Dubravka Ugrešić: a droll genius with an unwavering devotion to literature | Books

I discovered that Dubravka Ugrešić had died last month, aged 73, in that strange, uniquely modern way one does: by noticing a sudden proliferation of quotes from her works on Twitter. For a moment I could suspend the sadness and scroll through her sharp-witted wisdom. But there was a darker irony to the scene – one that Ugrešić, a writer all too attuned to the impoverishment of literature in the name of consumption, would have found quite amusing. Visit her website and the text that greets you reads: “Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead … there will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once.” In other words, literature as content, content as literature. Dubravka the playful, Dubravka the prophetic.

Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina in the former Yugoslavia, to a Bulgarian mother and Croatian father, but spent the majority of her working life in exile in Amsterdam. When war took hold of Yugoslavia in the early 90s, Ugrešić spoke out against the creeping nationalism of newly independent Croatia – for which she was shunned by the literary establishment (“whatever that word means,” I can hear her mutter). Booksellers stopped displaying her books and critics boycotted her works. The media even accused her of being a witch. Well versed in the intimate link between the history of sexism and tired literary tropes, Ugrešić would later respond to this charge with characteristic class: “I accepted it as an honourable name,” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I decided to take my broom and fly away.”

The literary cliques that would go on to denounce her had once swooned over her debut novel, Fording the Stream of Consciousness, a work rich in parody and slanted literary references for which she won the NIN in 1998, a prestigious Yugoslav (now Serbian) literary award whose past winners include Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavić. Ugrešić was the first woman to receive the award and it was the first in a long line of prestigious accolades, most notably the Neustadt prize, a kind of unofficial Nobel, in 2016.

Ugrešić left Croatia in 1993 and her experience of exile is everywhere in her prose, from her inventive works of fiction Lend Me Your Character, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain, to her incisive essay collections Nobody’s Home, The Culture of Lies and The Age of Skin.

My first encounter with Ugrešić’s writing was her probing essay collection Thank You for Not Reading, which brilliantly dissects the widely accepted absurdities of the literary “marketplace”. The collection is unsparing, often irate, and contains some of the best examples of Ugrešić’s affectionate humour. “Recently I have done nothing but write book proposals,” she writes in one satirical essay on this sort of commercial legwork. “I took the trouble to write a book proposal for Remembrance of Things Past. It was turned down. Boring, too long, change the title…” And alongside the piercing wit, her unwavering commitment to preserve literature – and all its moral, spiritual and enchanting properties – reverberates from page to page.

In the days after her death, I revisited her book Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, an ingenious blend of narrative and folklore, and was struck by a particular passage: “Baba Yaga,” she writes, “hers is the drama of old age, hers the story of excommunication, forced expulsion, invisibility, brutal marginalisation. On this point, our own fear acts like acid, which dissolves actual human drama into grotesque clownishness. Clownishness, it is true, does not necessarily have a negative overtone: on the contrary, in principle it affirms human vitality and the momentary victory over death!”

I paused over this word “clownishness”; how many writers today would lay that allusion at their own feet? Part of Ugrešić’s greatness was her brave refusal to bend to the literary tastemakers; she hovered, gleefully, above it all.

I had the pleasure of working with Dubravka for a brief period when I was an editor at TANK. We published her work Fox in the UK (originally published by Open Letter in the US), a looping, riotous and melancholic novel with reflections on exile, petty nationalistic quibbles, the Nabokovs, Ingrid Bergman, the Russian avant-garde and the trials of having a home country that no longer existed. She was a delight to work with: self-deprecating, compassionate, charming, precise, direct and always puzzled by technology.

It now feels fitting that Fox became her parting literary gift, a work in which Ugrešić finds a home for her multiple identities – the storyteller, the theorist, the political commentator, the fabulist – to so harmoniously coexist. The fox, after all, is a perfect “writer’s totem” for this cunning spinner of stories. Fox is, she writes, a story about how stories come to be written, an art that Ugrešić knew all too well could be used to manipulate and control as much as to enchant.

Of all those quotes I scrolled through on the day Dubravka died, it was one from Fox that stuck with me most and one – equally haunting as it is hopeful – I continue to revisit: “We are all footnotes,” she writes, “many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle.”

Hers was a struggle that deserves to be better known and one that should be universally read.

I discovered that Dubravka Ugrešić had died last month, aged 73, in that strange, uniquely modern way one does: by noticing a sudden proliferation of quotes from her works on Twitter. For a moment I could suspend the sadness and scroll through her sharp-witted wisdom. But there was a darker irony to the scene – one that Ugrešić, a writer all too attuned to the impoverishment of literature in the name of consumption, would have found quite amusing. Visit her website and the text that greets you reads: “Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead … there will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once.” In other words, literature as content, content as literature. Dubravka the playful, Dubravka the prophetic.

Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina in the former Yugoslavia, to a Bulgarian mother and Croatian father, but spent the majority of her working life in exile in Amsterdam. When war took hold of Yugoslavia in the early 90s, Ugrešić spoke out against the creeping nationalism of newly independent Croatia – for which she was shunned by the literary establishment (“whatever that word means,” I can hear her mutter). Booksellers stopped displaying her books and critics boycotted her works. The media even accused her of being a witch. Well versed in the intimate link between the history of sexism and tired literary tropes, Ugrešić would later respond to this charge with characteristic class: “I accepted it as an honourable name,” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I decided to take my broom and fly away.”

The literary cliques that would go on to denounce her had once swooned over her debut novel, Fording the Stream of Consciousness, a work rich in parody and slanted literary references for which she won the NIN in 1998, a prestigious Yugoslav (now Serbian) literary award whose past winners include Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavić. Ugrešić was the first woman to receive the award and it was the first in a long line of prestigious accolades, most notably the Neustadt prize, a kind of unofficial Nobel, in 2016.

Ugrešić left Croatia in 1993 and her experience of exile is everywhere in her prose, from her inventive works of fiction Lend Me Your Character, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and The Ministry of Pain, to her incisive essay collections Nobody’s Home, The Culture of Lies and The Age of Skin.

My first encounter with Ugrešić’s writing was her probing essay collection Thank You for Not Reading, which brilliantly dissects the widely accepted absurdities of the literary “marketplace”. The collection is unsparing, often irate, and contains some of the best examples of Ugrešić’s affectionate humour. “Recently I have done nothing but write book proposals,” she writes in one satirical essay on this sort of commercial legwork. “I took the trouble to write a book proposal for Remembrance of Things Past. It was turned down. Boring, too long, change the title…” And alongside the piercing wit, her unwavering commitment to preserve literature – and all its moral, spiritual and enchanting properties – reverberates from page to page.

In the days after her death, I revisited her book Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, an ingenious blend of narrative and folklore, and was struck by a particular passage: “Baba Yaga,” she writes, “hers is the drama of old age, hers the story of excommunication, forced expulsion, invisibility, brutal marginalisation. On this point, our own fear acts like acid, which dissolves actual human drama into grotesque clownishness. Clownishness, it is true, does not necessarily have a negative overtone: on the contrary, in principle it affirms human vitality and the momentary victory over death!”

I paused over this word “clownishness”; how many writers today would lay that allusion at their own feet? Part of Ugrešić’s greatness was her brave refusal to bend to the literary tastemakers; she hovered, gleefully, above it all.

I had the pleasure of working with Dubravka for a brief period when I was an editor at TANK. We published her work Fox in the UK (originally published by Open Letter in the US), a looping, riotous and melancholic novel with reflections on exile, petty nationalistic quibbles, the Nabokovs, Ingrid Bergman, the Russian avant-garde and the trials of having a home country that no longer existed. She was a delight to work with: self-deprecating, compassionate, charming, precise, direct and always puzzled by technology.

It now feels fitting that Fox became her parting literary gift, a work in which Ugrešić finds a home for her multiple identities – the storyteller, the theorist, the political commentator, the fabulist – to so harmoniously coexist. The fox, after all, is a perfect “writer’s totem” for this cunning spinner of stories. Fox is, she writes, a story about how stories come to be written, an art that Ugrešić knew all too well could be used to manipulate and control as much as to enchant.

Of all those quotes I scrolled through on the day Dubravka died, it was one from Fox that stuck with me most and one – equally haunting as it is hopeful – I continue to revisit: “We are all footnotes,” she writes, “many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle.”

Hers was a struggle that deserves to be better known and one that should be universally read.