СЛИКИТЕ НА ЕВРОПА ВО СОВРЕМЕНАТА МАКЕДОНСКА КНИЖЕВНОСТ (И. ЏЕПАРОСКИ, Г. СТЕФАНОВСКИ, Е. ЛАФАЗАНОВСКИ)
THE IMAGES OF EUROPE IN CONTEMPORARY MACEDONIAN LITERATURE (DŽEPAROSKI, G. STEFANOVSKI, E. LAFAZANOVSKI)

Summary/Abstract: To the question what Europe is like, Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski in a 1997 interview replied, in the style of a zen monk: ‘There are thousands of parallel Europes.’ Even though a quarter of a century has passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as readers we have witnessed that in contemporary literature, when speaking of Europe, on still thematises the East-West dichotomy. Therefore, on this occasion, we propose a comparative reading of several works of contemporary Macedonian literature produced in the last two decades. Namely, we shall attempt to analyse the images of Europe, as well as the stereotypes of Europe in the fields of poetry, drama and prose, through several representative examples: the book of poetry Grabnuvanjeto na Evropa (2012) / The Abduction of Europeby Ivan Džeparoski (1958), the plays Eks-Ju (1996) / Ex Yu, Evroalien (1998) / Euroalien, and Hôtel Europa (2000) by Goran Stefanovski (1952), as well as the novella Egzotična kantata (2008) / The Exotic Cantata by Ermis Lafazanovski (1961). In Džeparoski’s poetry, European culture is presented as a complex and exciting palimpsest, and we find a very similar idea in Goran Stefanovski, who stresses that cultural identity is always a composite and an alloy. As a playwriting strategy of Stefanovski’s plays, related to the imagological aspect, the interactivity is particularly striking: the viewers-as-participants, at least for a few minutes, directly face the trauma of the difficult economic situation, nationalism, exile, alienation, labelling, but also the stereotypes of ‘genetic purity’ and the traps of hate speech. On the other hand, the story The Exotic Cantata by Ermis Lafazanovski invites imagological readings: the problem of the difficulties when receiving the music of the Other is one of the fundamental thematic threads of the story.

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