While working as an editor and proof-reader, including at the prestigious journal Književne novine, she wrote three novels. These appeared in print in short order: Pada Avala (1978), Psi i ostali (1980), and Duša, jedinica moja (1984). Her writing for the stage began in the 1970s and lasted through until the end of her life. Unfortunately, very little of her work is available in English, although a few excerpts can be found online , and there are two book-length items (though no novels) in the bibliography at the end of this essay. Since 2006 there has been a major literary prize in Serbia that is named for her, awarded by the prestigious Srpsko književno društvo (The Serbian Literary Society), and there have recently been conferences, retrospectives, a noticeable increase in scholarly attention about her writing, and reprints of her works.
Whether Jovanović is, in the final analysis, considered primarily a pioneer of ‘jeans prose’, a feminist, a vulnerable and extremely sensitive but also powerful witness to nationalist, authoritarian, and patriarchal anachronisms, a ‘rebel with a cause’ (as the title of the major anthology released on the 20th anniversary of her death reads in translation), an avant-garde experimentalist, a chronicler of the Yugoslav socialist experiment, or all of the above, her prose is both descriptive and normative in new ways. Jovanović was growing up as the unsolved contradictions of the reign of Josip Broz Tito and the League of Communists were emerging from the shadows of the anti-fascist moment and the Cold War. In the opinion of this translator and historian, she is remarkable not only for her civil courage, but also for her intellectual perspectives and her rich and bracing writing.
About This Book
This novel is a quest. It is built of a spare plot much enriched by flashbacks and letters of various types. The glue that holds its pieces together is a particular epistemology, more or less articulated in various barely-disguised authorial interventions sprinkled throughout the text(s), along with a pell-mell, ‘take-no-prisoners’ style of narration that is well suited to capture the tumult of Lidia’s life and surroundings. And the whole thing ends up feeling like an acid bath. Everything is stripped of its façade or patina, all paradoxes melt away, and we are left with excruciating truths about power and loss. Only pain survives this book. We can hope our vision is a bit sharper, too.
This is Jovanović’s second novel, and it is, to say the least, highly unconventional. ‘Avant-garde’ is a better characterization. It is set in Belgrade in the 1960s and 1970s, and through a fragmentary narrative replete with intertextuality and interior monologues (‘stream of consciousness’), it tracks the life of a young woman named Lidia. The lives depicted in the novel are probably more ‘counter-cultural’ than ‘bohemian’ per se, but above all they are modern, and urban. Lidia’s family life is pulling apart at the seams due to old age, disability, mental illness, drug use, and suicide; her very personhood is also bedevilled by memories of an abusive childhood that are still very much alive, but also by sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault in her adult world. Lidia is raped by her psychiatrist and sexually assaulted by her boss; her love Milena is assaulted by her dentist and, in turn, sexually assaults an intellectually disabled patient in her care.
A kind of frame tale is set up in the first chapter, with the narrator and her grandmother, Jaglika, positioned to complete each other’s stories about the history of the family. The narrative is constantly disrupted by the unexpected appearance and disappearance of characters, by the insertion of a group of detailed and disturbing letters from an anonymous neighbour, by often unmoored ‘Images from Childhood’, and by frequent use of words such as ‘the others’, ‘the rest’, ‘all’, and ‘everything’. In addition, the author takes an experimental approach to punctuation, spelling, paragraph structure, attribution, epigrams, chapter titles, and, of course, chronology, so that the reader, breathless and sometimes even partially blind, is hurtled through the story and plunged into situations awash in carefully calibrated amounts of what seem to be random detail and suffering. The novel works hard, and it works the reader hard, but with great effect.
The death of Lidia’s brother, mirroring that of her father, casts her progress in trying to understand her world into doubt, if not into a nose-dive. The novel even closes with a reference back to the cryptic preface of the book, underscoring the bleakness of the burden of self-assertion and social adaptation.
An Appreciation
Translators read books multiple times, and they do so very carefully. Your translator for this volume also happens to be a historian of the twentieth-century Balkans, and, while that is far from a guarantee of good taste or good sense, it might mean that the things I appreciate about this novel, or wish to underscore in some way or another because they ‘worked for me’, are singular enough to provide new food for thought.
For this reader, some of the most memorable scenes in the book involve Jaglika, the baba (grandmother) of Lidia and Danilo. She is a kind of unifying or intersecting axis across multiple generations and ethnicities, and parts of her life story also appear in other places in Jovanovic’s fiction. The apartment in which most of the family lives, although only partially described, is the site of a wondrous number of comings and goings; it’s located in an out-of-the-way part of greater Belgrade, but the number of visitors, all seeking different things – from trysts to funeral visitations to porn screenings to jobs and lodgings and beyond – make it a microcosm of the urban world. The way Jaglika’s physical decline is charted, and the interactions of her family members in its shadow, is thought-provoking and disarmingly unconventional. The impact of the two startling incidents in Belgrade trams or buses, one involving Lidia and the other her brother, endures in a cinematic style, long after reading. While the tragedy with Danilo is doubtlessly the dramatic turning point of the novel, Chapter 22 seems to realize the potential of much of the book with the brutal clarity and expanse of its elaborations; the chapter is a calling card for the entire work, ready to be anthologized.
Some of the appeal of this novel to historians, or to people from the western Balkans, might stem from the reality of local life that populates the narrative. These ‘assemblages’ of Yugoslav products and practices range from cafe fare (tulumba, krempita, boza) to UNICEF greeting cards and specific consumer items such as rice, soap, and bleach, and from summer vacations in Italy and Istria and reading circles to Sunday family strolls along Knez Mihailova in downtown Belgrade. We are also on the edge of the world of books and literature and universities when we are in Lidia’s world: there are libraries, class notes and hand-outs, and references to Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Castaneda, Dewey, Bergson, Schopenhauer, and Mann.
The relationship between Lidia and Milena, in evidence from Chapter 7 till its demise in Chapter 23, is tracked fearlessly from attraction through sex to toxic arguments. Some of these passages are startlingly evocative in the service of emotional and physical connections; some of them are flat-out beautiful, in a very modern way.
Conclusion
This book takes us from a scene in which a mother, flashing ‘encoded family glances’ and telling a grandmother ‘This child’s never going to stop lying. We’re taking her to the doctor’ to a daughter longing for the chance to acquire explosives from the Red Brigades in Italy and blow her mother’s head off. That’s what was meant back in the opening sentence of this essay about ‘strong medicine’. It is a novel, one could say, of backbiting and recrimination that gives way to excavations of mental and physical abuse and sexual violence and more, and ends in full-blown social critique.
In style and impact, perhaps an analogue to Dogs and Others might be found in the compelling novels of the British Nobel Prize laureate Doris Lessing (1919–2013) or the Quebecois novelist Hubert Aquin (1929–1977); many other comparisons to writers outside the South Slavic sphere are doubtless possible. In addition, Yugoslavia never lacked for hard-hitting and inventive authors, in any epoch. But within Serbian literature, it would be hard to find, even at the late date of her writing within the trajectory of Yugosl
avia, a writer who carried a bigger set of thematic and political concerns into innovative texts. And, in terms of women writers, Jovanović arguably joins Judita Šalgo (1941–1996) and Milica Mićić-Dimovska (1947–2013) in the vanguard of challenging and accomplished artists.
As this translation goes to press, the #MeToo movement is over a year old and is still growing in social and political importance. It is impossible not to notice the amount of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault in this novel, which itself is 38-year-old evidence in a millennia-old struggle for voice and redress. It is not too much to ask that we stay open to questions asked by older novels. And this is true also about the reception accorded to innovative or transgressive writings. Therefore, over time, it is quite possible that the study of Jovanović’s novels and their real-life trajectories will tell us a lot about what life was like in socialist Yugoslavia and what went wrong with Titoism.
Bibliography
Works by Biljana Jovanović
Poems:
Čuvar: pesme (Belgrade: Književna omladina Srbije, 1977)
Novels:
Pada Avala (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1978 and several later editions [1981, 2006, 2016])
Psi i ostali (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1980 and several later editions [2007 and 2016])
Duša, jedinica moja (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1984)
Plays:
Ulrike Majnhof (1976)
Leti u goru kao ptica (1982)
Centralni zatvor (1990)
Soba na Bosforu (1994)
Nonfiction:
Vjetar ide na jug i obrće se na sjever (with Rada Iveković, Maruša Kreše, and Radmila Lazić). Belgrade: Radio B92, 1994.
Non omnis moriar: prepiska (correspondence with Josip Osti). Ljubljana: Vodnikova domačija, 1996.
Works about Biljana Jovanović
Dojčinović, Biljana. “Representations of Body in Contemporary Women’s Writing in Serbia.” Conference paper. Unpublished.
———. “Telo kao globalizovano odelo: konstrukt telesnosti i tekstualnosti u romanu Mango Ljubice Arsić.” In Agnieszka Matusiak, et al, eds., Wielkie tematy kultury w literaturach słowiańskich (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwerzytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011), pp. 145-150
Đurovic, Jovana. “Čitati Biljanu Jovanović danas.” Conference paper.
Available at academia.edu/9588946/Čitati_Biljanu_Jovanović_danas
Lazić, Radmila, and Urošević, Miloš, eds. Biljana Jovanović: Buntovnica s razlogom. Belgrade: Žene u crnom/Women in Black, 2016.
Lukic, Jasmina. “Protiv svih zabrana.” ProFemina, no. 7 (Summer 1996), pp. 126-134.
Pavićević, Borka. “Glava u torbi: Duša jedinica moja.” Danas. 11 March 2016.
Slapšak, Svetlana. “Soba na Bosforu Biljane Jovanović.” ProFemina, no. 7 (Summer 1996), pp. 144-145.
Existing Translations
Jovanović, Biljana; Iveković, Rada; Kreše, Maruša; and Lazić, Radmila. Briefe von Frauen über Krieg und Nationalismus. Translated by Barbara Antkowiak and Marina Einspieler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993.
Jovanović, Biljana. Maison centrale: jeu dramatique en deux actes; Une chambre sur le Bosphore: jeu dramatique en neuf scènes, avec neuf fenêtres. Translated by Mireille Robin. Paris: Éditions L’Espace d’un instant, 2010.
The Translator
JOHN K. COX is a professor of East European History at North Dakota State University in Fargo. He earned his PhD from Indiana University-Bloomington in 1995 and specializes in modern Balkan and Central European intellectual history. His translations include works by Danilo Kiš, Miklós Radnóti, Muharem Bazdulj, Ivan Cankar, Radomir Konstantinović, Stefan Heym, Goran Petrović, Ismail Kadare, Ajla Terzić, and Vesna Perić. He is currently translating other works by Biljana Jovanović as well as novels by Dragana Kršenković Brković and Erzsébet Galgóczi.
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