The Age of Skin and the Epoch of an Author: A Eulogy to Dubravka Ugrešić

This text was intended to be written as a review of Dubravka Ugrešić’s latest book of essays translated into English, her most recent book to be made accessible to European and world audiences: The Age of Skin, published in 2020 with Open Letter, Rochester, New York, and translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (Ugrešić 2020a). Yet the essay suddenly began to take on some of the distinctive features of Ugrešić’s own writing, and to engage in a kind of metatextual play, self-ironically, melancholically, nostalgically, trying to make sense of the loss. Dubravka Ugrešić passed away on 17 March 2023.

A whole community of post-Yugoslav, Yugoslav, exile, feminist, transnational, minority people, her readers were suddenly faced with the fact that the person who had been so vocal and ardent in the face of injustice, cruelty, and banality, the author who made sense of it all through writing, had left without warning. It was Dubravka Ugrešić who resisted and defended our (we—the subalterns listed above) dignity and the dignity of literature as a free space and as our joint conspiracy.^[1] Reading her oeuvre provides an experience of aesthetic splendour both utopian and lived, involving pleasures and blisses of the text. ^[2]

A glance at the numerous homages to Dubravka Ugrešić confronts us both with the void and with the plenitude this writer has left behind. Among the noteworthy homages are those by Luketić (2023), Ivančić (2023), Parežanin (2023), Slapšak (2023), and Lukić (2023). Before this review was finished, commemorations were held in cities in which she had left her mark, including Berlin, Belgrade, and centrally in the Zagreb Puppet Theatre (Zagrebačko kazalište lutaka).^[3]

In her book of essays The Age of Skin (originally published in Croatian as Doba kože in 2019), Dubravka Ugrešić stays engaged with her principal, programmatic topics, mapped out some thirty years earlier, first and foremost in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1995), in which she used the phrase “post-Yugoslav” for the first time to define a non-existing national identity, a nomadic citizen of sorts.^[4] Though the expression was coined with undisguised self-irony (to avoid a straightforward pathos or even pitifulness), it was one of the earliest and most original attempts to circumscribe the paradox of an end and a continuation happening together, as was the lived experience of Yugoslav dissolution. It was also an expression that indicated the surpassing of the narrow boundaries of nationalist literature and culture and—as emphasized by the authors of the eulogies—it was Dubravka Ugrešić who contributed greatly to the creation and advancement of a transnational literary and cultural space. The Culture of Lies represents a handbook of nationalism critique, a guide to Yugoslav cultural history, a straightforward ideological enquiry into the period of the so-called transition, marked by discourses delegitimizing any alternative to capitalism, laying bare the role of intellectuals in the rise of all nationalisms in Yugoslavia. Ugrešić’s work represents a valuable and extensive corpus of knowledge, memory, as well as literary and cultural imagery for her devotees and scholars alike. The field of post-Yugoslav studies has been significantly inspired if not initiated by Dubravka Ugrešić’s writings, while her uninterrupted spotlighting of such critical matters as antinationalism, antifascism, feminist critique of war, pacifism, international and transnational culture, as well as her anticapitalist stance and her claiming of the right to remember the (Yugoslav, socialist, communist) past, has enabled our contemporary conceptual imagery to consolidate.

It is a recurring thesis in texts about Dubravka Ugrešić that she developed these questions not only in her non-fiction but also in her fictional literature (to name her best-known works available in English translation: the books of essays Nobody’s Home ([2005] 2007) and Karaoke Culture ([2010] 2011), as well as the novels The Museum of Unconditional Surrender ([1997] 1998), The Ministry of Pain ([2004] 2005), and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg ([2008] 2009)).^[5] This fact is significant for several reasons. It suggests a possibility of identifying her writings as a single, always-in-process work, expanding, self-referential, cross-genre, with recurring but variated and modified familiar motifs and theses. But it also necessitates a return to the “Yugoslav chapter” of her work, which greatly informs her post-Yugoslav writing and, perhaps most importantly, makes a case for the interdependence and continuity among Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav literatures.

Ugrešić had been present in the Yugoslav literary scene since the beginning of the 1970s, when she published primarily two volumes for children and, in 1978, issued a first collection of short fiction, Poza za prozu. In 1981, she published her perhaps most famous book, the short novel Štefica Cvek u raljama života (In the Jaws of Life).^[6] This book marked a breakthrough for Yugoslav neofeminism in fiction, involving a feminist debunking of cliché literary topics, a self-conscious female narrator, thereby remaking the conventions of “female” genres, and, finally, the compelling presence of a sovereign, witty female author behind complex literary architectonics. This was by no means a debut for a markedly present female author in Yugoslav literature. Still, Štefica enacted a statement; it demonstrated not only the arrival of women authors into the Yugoslav literary space of the time, but also of female and feminist topics and perspectives of narration missing in modern Yugoslav fiction: it was a “revolution in the local literature” (Luketić 2023). It was also humour, romance (and its satirizing), together with a spectacular metatextual play between the narrator and her protagonist Štefica Cvek, a young woman unfortunate in matters of the heart, that propelled the book to cult status and led to a film version. In 1984, the movie In the Jaws of Life (dir. Rajko Grlić) came out, remaining to this day one of the most loved films of the late Yugoslav period. The revolutionary Štefica Cvek has, however, maintained a certain post-Yugoslav vim as well. In 2021, a regional feminist literary award was established and named “Štefica Cvek”, in honour of this illustrious, quirky Yugoslav female literary character, but also as a way to foster the literary qualities pioneered by Dubravka Ugrešić in her famous 1981 novel. Ugrešić herself had been acclaimed by readers and critics equally. She was the first woman writer to be awarded the biggest Yugoslav literary award, NIN (Ninova nagrada), for her novel Forsiranje romana-reke (1988), translated into English by Michael Henry Heim as Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1991).

The Age of Skin contains seventeen essays written between 2014 and 2018, published in a somewhat different order and number than in the original Croatian edition. Instead of “Esej koji svome adresatu putuje već četvrt stoljeća, nikako da stigne, a po svemu sudeći i neće” [An essay which has been travelling a quarter of a century, would never arrive, and by all accounts will never reach its addressee], the essay “There’s Nothing Here!” was included in the English edition, together with one additional text, “A Fairy Tale Written by Feet”. This collection reiterates the above-mentioned post-Yugoslav conceptual reference points, characteristically expanded with various peculiar topics and reflections on Europe, portrayed both as a desired and a disappointing utopia. Ugrešić writes about everyday experiences, masterfully emphasizing their quality as the actual fabric of our lives, be it grocery shopping^[7] or a spa treatment.^[8] However, Ugrešić discerns a spirit of the extraordinary in these events, how they almost undetectably make us wonder about those unknowable realities of human existence such as aging, being corporeal, cruel, mortal, but also being inclined to beauty and happiness. And it was undeniably the genre of an essay, which since the Renaissance has nurtured “a necessary supplement to philosophy and literature—self-analysis and analysis of new circumstances” (Slapšak 2023), that proved to be the optimal form for Ugrešić’s reflections on the outside world and the self, having the capacity to absorb her impressive literary and historical knowledge. After 2000, essay-writing indeed came to be Ugrešić’s main genre (Parežanin 2023). Practically unrivalled in contemporary post-Yugoslav literature (Postnikov 2011), Ugrešić’s essays are arguably closest to the traditions of the familiar essay, a genre in-between critical and personal writing, the most characteristic aspect of which is a distinctive voice of the first-person narrator.

By delineating the main theses of the collection, the opening essay “The Age of Skin” assumes a metapoetic function, as suggested by its pronounced position in the composition and its eponymic status. The very phrase “the age of skin” captures what the author sees as an index of our present-day worldview, revolving around skin, as a category with anthropological, biological, but also aesthetic, social, cultural, political, and even economic meanings and usages. Dealing at length with Lenin’s embalming, the essay evokes similar contemporary bizarre practices like using skin of the deceased for artistic purposes in a tattoo parlour in Amsterdam, or the harvesting of human organs, making humans and their bodies into commodities. (We can monetize our bodies in any social context or market, including the artistic one, but also exchange them for bare subsistence, if we are poor enough.) The function of popular culture in this, as Ugrešić labels it, modern vampirism, or zombiism, cannot be overestimated: “Popular culture—the new mythological field—helps its consumers digest indigestible reality.”^[9]

However, the phrase “the age of skin” could additionally be read to indicate the fact that skin has its age, that it is aging, which certainly represents another property of our culture, obsessed as it is with beautiful and young bodies (as youth is, contrary to old age, coded as beautiful). The Lenin embalming episode ironically encapsulates our culture’s fixation with beauty and suggests its ultimate ambition: the fight against mortality, or fear of death.

These assumptions, as an introduction to the essay collection, about humanity and humans being basically reduced to their bare skin—possibly analogous to Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life” (1998)—outline the philosophical and political morals of our time and function as an authorial statement, opening the book and almost announcing what follows. The “skin regime” could be discerned as a precondition for other “phenomena of reduction” appearing in the subsequent essays: banality, ignorance, provinciality, poverty, economic and cultural decay (globally, but particularly in the post-Yugoslav space), but also cruelty, as an analogous but extreme end of our cultural and political setting. “Why We Love Movies about Apes” is an anthropologically pessimistic essay dealing with the atrocities organized and executed by the Indonesian regime during the 1965–1966 anticommunist purges. While this in fact appears as one extremely and irrationally inhumane example of brutality as a universal human trait, shared globally and transhistorically, Ugrešić emphasizes that violence is cultivated and executed by those in power. Yet, importantly, this historical account is mediated, artistically transposed: she recalls watching the award-winning documentary The Act of Killing (2012), in which the perpetrators re-enact the crimes they committed (without showing any feeling of guilt or remorse). The essay begins with a report on the “protagonists” of Yugoslav war crimes and the prominent documentary Serbian Epics (1992), in which the perpetrators freely and benevolently present their ideological views and plans for war. By stating that the Yugoslav war is still ongoing, Ugrešić recaptures the principal motifs of her literary and social engagement.^[10] She sees the Yugoslav wars as not merely historical events sealed off in a remote past, but as a structural phenomenon of enduring nationalist ideology founded on fear and violence. She thus shows her belief in the power and agency of an engaged intellectual or artist, and in the aptitude of their art to throw light on historical events, to try to understand them, question them, and memorize them.

It is post-Yugoslav artists who try to lay Yugoslavia to rest, Ugrešić maintains, like the protagonist of the Japanese film Departures (2008), a cellist who after the disbandment of his orchestra becomes a nōkanshi, a master of the traditional skill of burying the dead: “We ‘musicians’ are ostracized by most of our community. We are doing our best to juggle two skills, the one we’ve always wanted to master (art), and the other, which life has set before us as a moral imperative.”^[11] Ugrešić’s essays on (alleged) patriotism, nationalism, chauvinism, and war almost instantly evoke the subject of writing, the author, and thus the public figure of the intellectual aware of and responsible for the community and society they write for. Ugrešić reaffirms the meanwhile thoroughly researched and theorized thesis about the articulation and success of (post-)Yugoslav nationalisms through the engagement of intellectuals: the intellectual elite remains the most responsible for producing and disseminating a political agenda of fear of the other, of (self-)victimization, of the myth of purity and exclusiveness that lies at the heart of every nationalism. She unmasks not only the great nation-building bards, but all intellectual and literary bystanders who watch silently, conform to the rules of the majority, and do nothing to prevent the worst from happening.

When Ugrešić recollects the role of intellectuals and writers in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, she evokes how the violent break-up of a country was articulated and legitimized in (literary) discourse, but she also evokes the notorious Witches from Rio affair, when she was persecuted, together with four other feminists from Croatia, and soon after decided to leave her home country for good. Jelena Lovrić, Rada Iveković, Slavenka Drakulić, Vesna Kesić, and Dubravka Ugrešić were targeted and blacklisted as non-patriots for publicly speaking of war violence and war rape committed by the Croatian military in 1992.^[12] Dubravka Ugrešić’s insistence on a feminist critique of nationalism, violence, and war in her “feminist essays” in the Age of Skin collection is a reiteration and a continuation of Yugoslav feminists’ discursive but also activist struggle.

In the prominent essay “The Scold’s Bridle”, which lent its name to what would be her testamentary hybrid essay–interview with feminist scholar Merima Omeragić,^[13] Ugrešić analyses legal regimes of patriotism, which recognize flag desecration as a criminal offence and strictly regulate it, while the laws for rape remain mild and ambiguous. In the above-mentioned essay “Why We Love Movies about Apes,” Ugrešić adds: “The world of murderers is a world without women (they are an absent object of hatred and disrespect)” (38). She instead suggests that a “powerful, massive movement is what matters for change, a multitude of strong women’s and men’s voices singing in unison, which will, together, obliterate the sly ways of misogyny.”^[14] Only such a unified struggle can end the hegemony of patriarchy and misogyny, whose invisible but toxic and loud presence the author masterfully compares with radiation and with fireworks thrown at night.^[15]

Ugrešić writes on misogyny not only as a project of disqualifying and demeaning women, but also as a literary practice, “a cloaked form of male writing”.^[16] She opposes the officially inexistent practice of male writing—l’ecriture masculine—to the historically existing écriture feminine, a French post-structuralist school and discourse that theorized “female difference”, its structural expulsion from the discourse, but also its ways of matrialization in the discourse. Ugrešić shows how misogyny is a well-organized system that “naturalizes” male dominance through all sorts of “neutral” cultural practices, including writing.

While Ugrešić is most commonly and for the best of reasons defined as a feminist author, she writes in a cross-over of feminist and avant-gardist traditions and conventions, often also subverting them. A kind of “code” of Ugrešić’s writing appears as she opens interspaces between reality and fiction and grasps the paradoxes of life. Their common absurdity, their bizarre and banal edges disperse in surrealist contours, making reality in her texts appear not so different from fiction. An excellent example of this practice is her collection of short stories from Yugoslav times, Život je bajka (1983).^[17] In this book the absurdist and ironic aspects of storytelling (evoking avant-gardist traditions and authors like Daniil Kharms, or proto-avant-gardist Nikolai Gogol) are integrated in an autofictional narrative on male dominance and privilege in the literary field (important is the figure of the male writer and his antagonist, the woman writer). More recently, such storytelling can be found in her novel Lisica (2017) in which the yet again autofictional narrator, a writer by profession, rereads avant-gardist author Boris Pilnyak and confronts the misogynist attitudes of this, once for her formative, author.^[18] By employing various avant-gardist techniques, such as pastiche, or swapping real and fictional worlds, Ugrešić in fact alters the story into a feminist, and more precisely gynocritical challenging of the avant-gardist canon.

Suspension and critical challenging of the reality/literature divide are principal avant-gardist gestures. Dubravka Ugrešić uses both simultaneously to affirm the entitlement of literature to the factual, but also to remind us that the avant-garde opened paths towards alternative, critical, anti-conservative, eccentric (but also ex-centric, outside the centre, without a centre), and finally revolutionary cultural and political possibilities. Not by accident, she juxtaposes our present-day culture of consensus to the avant-garde.^[19] It is probably a less-known fact that Dubravka Ugrešić was a scholar of the Russian avant-garde. Between 1974 and 1993, the year she went into exile, she was a research fellow at the Institute for Theory of Literature at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zagreb. Besides this academic interest nurturing her writing, she had an artistic affinity for the avant-garde as an epoch and aesthetic. Throughout her writings, the avant-garde is present in techniques, figures, references to avant-gardist authors and their work. Ugrešić clearly upholds political and social aspects of the avant-garde rooted in the October Revolution, and signifying radical novelty and the opening-up of the artistic space for anti-traditionalist and anti-institutionalized creativity, in other words for the “culture of avant-garde resistance”.^[20]

In The Age of Skin, the avant-garde assumes a clear historical meaning and relevance as the lived experience of resistance—resistance to fascism, capitalism, conservativism, non-liberty. Furthermore, her reference to historical precursors of contemporary avant-gardist potentials includes not only the Soviet and generally artistic avant-garde, but also specifically Yugoslavia as an avant-garde—the progressive values of antifascism and egalitarianism on which it was built, but also its politics of internationalism and workers’ self-management. Suggesting present-day potencies of the avant-garde is perhaps the most important function of such reaffirmation: the possibility of reviving avant-gardist resistance means precisely to fight for an open, conflictual, and conflicting culture, far from any culture of consensus. Precisely for this political motion, but also for their aesthetic of the fragment and associative-montaged text portions, the essays in The Age of Skin are avant-gardist essays.

As becomes clear, a “before and after” matrix of sorts lies underneath Ugrešić’s speech, as if a distinct temporal and spatial line divides her reality in two. At the inaccessible end of this boundary is the lived past of socialist Yugoslavia, when it was possible to take up the “parameters of good and evil”,^[21] in a “communist utopia”,^[22] which refers to living according to the values of antifascism, egalitarianism, all sorts of rights, particularly workers’ rights, but also simply enjoying an everyday life that “was like a hedonistic parody of the everyday life in other communist countries”.^[23]

At “our” end of this temporal borderline, instead of workers there are the jobless, “indolent, ne’er-do-wells, and malingerers”,^[24] the losers,^[25] and even zombies as retrogressing twins of former post-Yugoslavs. Unlike her famous self-declaration “I am a post-Yugoslav” in The Culture of Lies, in this collection Ugrešić acknowledges, “I’m a zombie”.^[26] There is the never-ending (Yugoslav) war, hostility, violence, feelings of defeat, exploitation, general commodification, and commercialization, including culture (the marketplace “is the culture of our time”^[27]), anti-intellectualism, and finally pseudo-democratization enabled by technology (“the digital revolution: something Communism only dreamed of but technology realized”^[28]).

At times Ugrešić’s sardonic comments seem to expose an idle generational scorn. But in fact she articulates the paradoxes that our culture produces on a daily basis through masterful placid ironizing and black humour. With succinct irony, Ugrešić analyses at length the modern concept of success, which refers to being rich and fulfilling shallow beauty demands, while intellectual or artistic achievements appear to be less relevant. People who do not fulfil the requirements of beauty and wealth, but are merely gifted, belong to “the ghetto of the poor, the fat, and the talented”.^[29] She comments with black humour on practices of embalming for the purpose of beautifying the corpse, which exposes our obsession with the (inaccessible) immortality of the body: “someone who had a poor complexion during their lifetime may see it improved in death”.^[30]

For Ugrešić, literary competency, the capacity to speak, to verbalize the world clearly, lies at the heart of agency, of survival even. She critiques the young who revisit the already “spent language of social critique”,^[31] and is at the same time aware of her own powerlessness, her fear of failing to put experience into words: “Isn’t this wordlessness, this inability to transmit experience, the burden of the future?”^[32] A blurred question has a clear political edge: to have a future means being able to see and verbalize the world, hence to capture it, and possibly also to transpose this capture to literature which will carry it to that forthcoming future. Articulating the world and writing it means being able to project our lives into the future, as not merely a passive temporal ambiance but an ambiance of change that we secure by our doing in the present. In The Age of Skin, temporality has a clearly ethical quality, or potentiality: the present day is the disillusioned time, the past is the source of comfort and belief in a social and political alternative (represented and lived in socialism). For that very reason, the future, though uncertain, is still open-ended, thus indicating even a possibility of utopia.

While Ugrešić sees our contemporary channels and modes of communication based on modern technologies as only seemingly democratic and as fostering limited and narcissistic exchanges, the careful reader of her collection will not miss the fine contrast between the world of this self-centred and therefore fake communication and conversations the author/narrator is having with her neighbours, friends, acquaintances, and passers-by. The speech of the interlocutors is direct, unmediated, but possible only through conversation, through exchange with another person who listens. This truly dialogic (in the Bakhtinian sense) and democratic space of shared worldviews means common cultural, but also artistic, literary, textual space.^[33]

This is where Dubravka Ugrešić comes up with possible ways out—for herself, her protagonists, and her readers. In one of the key essays in the book, “Invisible Europe”, in which she writes about exile as a cultural meme of Europeans and associates the myth of Europe with the stories of present-day refugees, the incompatibility among intellectual narratives on European identity and the lived reality of ordinary people is made plain. Migrants “will be the people who sustain life and lift human standards, the standards of the humane”,^[34] Ugrešić concludes, devoted to her encounters and conversations with Meliha, or Meli, a young Bulgarian woman cleaning apartments in Amsterdam, who learnt Dutch and self-decolonized “in language, through language, thanks to language”.^[35] To be self-decolonized means to break away from the destiny of the lesser one, the oppressed, the underprivileged, but also to be emancipated through one’s own agency. This liberation, becoming a subject, is also achieved through language, language which enables communication with the other.

Recognizing the horror of the absence of a real community and of sociability as a symptom of our time, Ugrešić succeeds in creating a community of readers, fictional protagonists, writers, in arranging literature as communication, our common creative and playful ground. More than once she mocks the contemporary obsession with “objectivity” and instead writes not only informed but outright erudite essays with no pretence of objectivity but with the most indispensable ingredient a text can have—an author, an authorial personality that is not only a literary appearance but a strong individual presence, expressed precisely through a distinctive narrator’s voice, the genre being, or resembling, that of a familiar essay.

Her world is made of other voices, including authorial ones that resonate from “literature [that] has a life of its own, and a power over reality” (Lukić 2023). Some of the most memorable parts of The Age of Skin are the narrator’s encounters and associations with writers and protagonists of her preferred books. Bohumil Hrabal is most certainly one of Ugrešić’s favourite authors, who understood and experienced the protective, resilient power of literature: “I have a physical sense of myself as a bale of compacted books.” This quote from his Too Loud a Solitude (1990)^[36] serves as a motto in the essay “An Archeology of Resistance!?”. The protagonist of Hrabal’s novel, Haňťa, whose words are quoted here, spends his working life compressing paper for recycling. Many banned books end up being compressed as wastepaper, but Haňťa reads and rescues many of them, becoming a figure of resistance to censorship and of the resilience of literature.

The finale of The Age of Skin is Ugrešić’s assertion that “the creative act itself is an act of resistance”,^[37] a statement reflected throughout the book in the form of resistance to forced identities and imposed communities of belonging, resistance to the demands of market and canon, to all forms of non-freedom, by artists and everyone else “whose choice was not to be silent” (Parežanin 2023). Hence, books are resilient; they can resist, despite being unwanted, heretic, dissident, different, dangerous. They can resist through the efforts of “Haňťa’s children”, as Ugrešić names those involved in saving literature and culture from extinction: “Thanks to Haňťa’s children, manuscripts don’t burn. And when they’re tossed into the bonfire, the books laugh with the ‘quiet laugh’ of resistance.”^[38]

In one of the concluding essays in The Age of Skin, “There’s Nothing Here!”, Ugrešić considers the modalities in which the past becomes present in our time, how we construct it, and whether it is possible to recover it. She describes her visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which organized the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia. Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980”, shown between 15 July 2018 and 13 January 2019, and including a section on antifascist monuments. After realizing that those monuments, severely damaged and neglected in the post-Yugoslav countries, were exhibited at MoMA as artefacts of a lived and better alternative, she gratefully exclaims that “nothing had been forgotten”.^[39] The modernist monuments featured in the exhibition are objects of the Yugoslav time when society was oriented towards the future and therefore full of potentiality and hope. Yet this Yugoslav “fullness” is nowadays a void: in the title of her essay, “nothing” defines the earlier-mentioned “reduction”, poverty, and decay present throughout the post-Yugoslav space. Hence, Yugoslav monuments preserve the bygone, the absent or forbidden, that which has become impossible, similar to the way in which books become testimonials of lives that were lived, of alternative worlds, and finally, of resistance, no matter how marginal or fragile.

Finishing her book in the company of her favourite authors and fellow writers Bulgakov and Hrabal, who both found a way out in writing and through writing, Ugrešić echoes their words, reasserting that some things—such as the artefacts of human intellect, spirit, and resistance—are indestructible. Indeed, since Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita ([1928] 1967), it is known that “the manuscripts are not burning” (emphasis in the original), and Dubravka Ugrešić purposely decides to close her book with this famous quote on oppressed authors and their dangerous books, but also on the power of the written word.^[40] How could that which once was be destroyed or forgotten if kept inside the powerful capsule that is literature? Nothing has been forgotten; nothing will be forgotten. Thank you, Dubravka Ugrešić.