Zvjerinjak
The bestiary

Summary/Abstract: The central section of this issue is ‘The Context’ column, entitled Writers and the Nationalistic Ideology, with essays about writers who are in one way or another responsible for the eruption of national-chauvinistic feelings among the population of former Yugoslavia, which filled the public space with hate toward the other nations and cultures and contributed to the bloody collapse of the country. According to Velimir Visković, some of these prominent and influential writers “felt the obligation to act as guardians of collective memory, defenders of national identity. When the common state started falling apart, when the ideological system caved in, some of these writers started to believe in their own prophetic function as national bards that model the political future of their own people. They understood their role in an anachronistic manner that was nourished by the mythological images of folk epics or by the romanticist poetry of the 19th century. Even in the ‘80s we faced the flourishing of new historical novels that did not deal with history in the post-modern manner of historical meta-fiction, but tried to throw light on the past of their people from the perspective of militant nationalism, pointing out enemies and constructing the ideological foundation for the future wars. In the ‘90s, numerous writers appeared as authors of flattering praise for national leaders, while some of them were even major ideological architects of the concepts of ethnic cleansing.” Besides Visković, other writers and theoreticians writing about this phenomena in this column include names such as Slavenka Drakulić, Mirjana Miočinović, Predrag Matvejević, Nikola Bertolino, Filip David, Nikica Mihaljević, Marko Vešović, Teofil Pančić, Andrej Nikolaidis, Tvrtko Kulenović, Milan T. Đorđević, Andrew Wachtel and Enver Kazaz.

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