Tajni život romana
The secret life of a novel

Summary/Abstract: Literature is a fascinating realm that takes us into different worlds and allows us to experience various destinies and realities. The author of the article emphasizes not only the importance of words and books, which enrich our reality, but particularly highlights the significance and characteristics of a literary technique that combines real and false elements, fragmentariness, and mystification. As an example, he mentions Danilo Kiš, who skillfully employed such techniques in his works. His novel “Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča” is an extraordinary example of literary mystification, where reality and fiction intertwine in an intriguing way. In literary works where writers employ such a technique, they do not appear as “divine” creators anymore, but as chroniclers who present facts and their sources. However, even these sources are not real because in the literary work, the source of everything is literally the creator himself: both the names and events and the “whole fictional world.” The author is right in claiming that the sources are “just part of the overall mystification that the text produces.” In this article, he provides the reader with a retrospective of the creation and interesting “journey” of his novel “Legenda o Bijeloj džamiji”–from reality to fiction and back. It is precisely in this novel that the “somewhat unusual mixture of documentary and literary, fictional and real, dream and reality” is skillfully intertwined: It consists of 30 skillfully arranged texts, actually fictional letters and documents that never existed in reality. The archaic style and language in which these texts are written achieve their authenticity as they hover between reality and dream. And so begins the “secret life of the novel.”

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