Authors

Iva Dimovska¹;  ¹ Democracy Institute, Hungary

Discussion

This paper traces the still unchartered connections between utopia and nationalism in the political, cultural, and artistic life of the former Yugoslavia. The establishment of the state named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918 was itself catalyzed by a certain utopia: the pan-Slavic idea (Kovač 2003, 271 in ed. Djurić and Šuvakovič). The formulation of the pan-Slavic idea as a utopian ideal lies at the center of my project as I trace the multivalent role of utopian expressions in literary and fictional representations, but also in political manifestos, social narratives, and texts of various types while examining their importance in inventing (or solidifying) a sense of identity – defined as “nation” – in the former Yugoslavia.
In doing that, I establish three phases of development, both temporally and geographically determined when it comes to the relationship between nationalism and utopia. The first phase traces the early manifestations and engagements with utopia and socialism through emerging tensions between the East and the West, in the works of significant writers and movements and writers from the 1920s originating in Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana– the political and cultural centers of the Federation. The second phase focuses on the postwar period, the 1950s and 1960s, moving to the “margins” of Yugoslavia – multi-ethnic and multi-cultural territories that once belonged to the former neighboring empires – where the trope of the borderland becomes prominent in critiques of social utopias. The final, third phase outlines the decline of the socialist utopian ideal by examining the proliferation of socialist dystopias as a new genre in Yugoslav writing from the late 1950s to the 1980s. As I aim to show throughout my presentation, the mission of establishing a political and social system based on the idea of shared pan-Slavic nationhood while incorporating the sometimes complementary, sometimes opposite processes of nation-building that each of the Slavic nations was simultaneously going through, was at times utopian, and at times dystopian process. The tensions between the notions of “shared” and “individual” identity and their role in forming and sustaining a socialist political system are reflected in the overlap and dialogue between “utopia” and “dystopia” in the narratives that will be analyzed.