If there’s one thing Dubravka Ugrešić didn’t want, it was to be pigeonholed. So you didn’t like her Croatian call a writer. At most you could say that she wrote in English and Croatian and lived in Amsterdam. She died in that city on Thursday at the age of 73.
Since 1993 Ugrešić lived in voluntary exile. Two years earlier – she was then teaching at the University of Zagreb – she had published critical articles in the German and French press about the aggressive nationalism with which, among other things, Croatia’s fascist past in World War II and the Croatian and Serbian war crimes in the Yugoslavia- war were wiped out. On the basis of these statements, she was called a traitor in the Croatian media. Her best friends had suddenly become fanatical nationalists and turned against her.
She then went abroad. After a stay in Berlin and the United States, she settled in the Netherlands in 1996. Croatia had become a fascist country of cheaters for her, she said in an interview with this newspaper in 2019.
Thanks to her authoritative essays and novels, Ugrešić had been a serious contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature for many years. Some of her best known works are The culture of lies (1995), Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1997) Ministry of Pain (2005), The Fox (2017).
In her writings, she confronted Western Europe in particular with its disinterest in what was happening in Eastern Europe and Russia over the past twenty-five years. Only after the downing of MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 did that blindness come to an end. If anyone recognized Vladimir Putin’s aggressive power politics in time, it was Ugrešić.
She also had a keen eye for the incorrigible ‘tribal thinking’ of Europe, where two world wars had been fought. Given the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine that has been raging since 2014, a third global conflict was looming, she wrote.
According to Ugrešić, the same Europe was in a serious identity crisis, which was exacerbated by the fact that modern man, thanks to his unbridled consumerism, had lost his essential self and lived in one big exhibitionistic, banal Big Brother society. Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter were the main culprits, because they would supplant any normal conversation. In one of her essays in Europe in sepia (2019) she writes: ‘Totalitarianism is dead, long live totalitarian freedom’, when she wants to show that the corrupt governments that came to power in Eastern Europe and the Balkans after the fall of communism can do anything with their citizens what they want.
In addition to Eastern Europe, Ugrešić also aimed her sharp pen at the cultural consumer. He would be guided by the market and did not dare to have his own taste for fear of being left out. The danger of this was, among other things, that in the absence of independent judges such as Harold Bloom and George Steiner, mediocre literature would predominate.
The authentic public intellectual and writer Ugrešić herself had a taste of her own like no other. With her death, one of the most astute intellectuals of our time disappears.
Also read the review of Ugrešić’s novel The Fox:The fox, eternal symbol of illusion and deceit