupidity and the criminality of war, and soon became a target of parts of the Croatian media, fellow writers and public figures. She had been accused of anti-patriotism and proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch”. She left Croatia in 1993 after a long-lasting series of public attacks, and because she “could not adapt to the permanent terror of lies in public, political, cultural, and everyday life”. She wrote about her experience of collective nationalist hysteria in her book The Culture of Lies, and described her “personal case” in the essay The Question of Perspective (Karaoke Culture). She continued to write about the dark sides of modern societies, about the “homogenization” of people induced by media, politics, religion, common beliefs and the marketplace (Europe in Sepia).

Southeast European studies seminar series

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