Ironic, playful, and multilayered, winner of three major prizes for the best Yugoslav novel of 1988, this beguiling novel-about-a-novel is set at an international literary conference in Zagreb. It begins with the death of an anti-Franco poet who slips into the pool of the intercontinental Hotel and continues with a rapid and entertaining chain of events involving espionage, sexual intrigue, murder, and a good deal of one-upmanship among the assembled academics. In the style of David Lodge, the novel is filled with colorful characters and hilarious scenes; but amid the lighthearted action Ugresic provides a serious and doubly outsidered perspective on the differences between the worlds of Eastern Europe and the West. Through the eyes of her Yugoslav and Russian characters Ugresic expresses the incredulity that many in Eastern Europe felt at the Western tendency to romanticize the "communist" world; simultaneously, through her American character, she explodes many of the myths of the West in the minds of Eastern Europe. In addressing issues of mutual cultural misunderstanding without attempting to impose artificial solutions to the problems, Ugresic has produced a truly successful multicultural novel.

Throughout the twentieth century in the lands of Yugoslavia, socialists embarked on multiple projects of supranational unification. Sensitive to the vulnerability of small nations in a world of great powers, they pursued political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural modernization at a scale between the national and the global – from regional strategies of Balkan federalism to continental visions of European integration to the internationalist ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. In Mediating Spaces James Robertson offers an intellectual history of the diverse supranational politics of Yugoslav socialism, beginning with its birth in the 1870s and concluding with its violent collapse in the 1990s. Showcasing the ways in which socialists in Southeast Europe confronted the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization, the book frames the evolution of supranational politics as a response to the shifting dynamics of global economic and geopolitical competition. Arguing that literature was a crucial vehicle for imagining new communities beyond the nation, Robertson analyzes the manuscripts, journals, and personal correspondence of the literary left to excavate the cultural geographies that animated Yugoslav socialism and its supranational horizons. The book ultimately illuminates the innovative strategies of cultural development used by socialist writers to challenge global asymmetries of power and prestige. Mediating Spaces reveals the full significance of supranationalism in the history of socialist thought, recovering a key concern for an era of renewed geopolitical contestation in Eastern Europe.

Moving through the elegiac ruins of the Berlin Wall and the Yugoslav disintegration, Writing Postcommunism explores literary evocations of the pervasive disappointment and mourning that have marked the postcommunist twilight.

This book tells the story of new Yugoslav feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, reassessing the effects of state socialism on women’s emancipation through the lens of the feminist critique. This volume explores the history of the ideas defining a social movement, analysing the major debates and arguments this milieu engaged in from the perspective of the history of political thought, intellectual history and cultural history. Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War, societies in and scholars of East Central Europe still struggle to sort out the effects of state socialism on gender relations in the region. What could tell us more about the subject than the ideas set out by the only organised and explicitly feminist opposition in the region, who, as academics, artists, writers and activists, criticised the regime and demanded change?

The third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Croatia relates the history of this country through a detailed chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, and events; institutions and organizations; and political, economic, social, cultural, and religious facets.

This volume presents Eastern Europe and Russia as a distinctive translation zone, despite significant internal differences in language, religion and history. The persistence of large multilingual empires, which produced bilingual and even polyglot readers, the shared experience of "belated modernity and the longstanding practice of repressive censorship produced an incredibly vibrant, profoundly politicized, and highly visible culture of translation throughout the region as a whole. The individual contributors to this volume examine diverse manifestations of this shared translation culture from the Romantic Age to the present day, revealing literary translation to be at times an embarrassing reminder of the region s cultural marginalization and reliance on the West and at other times a mode of resistance and a metaphor for cultural supercession. This volume demonstrates the relevance of this region to the current scholarship on alternative translation traditions and exposes some of the Western assumptions that have left the region underrepresented in the field of Translation Studies."