Intertekst slavenske mitologije i elementi magijskoga realizma u romanu Dubravke Ugrešić Baba Jaga je snijela jaje
The Intertext of Slavic Mythology and Elements of Magic Realism in the Novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić

Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates how elements of magical realism are enacted through a Slavic mythical intertext in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Baba Jaga je snijela jaje (Baba Jaga Laid an Egg) (2008). It is a unique text in Croatian novelistic prose of the 2000s due to its inventive inclusion of mythlogical, ethnographical, ur-Slavonic and pre-Christian layers in a hybrid genre novelistic form, constructed through the author’s well known “patchwork” poetics. The characteristics of magical realism are here recognised as a narrative mode, which can be entirely incorporated into the genre hybrid, intertextual and interdiscursive multi-layered nature of the novel. These are: the irreducible elements of magic (the characters’ inexplicable powers and features, their influence on special and temporal relations as well as on the relationships of other characters, without any sense of bewilderment or disbelief); a detailed description of the world of phenomena (a mimetically represented reality of the life of elderly woman as well as the urban spaces of (South) Eastern Europe); the concordance of contradicting understandings of occurrences; the unification of different domains in the perception of reality (a lack of surety in the information received by the bodily senses) as well as a breach in the commonly received ideas on space, time and identity. In the entire novel an inherent sense of the marvellous is present underneath its mimetic framework, through which the transitional reality of post-communist countries (as a contrast between impoverished and decaying urban quarters with the decadent luxury in the highly stylised spaces of hotels and spas). The figurative nature of the characters of the elderly woman, founded on a mythic intertextuality, in this work it is interpreted as a figure of the voice of a suspended subject between two discursive systems: the transitional; the dominant and colonising, in which an elderly woman is a degraded object on the margins of society and a culturally submerged, mythic system in which an elderly woman is frighteningly powerful. According to S. Slemon and L. Hutcheon, the aim of magical realism is the creation of a liberating poetic for the suspended subject in the various contexts of marginalisation. However, it must be noted that due to the aforementioned mythological intertext on the witch Baba Yaga, upon which magical realism as a mode of narrative relies here, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg represents an innovative text within the corpus of Croatian novelistic prose on the theme of transition, so that due to the presence of its characteristic imaginarium we can place within this narrative model (despite some differences) which are represented in it.

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