Magical realism and the politics of narrative: Historical postmodernism in the contemporary Serbian novel

Abstract

The paper critically examines three extremely successful examples of historical postmodernism in contemporary Serbian literature: Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars (1984), Radoslav Petković's Destiny, Annotated (1993) and Goran Petrović's The Siege of the Church of Holy Salvation (1997). All three novels take historical events as the basis of an archaeological narrative, but they also question the notion of history which itself is, of course, historical and political. Therefore, we have to (re)construct the context of the 1990s when nationalism needed a new "imagined community" ready to deal with the challenges of the disintegration of Yugoslavia, postcommunism and capitalism. Thus it seems that these novels invite magical realism as a possible way out from history, or even better, a way into a "new" history.