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Balkan warrior

After criticising Croatia, her homeland, for its brutality during the Yugoslav wars, Dubravka Ugresic was driven into exile. Still savagely satirising nationalism, she fears for Kosovo's future
Dubravka Ugresic
Dubravka Ugresic. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Dubravka Ugresic. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

During the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic was denounced, she says, as "a whore, a witch and a traitor". A reluctant citizen of newly independent Croatia, she took a stand against nationalism "and all its perversities", and like many people became a target. As the Balkan wars escalated, she found herself the victim of a "collective paranoia: people rushed to be willing executioners. Nobody forced them to kill, spit on and humiliate others - but they did. It became acceptable. It was like being marked with a yellow star."

In her astringent writing of the early 1990s, collected in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1995), Ugresic wrote of nationalism as the "ideology of the stupid". Though she was just as scathing about Serbian chauvinism, she excoriated a self-justificatory victim mentality in the "freshly baked European state of Croatia", whose ultra-nationalist president, Franjo Tudjman, had come to power in 1990, declaring Croatia paradise on earth. With a nod to Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Ugresic wrote: "What is being annihilated with guns, grenades, murders, rape, the displacement of peoples, 'ethnic cleansing', the new ideology supported by the media, is memory."

The title essay was written shortly before Ugresic was driven out of Croatia in 1993: the book appeared first in Dutch translation. She wandered in Germany, the Netherlands and the US before settling in 1999 in Amsterdam, where she lives alone. A novelist, critic, screenwriter and children's author, she loathes being identified as a Croatian writer, the representative of a "country from which I ran away into exile."

For Marina Warner, Ugresic is a "wise jester and aphorist with a madcap wit". Lisa Appignanesi relishes her "acerbic sense of life, and Eeyore grumpiness". Ugresic, who likens AA Milne's Eeyore to the sceptical, melancholic figure of the central European intellectual, practises sardonic jesting with a serious intent. Her work ranges from Thank You For Not Reading (2001), a dissection of today's literary marketplace, to dark fiction exploring trauma, flight and the violence done to selfhood by political upheaval.

Her most recent novel, The Ministry of Pain (2004), now out in translation, is named after an S&M club in The Hague - also, of course, the setting of the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia. In the book a lecturer in Serbo-Croat at Amsterdam university tries to keep alive "Yugonostalgia" in her students - who are all fellow emigrés - as her own world disintegrates. The depiction of a sado-masochistic relationship underlines what Ugresic sees as the "self-hatred, self-hurt part of post-traumatic conditions": it is a novel about "the trauma of language and the language of trauma."

Ugresic's newspaper columns, recently collected as Nobody's Home, reveal her to be a sharp observer of absurdities on both sides of the old Berlin wall. "People in the east developed a bunch of stereotypes about the shiny, democratic west, while westerners had a sense of superiority," she says. "A lot of lies were there on both sides from the beginning." She laments the passing of underground culture ("One can buy Prada shoes, but the jokes are gone"), while charting nostalgia, not for communism but for its mundane souvenirs, even the ugliest and most kitsch. Like Ostalgie - the post-1989 term coined in former East Germany - it is an "archaeological drive", powered by the realisation that all this is about to vanish.

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.

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."

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."

Of Tudjman, who died in 1999, and his nationalists, she says "probably they were right to hate me because I made them look funny and stupid; you can't forget people laughing at you. I didn't believe in their cause, or that, for the sake of the state, you have to kill so many people. I thought they were criminals out for money, who manipulated people with that ethno-nationalist stuff." For her, the so-called Yugoslav war was a fascist struggle for new borders, its winners powermongers, mafiosi, criminals, war profiteers.

Tudjman, she adds, was a bad historian: "He wanted to erase the past, to cut 50 years out of Yugoslav history, and glue 1991 'the year of Croatian independence' to 1941, when Croatia was a Nazi puppet state." Nazi collaborators were resurrected as Croatian heroes, she says, while kebabs were spurned as Serb cuisine, anti-fascist monuments pulled down and libraries ethnically cleansed. In Ugresic's view, the majority probably wanted to feel they were victims of communism. "Victims don't have any responsibility. History is like the weather - it has nothing to do with you. But who were the local communists, or the local Nazis? My question is always, 'and what were you doing?"'

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."

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.

When forced to apply for a Croatian passport, under "ethnicity" Ugresic wrote "none". Because of the heritage of the second world war, when Croats and Serbs killed each other, she says "people accepted Yugoslavdom as a kind of relief, especially in Bosnia. They didn't want to hear who was who." She partly blames EU policy for having to choose. "When Yugoslavia fell apart, there were more declared Yugoslavs than Slovenes, but the EU wouldn't accept them. They lost ground and were never recognised. You hear only of the fight between Croats and Serbs. But people were deaf to the story of those who didn't want to be either."

For her, Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia this week was understandable in reaction to Serbia's "chauvinistic arrogance" but she remains cynical about the nationalist rhetoric on all sides. "I followed this domino effect across Yugoslavia," she says. "It's not logical that this should be the last chapter."

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."

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".


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