The specific characteristics of the "new Bosnian narrative" as exemplified by Karim Zaimović's short stories book Tajna džema od malina

The article is an attempt to describe the specifics of the „new Bosnian narrative” as exemplified by Karim Zaimovic’s short stories collected in the book Tajna džema od malina. The text synthetically presents the new generation of prose writers clearly referring to the heritage of the so-called „narrative Bosnia” (J. Kršić). The generation of writers contemporary to Zaimovic, which dominated the literary scene in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last decade of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century, was united by a creative motivation generated by common experiences, which was a reaction to the tragedy of the homeland war. The article briefly characterizes the „new narrative Bosnia”, highlighting the great tradition of narrative (pripovijetka) in local literature. Narrative/Short story is considered to be the most important and valued genre, which in its meaning goes far beyond purely literary boundaries – it has played and still plays an important role in the cultural, social, political and ideological context. In the text, it is shown that Zaimović’s stories, compared with (anti)war writing, are distinguished by: the way of constructing scenes that make up the story adapted from comic art, the presence of fantastic elements known from the work of „Borges writers”, as well as a characteristic, humorous style –where the author deals with the absurdity of war by the use of grotesque and satire, and describes the Sarajevo apocalypse using numerous metaphors and allegories. Even though, Zaimović’s texts cannot be treated as a model or the most representative example of “the new Bosnian narrative“, their unconventional way of presentation of the main theme as well as structural and compositional innovation have earned them an iconic status. The circumstances of the stories, and above all the fate of the young writer, made him a tragic symbol of the drama of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Collaborative Authorship and Postmigration in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Novel Montecore

Montecore. En unik tiger (2006) stages its own making through the joint authorship of Kadir, a friend of Abbas’, and Jonas, a young writer and Abbas’ son. Their collaboration aims at a novel about Abbas, who migrated from Tunisia to Sweden, now a missing person. The interpretation of his life proves to be a conflicting ground for the co-authors because of their generational differences. This article proposes an analysis of Montecore building upon the notion of collaborative or multiple authorship (Stillinger 1991; Love 2002), and upon the discussion in Scandinavia and in Germany on contemporary migration and postmigration literature. Through a metafictional collaborative authorship – a so far neglected dimension in the study of Montecore – Jonas Hassen Khemiri depicts a young author’s ambivalent feelings towards his father and his story. Abbas has vanished from the family, but his special gift to Jonas, through Kadir’s mediation, deals with a linguistic talent that defies the rules of Swedish, showing the power of language to invent, and to imagine a different and less oppressive order.

Травматический опыт сталинизма в романах Гузели Яхиной

The traumatic experience of stalinism in the novels of Guzel Yakhina. The focus of the study is on how the bestselling novels of the young writer Guzel Yakhina reflect on Russian collective trauma and the traumatic experience of the 20th century. The novels Zuleikha and My Children are set in the post-revolutionary period, among ethnic groups who were victims of Stalinist terror. The analysis explores how Yakhina depicts the colonialism of the Soviet empire and the role of mythic and mythological models in the interpretation of historical events.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s The Beast in the Cave: an interpretation

The article proposes a concept study of one of Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s earliest pieces The Beast in the Cave (1905). The author employs elements of biographical and mythological (Jungian) approaches to the text, synthetising them in order to achieve a complex understanding of Lovecraft’s work. In the study the author tries to reach three interconnected goals – to come up with an interpretation of the text previously ignored by the critics and thus to include The Beast in the Cave in the Lovecraftian canon, as well as to establish a link between the writer’s personal circumstances and their metaphorical embodiment in the text in question. The author of the article concentrates upon several crucial elements of the short story – the topos of the cave and the three principal characters (the protagonist, the beast, and the guide who comes to the narrator’s rescue in the end). Despite the fact that Lovecraft’s story had been composed almost thirty years prior to the first publication of some of Carl Gustav Jung’s principal ideas on archetypes of the collective unconscious, the young writer seems to be able to intuitively foresee the artistic potential of the cave monomyth (the hero goes down the abyss and fights the monster who lives there). Lovecraft masterfully relates the myth, simultaneously turning this general story into a very personal account of his own tragic experience and his way of coping with the crisis. Such an interpretation makes it possible to perceive The Beast as an early example of Lovecraft’s “mythologising” écriture.

Artistic Polemic with A.P. Chekhov in the Story by T.L. Shchepkina-Kupernik “Loneliness”

From the earliest works, Chekhov acts as a polemicist with both contemporary literature and with the literature of the immediate past. This polemic is expressed not so much in the direct statements of the writer in letters or in conversations recorded by the memory of the memoirists, but in an artistic form, with the help of an imaginative system. However, there were people who polemicized with Chekhov. On the one hand, these were magazine critics, and on the other, fellow writers. One of these authors was T.L. Shchepkina-Kupernik, who wrote the story "Loneliness" at the age of twenty, which was published in the authoritative journal “Russian Thought” in 1894. The works of Chekhov, which caused the greatest resonance among the reading public: “The Jumping Girl”, “Boring Story”, “Ward No. 6”, became the material for the polemic of the young writer. Shchepkina-Kupernik actually agrees with the opinion of the readers who recognized the element of libel in the story "The Jumping girl", and the element of distortions of reality in others. The author of “Loneliness” creates an artistic picture of the world, which seems to her more realistic than Chekhov’s. However, the story of the young writer does not go beyond the bounds of stencil mass literature. All her claims against the author of “Ward No. 6” turn out to be untenable and demonstrate her lack of understanding of the innovative nature of Chekhov’s work. The complex nature of the dialogic character of his works, based on the art of parody stylization, was not perceived by the opponent, who opposed it with a one-dimensional and simplified image of reality.

“MY DEAR, CLOSE AND DISTANT FRIEND”: Nina Berberova’s Letters to Sergej Rittenberg (1947–1975)

Nina Berberova (1901–1993) almost appears to have lived several lives. First, she was a young writer in the revolutionary Russia. Then she witnessed the hectic 1920s in Berlin and achieved her literary breakthrough in interwar Paris with psychologically finely-honed novels and short stories set in the Russian émigré community. Finally, she went on in the latter half of the century to a career as a Slavist in the United States. She had her eyes on Russia the whole time. As an academic she studied the cracks in the ideological wall and seems early on to have foreseen her return to her homeland. At last, as she approached the age of ninety, she had vanquished the Soviet Union and could go back in triumph in the “revolutionary” year of 1989. In addition to everything else Berberova was an avid letter writer who maintained a great many correspondences. For nearly thirty years she was friends with her Russian – and Petersburgian –countryman Sergej Rittenberg (1899–1975) in Stockholm, to whom she sent more than 150 letters and postcards between 1947 and 1975. A reflection of her thoughts and reading interests, they also provide a glimpse into the genesis of her huge memoir The Italics Are Mine (Kursiv moj). This volume presents Berberova’s letters with an introduction and extensive commentaries by Professor Magnus Ljunggren.

Escreva-me e te direi quem és: fazer epistolar e suas facetas em “Os romances da Bahia”, de Jorge Amado / Write Me and I’ll Tell You Who You Are: Epistolary Writing and his Facets in “Novels of Bahia”, by Jorge Amado

Resumo: O artigo se propõe a analisar as facetas da arte epistolar em três obras de Jorge Amado: Cacau (1933), Suor (1934) e Jubiabá (1935), que compõe o ciclo de “Os romances da Bahia”. Empreendido por Jorge Amado nos anos 1930, quando debutava na vida literária e tinha 20 anos, o projeto ficou conhecido pela crítica como “romance proletário”. Nele, o escritor se volta para as questões do povo e inaugura um período de forte militância política e de acentuada voltagem social. Amado confere grande relevância às cartas nas obras em tela, reconhecendo sua popularidade e vislumbrando sua importância para captar/retratar a vida daqueles em situação de vulnerabilidade. O artigo estuda procedimentos e mecanismos colocados em cena pelo jovem escritor e propõe novos conceitos no âmbito das correspondências, dentre os quais: a carta democrática, a epistolografia e a ascensão social, a redenção epistolar, a renúncia epistolar, o silêncio epistolar, a carta coletiva, o binômio carta e verdade e o dispositivo da carta-documento.Palavras-chave: Jorge Amado; Romances da Bahia; carta; epistolar; correspondência.Abstract: The article proposes to analyze the facets of epistolary writing in three books by Jorge Amado: Cacau (1933), Sweat (1934) and Jubiabá (1935), which composes the cycle of “The novels of Bahia”. Undertaken by Jorge Amado in the 1930s, when he debuted in literary life and was 20 years old, the project became known to critics as “proletarian romance”. In it, the writer turns to the issues of the people and inaugurates a period of strong political militancy and marked social tension. Amado confers great relevance to the letters in the works on canvas, recognizing its popularity and envisioning its importance to capture /portray the lives of the humblest. The article studies procedures and mechanisms put on stage by the young writer and proposes new concepts in the context of correspondence, among which: the democratic letter, epistolography and social ascension, epistolary redemption, epistolary renunciation, epistolary silence, collective letter, binomial letter and truth and the device of the letter-document.Keywords: Jorge Amado; Novels of Bahia; letter; epistolary; correspondence.

Milton and Transcendent Authorship

This chapter examines Milton’s notion and practice of authorship over the first half of his career. Beginning with Sonnet 8 and some of Milton’s other early poems—‘On Shakespeare’, Mansus, ‘The Passion’, and Lycidas—the chapter shows how as a young writer he embraced an idealistic notion of poetry’s preservative power but always in terms of his texts’ material transmission. Two crucial experiences helped to develop Milton’s thinking about his authorship: the outrage prompted by his divorce tracts underscored his works’ vulnerability, while the printing of his Poems in 1645 drove home the need for collaboration if his writing were to survive. All of Milton’s early works illustrate how his concept of authorship anticipates the monist philosophy that will animate Paradise Lost. He understood early on that his writing was both letter and spirit: his words needed an appropriate material form if they were to have a lasting spiritual life.

Jewish Wheaties

Roth travels with Barbara Sproul to Asia, while maintaining his opposition to the Vietnam War; his writing turns to satire in a general effort to undermine seriousness in politics and literature Baseball, long a love of Roth’s, emerges in his lengthy burlesque novel, The Great American Novel followed by his semi-autobiographical My Life as a Man (1974), a rebuke to his first wife, Maggie. In the midst of his writing, a bitter legal encounter with Norman Mailer involving the young writer Alan Lelchuk occurs, at the same time he develops a friendship with the important Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick, who admired Roth’s rewrite of Kafka, The Breast. But he also experiences sustained criticism from Irving Howe which he never forgot. Roth unexpectedly changes publishers leaving Random House for Holt with a new editor and soon-to-be friend, Aaron Asher.

Coda: “It’s a Miserable Life”

This chapter begins with Roth’s comic assessment of his own career as an author shared with a young writer and then analyzes his final volume, the essay collection Why Write? It then examines how he spent his time after he gave up writing fiction, while noting his final public reading on 8 May 2014 in New York. His death in New York on 22 May 2018 and the international reaction to the news follows. His funeral at Bard College in May 2018 and his memorial service held at the New York Public Library on 25 September 2018 were occasions to honor and remember the writer. His efforts to complete his personal story, even from the grave, via instructions to his biographer and others. He always meant to be in control.