Prof. Magdalena Kostova-Panayotova, DSc.
South-West University „Neofit Rilski“
Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria
https://doi.org/10.53656/for23.231nera
Absract. The article focuses on two texts by the remarkable Balkan writer, Dubravka Ugrešić, in which she introduces questions of emigration, identity, belonging to the nation, the community, as well as questions such as what it is like to be a writer writing in a small language, is there hope for the literature written in Slavic languages, how resistance makes sense in a world where the ability to adapt is everything. Among the non-hypocritical messages of Dubravka Ugrešić's novels there is one that states we must learn to live with bitterness and deceit in a world
where the best thing one can hope to leave behind is but a footnote to earn his ticket
to eternity . The narrator in Ugrešić's texts is the eternal emigrant crossing different
worlds, an image of the unloved, lonely, space-traveling storyteller who may have
nothing else but his thousand and one stories, and the exact words that might save
someone.
Keywords: Balkans; identity; nation; history; Dubravka Ugreshic, literature