After Yugoslavia

The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land

Radmila Gorup, Radmila Gorup

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804787345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Osteuropäische Geschichte

The book brings together many of the best known commentators and scholars who write about former Yugoslavia. The essays focus on the post-Yugoslav cultural transition and try to answer questions about what has been gained and what has been lost since the dissolution of the common country. Most of the contributions can be seen as current attempts to make sense of the past and help cultures in transition, as well as to report on them.

The volume is a mixture of personal essays and scholarly articles and that combination of genres makes the book both moving and informative. Its importance is unique. While many studies dwell on the causes of the demise of Yugoslavia, this collection touches upon these causes but goes beyond them to identify Yugoslavia's legacy in a comprehensive way. It brings topics and writers, usually treated separately, into fruitful dialog with one another.

Part I

My Yugoslavia: Personal Essays

1

My Yugoslavia

Maria Todorova

“My Yugoslavia” is my way of sharing with the ones for whom Yugoslavia was an existential reality, their home for good or for bad, how a view from the outside was shaped. While it is an external view, it is not necessarily foreign: I would dare to say it is the view of an intimate stranger (or, less poetically, of a neighbor). This is not a research essay that pretends to add new knowledge or novel analysis. What it does do is illustrate my scholarly and personal engagements with Yugoslavia; it is a kind of Bildungs essay.

When I was a little girl, of the four borders of my country my favorite was the one on the right side of the map: the eastern border, the Black Sea, where we went every summer on vacation. But I knew that on the left side of the map there was a country called Yugoslavia, and I was positively disposed to it, because from there came the chocolates called Kraš, which tetkica Božena would bring ever so often. She was a close family friend, born in Zagreb; she had moved to Sarajevo during the Second World War because she could not stand the Germans, and there she met and married a Bulgarian. We grew up with her daughter, who now lives in Canada with her Bulgarian husband. But that was pretty much all. Like most Balkan people at the time (and I think this pattern is very gradually beginning to be broken only in the past two decades), I was least of all interested in my neighbors. I had started school in Austria, then spent time in Germany, and later attended an English school; this is where my cultural interests lay. The one exception was Greece. I had been weaned, like many of my contemporaries, on Greek mythology, and I came from a mixed Greek-Bulgarian background, so sometime in high school I started learning Greek. My interest in the country almost vanished, however, when I began dating Bulgarian boys, and my Greek grandmother told me solemnly that I should never forget that I was a “daughter of Pericles.” I don’t remember myself ever understanding the appeal of nationalism, but if ever there was a potential for my developing some national pride, this was the dire end of it. On top of it came my interest in the Ottoman empire, and when I entered university, I began studying Ottoman Turkish. My interests thus gravitated in a southeastern direction. When I first visited Istanbul, I instantly fell in love with the city. I was aware that the people I was meeting there, who were all wonderfully educated and cultivated, were not your average Turks, but this gave me enough ammunition to fight all the profound anti-Turkish prejudices at home.

When the first Congress of Balkan Studies was convened, in Sofia in 1966, I was still in high school. Coming from a historian’s household, I had already encountered such silver-haired scholars, who came to our house from all over the world. I would regularly fall in love with one or more of them. Two in particular held my fancy for many years, both of them in their seventies: One, Anatolii Filipovich Miller, a prominent Russian Ottomanist, who sported a watch that had been given him by Atatürk, was like my third grandfather. The other one, an Albanian, I saw in a more romantic light: Alex Buda, a historian and president of the Albanian Academy of Sciences, who had studied in Vienna in his youth and could recite Goethe by heart. As a result, Albania was for me the epitome of real intellectuals, and the few contacts I had later with Albanian academics only confirmed this belief. This is significant, as it inadvertently influenced my first impressions of Serbian academics. At one of my earliest scholarly conferences, when I was a kind of debutante, nervous at presenting my work and at having left behind a husband with two tiny children for a few days, my colleague at the panel was a young Serbian academic. I had clashed with him in the corridors, when he enlightened me with regard to my naïveté about Albanians, all of whom he believed were savage and backward. Of course, my measure of Albania was Alex Buda. But it became worse when, unsatisfied with my continuing naïveté, he asked me how my husband and children were faring without their mother? What were they eating? Canned food? No, I replied, I had actually prepared cooked meals that I had put in boxes in the deep freezer with a different menu for every day. That was already a crime. I heard a lecture about organic and freshly prepared food, and how he refused to eat anything but what his mother prepared for him from the farmer’s market. We parted, both of us firm in our negative impressions. For him, I was a naïve person (part of the postwar feminization of scholarship), and a failure as a mother, and my verdict of him was no less generous: he was a racist and a macho. To me this meant “Oriental.” So, I nested Orientalism in Serbia (avant la lettre) many years before I came to know Milica Bakić-Hayden, and many years before she had conceived of her felicitous and evocative concept. In my Balkan map, Turkey was Western (because of the handful of fascinating intellectuals there), and Yugoslavia was Eastern. Even one of my earliest positive encounters with Yugoslavia was mediated through Turkey. I must have been nineteen, when, browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Istanbul, I stumbled upon Milovan Đilas’s Conversations with Stalin (Stalinle konuşmalar, 1964), in Turkish, and bought it. It did not much improve my Turkish, but it certainly whetted my appetite to learn more about Tito and why a broader Balkan federation had not materialized.

My subsequent encounters with Serbian colleagues did not entirely disabuse me of my first negative impression until quite later, although I excluded women from my harsh judgment. And even there, the beginning was thorny. Olga Zirojević, the great Ottomanist, whose book Carigradski drum od Beograda do Budima u XVI i XVII veku (The Constantinople Road from Belgrade to Buda in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1976) I had long admired, approached me after one of my comments at a conference and told me that I was vrlo vredna. I was deeply mortified. The literal translation of vrlo vredna in Bulgarian is “exceedingly harmful”—in a word, a huge pest. Luckily, Olga saw me blush and gasp for air, and the misunderstanding was dispersed with lots of laughter, but it taught me never to arrogantly assume that I knew a language simply because it was the closest to my own. So when I did my next purchase of Yugoslav books, I made sure that it was in the original. But it was still mediated: I bought Ivo Andrić’s Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina) in the foreign-language bookshop in Moscow. My real-life introduction to inflation I also owe to another remarkable Serbian historian: the Ottomanist Bojanka Desanić-Lukać. We were in Hungary for a conference in the 1980s, and we had to pay our registration fee “in currency”—three dollars, no national equivalent. So Bojanka opened her large purse and started rummaging through a pile of banknotes, which turned out to be dinars, until at the very bottom of her purse she fished out the three precious green banknotes, exclaiming: “Ovo su pare [Here is the money].”

Nor were my impressions of Yugoslav males, especially Serbian ones, entirely negative. One of the finest (of the very few fine Bulgarian feature movies) of the 1960s was a film adaptation of a novella by the great Bulgarian writer Emilian Stanev, Kradetsît na praskovi (The Peach Thief). The story—set in the First World War—is about a POW camp in Tîrnovo, in which a Serbian officer and the wife of the Bulgarian chief-of-garrison fall in love with each other. At the end, when the camp has to be relocated, he decides to say a last farewell, sneaking into the garden of his beloved trying to bring her peaches. He is shot by the guards as a mere peach thief. It was a wonderful role—of the sophisticated, disillusioned, peace-loving, internationalist, and cosmopolitan Serb, contrasted with the priggish, disciplined, and boring Bulgarian military husband. The beautiful Nevena Kokanova was in the leading female role, and the Serbian officer was played by Rade Marković, who for a brief time became the dream of many Bulgarian women. Maybe because this, my first encounter with Serbs, was artsy, my first real-life one was very disappointing. It felt like a betrayal. I have to say, though, and this is my way of paying homage to one of the sweetest human beings I have ever encountered, that when I was already in the United State and came to know closely the late and much missed Mita Đorđević, his warm and soft nature reminded me of the peach thief.

All of this is the stuff out of which stereotypes are made. Why am I telling these unimportant stories without any seeming connection or purpose? Because they all shaped a perception or, rather, a stereotype, and because this is how stereotypes are formed. They revolve around true occurrences, but it is the blanket generalization that elevates them to a seemingly coherent and, most often, dangerously sweeping and oversimplified picture. Later, I learned that such stereotypes are shared. In the mid-1990s, when I was writing Imagining the Balkans at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., the journalist Liljana Smajlović, a cofellow, told me that at one point she had lived in Algeria, where her mother, a doctor, was posted for a period of time. When rambunctious Yugoslavs would go to the beach with wine and beer, and were accosted there by the local police, they maintained that they were Bulgarians. Recently, I read Vesna Goldsworthy’s wonderfully moving memoir Chernobyl Strawberries, in which she describes going to a bookstore near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I remember this very same bookstore from before 1989: it gave out free books to Eastern Europeans—mostly forbidden literature, but also useful dictionaries, textbooks, and guides—and all you had to do was sign up in a pro forma book with your name and provenance, without being obliged to provide an identity. Vesna, upon picking up her volume of Solzhenitsyn (I believe), signed up as Bulgarian, just to be on the safe side. But this was not necessarily malicious. It displayed a certain kind of “cultural intimacy,” to use Michael Herzfeld’s notion, where you partake in the dirty linen of your group or a group you consider sufficiently close or well known.

Yugoslavia was the last Balkan country (outside of Albania, where I have never been) that I visited while still living in the Balkans. As a child, I had actually passed through it once with my family en route to Hungary, but I did not remember anything. But Yugoslavia was a favorite choice for many Bulgarians. The language was similar, there were often open border meetings (even in the days of the Cold War), and then there was Macedonia, the bleeding Bulgarian irredenta until the Second World War. To conclude my section on personal reminiscences, I recall how recently I almost lost a good Serbian friend with my potentially hurtful comments. Countering the bitter complaint about the fate of the Kosovo monasteries and what was the sacred symbolic center of Serbian national consciousness, I pointed out (obviously tactlessly): “You’ll get over it. The Bulgarians got over Macedonia, but most importantly the Greeks got over Constantinople, and Constantinople is worth a couple of hundred Serbian monasteries and Macedonia on top, and even I would not be able to get over the city.” We are, however, still friends.

It was mostly because of Macedonia that I was demonstrably not interested in Yugoslavia, since for many Bulgarians, and certainly for most of my historian colleagues, Macedonia was an obsession. I was sick of it and did not want to have anything to do with it (in fact, Macedonia is the only one of the former Yugoslav republics that I have not been to). But apart from Macedonia (and that primarily in unofficial conversations), university courses actually gave me a fairly solid grounding in the history of the neighboring South Slavs. As undergraduates conforming to a curriculum still owing a lot to the Humboldtian system we were drilled with an inordinate amount of ancient and medieval history. Apart from Bulgarian medieval history, I have passed exams in ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantine, Serbian medieval history, Russian medieval history, and Western European medieval history. All these courses were remarkably devoid of any nationalist zeal. The same was true, more or less, for the modern period, but it depended on the instructor. I happened to be exposed to professors of both kinds. For example, the professor who gave the lecture course on modern Balkan history went against every cliché that would have been instilled in school. Explaining the Treaty of San Stefano, for example, the cornerstone of the idea of the modern Bulgarian state, he did not necessarily challenge the idea that it resurrected a Bulgarian state in its ethnic boundaries, since it actually did follow the borders of the Bulgarian Exarchate recognized by the Sublime Porte. However, the professor accompanied this with a map showing that this new Bulgaria of 1878 was larger than the territories of the new kingdoms of Serbia and Greece combined. Here was a wonderful illustration not only of clashing perspectives but of the conflict between the principles of balance of power and self-determination. On the other hand, his young assistant, who was writing a dissertation on the Comintern policy toward Macedonia, was of the opinion that Yugoslavia was an “artificial formation” that would inevitably disintegrate. I thought this was silly at the time and I still think so, even as he seems to have been vindicated by the latest developments. What is natural as opposed to artificial in the world of politics, after all?

One of the most valuable graduate seminars I had at the University of Sofia was a seminar devoted to the history of the discipline. It was not exhaustive and there was little written on this subject at the time, but it provided a sound framework that remained intact over the years, to be filled in with detail and nuance. It is here that I first learned about Jovan Cvijić and his major work La Péninsule balkanique (1918). This grand regional survey was a paradigmatic work of geopolitical theory, drawing on the conjunction of geomorphologic and geophysical analysis with human geography and migrations, which bestowed a central political and strategic role to “Greater Serbia” as ordained by geography and in the best interests of the West. Thus history was subordinated to a geopolitical and ethno-cultural framework and the regional narrative was meant to buttress Yugoslav nation building, where common racial characteristics overwrote divergent historical and religious experiences.

While the turn of the twentieth century was generally characterized by the radicalization of national discourses, it also saw the rise of nonnational historical comparative methodologies, primarily among linguists, literary scholars, and ethnographers. Historiography, to the extent that it ventured beyond the national framework, later followed suit. The interwar period saw the institutionalization of Southeastern European studies in the whole region, and in this respect what was happening in Yugoslavia was crucial. In 1934, a Balkan Institute was founded in Belgrade under the auspices of the King of Yugoslavia. Alongside its research program, it had a regional geopolitical agenda envisaged on the basis of Balkan solidarity. “Our patriotism, if it wants to be real, should be a Balkan patriotism,” was the programmatic pronouncement of the founders of the Belgrade Balkan Institute.¹ Two scholars were pivotal in defining the new discipline of Balkanology: the linguists Petar Skok, a Croat, and the Serb Milan Budimir. As editors of the Belgrade-based Revue internationale des études balkaniques, of which only three volumes were published between 1934 and 1938, they aimed at demonstrating the commonality of Balkan societies through the comparative method of the nineteenth century. They related the new discipline to Byzantinology, Egyptology, or to classical philology which studies together and in a comparative way Greek and Roman antiquity.²

In their first editorial, a sui generis Balkanological manifesto, Skok and Budimir observed that Balkan studies “divided into national compartments, such as were constituted after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, researched, in fact, solely the parts of an organic whole.”³ Thus, “state particularism has been duplicated with a scientific particularism.” They lamented that at present no scholar studies the common Balkan reality and pleaded that “the time has come to contemplate the coordinating of national academic Balkan studies, to give them cohesion, and, above all, to orient them towards the study of a Balkan organism that had constituted one whole since the most distanced times of classical and pre-classical antiquity. This is the principal goal of the science that we have called Balkanology and to which our journal is devoted.”⁴

The Yugoslav scholars posited for the Balkans “a unique law guiding the vicissitudes of the totality of their history.” This law manifested itself in two alternating historical trends—cohesion and particularism—from antiquity to the present.⁵

The major forces of “Balkan aggregation,” whether locally engendered or imposed from the outside, were the Hellenistic, the Roman, the Byzantine, and the Ottoman empires. The particularism of the Greek city-states was overcome by “the first Balkan aggregation” under Philip and Alexander the Great, which “issued from the proper forces of the peninsula and thanks to which the basis of the European civilization were laid.” Irrespective of the linguistic divide between the Greek and the Latin worlds, the region preserved its political unity and internal cohesion under Roman and, subsequently, Byzantine domination. The tribal particularisms of the Slavs eventually succumbed to the same “Balkan law of aggregation”: the prime ambition of two Bulgarian empires and of the empire of Stefan Dušan was the unification of the peninsula.⁶

Where they really went against the grain was in their assessment of the Ottoman empire. Budimir and Skok attributed the present degree of social and cultural cohesion of the Balkan region primarily to the aggregation achieved and imposed by the empire of the “Turks.” Modern scholarship, however, had misinterpreted, according to them, the productive results of this aggregation; moreover, it had not duly recognized that the imperial regime had never pursued policies of denationalization typical of many other European states. The roots of this skewed interpretation lay in the ideology of nineteenth century Balkan romanticism. Balkan intellectuals, imbued with the desire to deliver their peoples from Ottoman oppression, saw the long centuries of Ottoman rule only as a continuous degradation of a formerly illustrious independent national past. This view was widely shared by practitioners in the new national discipli...