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Claiming the Dispossession
 Balkan Studies Library

Editor-in-Chief

Zoran Milutinović (University College London)

Editorial Board

Gordon N. Bardos (Columbia University)

Alex Drace-Francis (University of Amsterdam)
Jasna Dragović-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Advisory Board

Marie-Janine Calic (University of Munich)

Lenard J. Cohen (Simon Fraser University)
Radmila Gorup (Columbia University)
Robert M. Hayden (University of Pittsburgh)
Robert Hodel (Hamburg University)
Anna Krasteva (New Bulgarian University)
Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London)
Maria Todorova (University of Illinois)
Andrew Wachtel (Northwestern University)

VOLUME 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

 Claiming the Dispossession
The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe

Edited by

Vladimir Biti

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Srđan Ivanković, with the artist’s permission.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017034817

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

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Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction
Tua res agitur, tua fabula narratur: In Search of Lost Sovereignty 1
Vladimir Biti

Part 1
The Janus-Face of Dispossession

Ruling (Out) the Province and Its Consequences: Sovereignty,

Dispossession, and Sacrificial Violence 19
Vladimir Biti

The Time of Dispossession: The Conflict, Composition and Geophilosophy

of Revolution in East Central Europe 50
Aleksandar Mijatović

Manifesting Dispossession: Politics of the Avant-garde 74

Zrinka Božić-Blanuša

PART 2
The Politics of Post-imperial Hi/storytelling

Claiming the West for the East: Classical Antiquity as an Alternative Source
of Turkish Post-Ottoman Identity? 93
Petr Kučera

Andrić and the Bridge: Dispossessed Writers and the Novel as a Site of
Enduring Homelessness 116
Guido Snel

Anika and the “Big Other” 128

Bernarda Katušić

Melancholic Dispossession in The Diary about Čarnojević 159

Davor Beganović
vi contents

PART 3
The Post-post-imperial Retake

Failures of Community: Andrić in Andrićgrad 177

Nataša Kovačević

Literature and the Politics of Denial: Slovenian Novels on ‘The

Erasure’ 194
Marko Juvan

Cosmopolitan Counter-Narratives of Dispossession: Migration, Memory,

and Metanarration in the Work of Aleksandar Hemon 224
Stijn Vervaet

Index of Names 247

Notes on Contributors

Davor Beganović
is Lecturer for Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian languages and literatures at the
University of Tübingen, as well as Adjunct Lecturer for South-Slavic cultures
and literatures at the School of Slavic Studies, University of Zurich. He stud-
ied comparative literature, Slavic languages and literatures and English in
Belgrade, Zagreb and Constance, where he took his PhD with the thesis on
cultural memory in the work of Danilo Kiš. He published three monographs:
Pamćenje traume. Apokaliptička proza Danila Kiša (Remembering Trauma:
The Apocalyptic Prose of Danilo Kiš, 2007), Poetika melankolije (Poetics of
Melancholy, 2009) and Protiv kanona (Against Canon, 2011). He edited, togeth-
er with Peter Braun, the volume Krieg sichten. Zur medialen Darstellung der
Kriege in Jugoslawien (2007) and, together with Enver Kazaz, an anthology of
post-Yugoslav literatures Unutarnji prijevodi (Internal Translations, 2011).

Vladimir Biti
is Professor of South Slav literatures and cultures at the Faculty for Literary and
Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. Author of nine books, Literatur- und
Kulturtheorie: Ein Handbuch gegenwärtiger Begriffe, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001
and Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma,
Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 among others, he has also edited or co-
edited seven readers as well as published over one hundred articles in a wide
range of journals and readers. Co-editor of arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture
and member of the editorial board of several international journals, including
Journal of Literary Theory and Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies. Since
2016, he is the Chairperson of Academia Europaea’s Literary and Theatrical
Section. His monograph Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in
Post-imperial Europe is under contract with Brill (forthcoming 2017).

Zrinka Božić-Blanuša
is Assistant Professor of literary theory at the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences, University of Zagreb. Her research interests include poststructural-
ism, deconstruction, phenomenology, narrative theory, intersections between
literature and philosophy, the position of literature and literary theory in re-
lation to politics, theories of representation and problems of testimony. She
is the author of Iz perspektive smrti: Heidegger i drugi (From the Perspective of
Death: Heidegger and Others, 2012), a genealogical study of contemporary dis-
cussion on Heidegger’s concept of “Sein zum Tode” in relation to literature,
ethics and politics.
viii notes on contributors

Marko Juvan
is literary theorist and comparatist, Head of the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian
Literature and Literary Studies, and Professor of Slovenian literature at the
University of Ljubljana. He is member of the editorial boards of Primerjalna
književnost and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, as well as of
the Section Committee for Literary and Theatrical Studies of the Academia
Europaea. In addition to numerous articles and edited volumes—e.g., Prostori
slovenske književnosti (Spaces of Slovenian Literature, 2016), World Literatures
from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2013)—his recent book pub-
lications include History and Poetics of Intertextuality (2008), Literary Studies
in Reconstruction (2011), and Prešernovska struktura in svetovni literarni sistem
(The Prešernian Structure and the World Literary System, 2012).

Bernarda Katušić
currently teaches South-Slavic literatures at the Faculty for Literary and
Cultural Studies, University of Vienna. She is author of the monographs Slast
kratkih spojeva (2000) and Das literarische Pendel (2012) and co-editor (with
Vladimir Biti) of Märchen in den südslawischen Literaturen (2010). She has
published prolifically in Croatian and international journals. She has taught
courses on South-Slavic literatures at the universities of Salzburg, Innsbruck,
and Vienna. Her main fields of interest are intermediality, genre transforma-
tions and the formation of emotions in literary discourse.

Nataša Kovačević
is Associate Professor of postcolonial literature and theory at Eastern Michigan
University. Her research on Cold War Orientalism and (post)communist dis-
sident literature has been the subject of her book Narrating Post/Communism:
Colonial Discourse and Europe’s Borderline Civilization (Routledge, 2008). Her
essays have appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial
Studies, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and several collections.
Her current research explores challenges to multicultural discourses in the
European Union, specifically postcolonial and postcommunist immigrant texts
that imagine a subaltern transnationalism, interrogating traditional modes of
community based on filiative resemblance, racial, ethnic, or otherwise.

Petr Kučera
holds an M.A. in Turkish and Islamic studies and a Ph.D. in non-Western litera-
tures from Charles University in Prague. He held long-term scholarships at the
universities of Berlin, Ankara, Istanbul and Princeton and was postdoctoral
researcher at SOAS (London) and visiting researcher at Ludwig Maximillian
notes on contributors ix

University in Munich. He currently teaches Turkish studies at the University

of Hamburg. He has translated into Czech eight books by Orhan Pamuk. His
Comprehensive Grammar of Turkish came out in 2014.

Aleksandar Mijatović
is Assistant Professor of literary theory at the Faculty of Humanities and
Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. He has published two books in Croatian:
Personific(a)tions: The Literary Subject and the Politics of Impersonality (2013),
World without Man: Consciousness, Materialism and Literature (2012) as well
as edited a collection of essays titled Imaginary Languages: Visual Culture and
the Limits of Representation (2012). In English, he has published articles on
Agamben, Althusser, Benjamin, Bergson, Breton, Deleuze, Derrida and, most
recently, “Heteroessences: Community, Demonstratives and Interpretation in
Agamben’s Philosophy of Language” (2014).

Guido Snel
is Assistant Professor of European Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
He specializes in contemporary European literatures, with a specific focus on
Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans. He also writes fiction (novels,
travelogue). His recent research deals with spatial metaphor and imaginary
European geographies, under the umbrella title Bridge and Wall: Persistence of
East-West and Balkan imaginaries in post-1989 Europe.

Stijn Vervaet
is Associate Professor of Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Balkan Studies at the
University of Oslo. He is the author of a book on the construction of national
identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule (Sarajevo
and Zagreb: Synopsis 2013). In addition to publications related to the cultur-
al and literary history of Habsburg Bosnia, he has published book chapters
and journal articles on the representation of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s
and of the Holocaust in (post-)Yugoslav fiction. He co-edited the volume
Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary
Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture (De Gruyter 2016, with
Vlad Beronja) and authored the upcoming monograph Holocaust, War, and
Transnational Memory: Testimony from Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Literature
(Routledge, 2017).
Introduction
Tua res agitur, tua fabula narratur: In Search of Lost Sovereignty

Vladimir Biti

The breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian and Ottoman

Empires in the aftermath of the First World War induced in East Central
Europe the founding of new nation-states such as Poland, Romania or Bulgaria
on the one hand and successor states like Germany, Austria or Turkey on the
other. Other states, such as Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, or the Kingdom
of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, with constitutions that maintained the multina-
tional imperial principle, did not completely avoid such political reconfigura-
tion but merely postponed it until the 1990s.
Therefore, with the Treaty of Versailles, the Western nation-state powers
introduced into the East Central European region the principle of national
self-determination, which endowed each nation with the political right to
establish its own autonomous state. Keeping in mind that Herder had al-
ready raised each nation to the status of legitimate inheritor of its “primor-
dial” culture, and that his idea had been embraced by East Central Europe’s
intellectual elites ever since the national revolutions of the mid-nineteenth
century, (Barnard Herder’s Social and Political Thought, 170–177; Herder,
Nationality, 13–14, 85–104), the official adoption of the principle of national
self-determination in the region hardly comes as a surprise. Herder’s affirma-
tive attitude to the ‘marginal’ peoples had already taken root in East Central
Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century through the transforma-
tion of the technology of this imperial region’s governance. At that time the
empires decided to protect and endorse the ethnic, linguistic and cultural
difference of their provincial constituencies in order to prevent their claims
to complete political autonomy.1 However, instead of eliminating the power
asymmetry between the center and the periphery, this ‘generosity’ replaced

1 As regards the Habsburg Empire, this was, in a sense, a logical continuation of the eighteenth-
century efforts to forge a unified empire with a unified purpose, which also “sought implicit
and sometimes explicit support from a very broad array of groups and social actors” and ul-
timately got it, at least from those who felt they were “the indirect beneficiaries of Habsburg
reform” (Judson 6). This time, however, the anticipated supporters (or feared rebels) were
not peasants or educated middle classes but ethnic constituencies. This confirms Judson’s
thesis that “imperial state building took place under and necessarily responded to radically
changing local, empire- and European-wide conditions, which demanded nimble strategies,
dependent upon the support of different allies in society” (6).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004353930_002

2 biti

it with that between the protectors and those in need of protection (Amselle
12–13). New frustrations arose. In an attempt to assuage them, the Treaty of
Versailles implemented the Western “national trinity” of people-territory-
state as established in the course of the nineteenth century by translating
Herder’s pre-statist Kulturnation into the terms of the political nation-state. In
this way, Herder’s back-distilling of “primordial” linguistic and cultural purity
from the inextricable mixture of an imperial identity’s variables—which he
nota bene reserved for the “parochial” peoples commanded by myths and leg-
ends (Herder 1891, 510)—was consecrated politically.
Thus, in spite of the proud proclamations of the new nations’ representa-
tives, whose celebration of their ‘authenticity’ completely failed to notice the
humiliation implied by it, their ‘provably’ indigenous and primordial nations
were in fact an imported and modern invention.2 It could not have been es-
tablished, however, if the Western nation-state powers’ enforcement of tradi-
tions had not had been wholeheartedly embraced by the domestic elites. As
Mahmoud Mamdani remarks concerning the “indirect rule” introduced into
Western colonies around the mid-nineteenth century, Western nation-states

were the first to advance and put into practice two propositions: one,
that every colonized group has an original and pure tradition, whether
religious or ethnic; and two, that every colonized group must be made to
return to that original condition, and that the return must be enforced
by law.
Mamdani 50

Despite the artificiality of nation-states in a region that is not only extremely

ethnically variegated but also bereft of any extended history of independent
statehood and (violent) ethnic homogenization,3 these states—in a para-

2 In fact, imperial administrations of the second half of the nineteenth century paved the way
for the establishment of new nations by creating many institutional spaces for their develop-
ment. “Concepts of nationhood and ideas of empire depended on each other for their coher-
ence. As intimately intertwined subjects, they developed in dialogue with each other, rather
than as binary opposites.” (Judson 9–10) However, this means that the empire rather than na-
tions operated as the driving force in a region’s history, a conclusion that requires the engage-
ment of an alternative model different from the one currently implemented by the dominant
national historiographies. This volume is an attempt to establish such a large-scale, compara-
tive, and transnational model that explores shared experiences in East Central Europe.
3 According to Maria Todorova, “/e/ver since the fifteenth century (and in the case of England
much earlier), Western Europe has embarked on a huge homogenization drive with various
degrees of success (the Spanish reconquista, England’s expulsion of the Jews in the twelfth
Introduction 3

doxical joint venture of foreign imperialism and domestic nationalism (Guha

74)—were established for the purpose of the efficient governance of their pop-
ulations. Western European modeling of East Central European nations was
therefore not a unilateral imposition but a decision buttressed by frustrated
native elites who regarded the establishment of their respective nation-states
as a welcome opportunity for their own affirmation. An ambiguous relation-
ship between the ‘mentors’ and their East Central European ‘protégés’ emerged
in this way. The protégés desired the respect of their mentors, yet were kept at
a distance not only by their own sinister realities—miserable social and eco-
nomic conditions, poor infrastructures, corrupt regimes, and the inefficient
administrations of their newly established countries (Berend 3–47)—but
also by their mentors’ reservations towards them. This unbalanced alliance
ultimately deepened the East Central European protégés’ powerlessness. In
transferring onto their neighbors the stigmatizing “Orientalism” which their
mentors had originally imputed onto them (Bakic-Hayden 1995)—and which
in turn resulted, as we have seen, from the bad conscience of the West—the
East Central European protégés created enemies and instigated new conflicts.
The delineated power asymmetry between the mentors and protégés was
thus transferred onto the relationship between the post-imperial protégés
themselves who started to blame each other for the dispossession they ex-
perienced. In the case of the East Central European successor states, disap-
pointment arose from the concessions that they were forced to make, their
loss of former glory, and war guilt. The newly established nation-states’ intel-
lectuals were frustrated by the devastating condition of their countries, which
were additionally involved in animosities with neighboring countries, torn
by hatred toward domestic minorities, and exposed to huge influxes of refu-
gees. The Jewish dispersed community was destabilized by the collapse of the

century, the religious wars in France and Germany), which, in conjunction with the strong
dynastic states, had laid the foundations of the future nation-states” (Todorova 175). But as
Ernest Renan puts it in his famous lecture “What is a Nation?”, the essence of a nation is that
its individual members erase attrocities committed by their compatriots from their memo-
ries. “Every French citizen has forgotten St. Bartholomew’s Day and the thirteenth-century
massacres in the Midi.” (Renan 46) Because the Western nation-states suppressed in such a
fashion the crimes committed long ago for the sake of the establishment of their nations,
they experienced the ethnic cleansings that were engaged in several centuries later by their
East Central European counterparts as a painful “return of the suppressed”, reacting to them
with disgust and repulsion. This unexpected reappearance of the Eastern within Western
Europe (in the traumatic past) and the Western within Eastern Europe (in the traumatic
present) confirms Aleksandar Mijatović’s thesis, as presented in this volume, of their com-
posite, closely intertwined character. They do not exist as separate autonomous entities.
4 biti

Hohenzollern and Habsburg Empires as the homelands of its identity. The de-
sire to compensate for these painful losses inflicted upon all sides involved gave
rise to their peculiar politics of trauma, represented in each of these cases by
particular narratives of dispossession. The traumatic constellation induced by
the delineated perpetuation of the power asymmetry did not pertain to each
of its constituencies in the same way; rather each of them developed a politics
connected to its specific position in the given entangled complex.4 Some of
the constituencies, unavoidably adapting to their circumstances, acted pub-
licly and collectively, some of them individually and clandestinely.
The first case spawned the collective political narratives of dispossession
that uncritically glorified the national past in order to mobilize the masses of
followers to sacrifice their short-term private interests for the long-term objec-
tives of these narratives’ “carrier groups”, which were of course presented as
being common and universal. What made these foundational myths so fasci-
nating is that they usually claimed “legitimate” historical rights for their nation
against that which was rendered as the nation’s “illegitimate” dispossession,
and thereby provided the domestic population with desperately needed conso-
lation. In defining pain, perpetrators, victims, and remedies in clearly bipolar,
antithetical terms, (Alexander 16–19), they remedially repossessed the national
past, present, and future. National state institutions (such as parliaments, uni-
versities, museums, archives, schools, etc.) orchestrated their dissemination
and reiteration via various scientific, pedagogic, and media discourses (such as
historiography, ethnology, literary and art history, pedagogy, political speeches,
memorials, TV-series, films, internet sites, etc.). This entailed a discriminating
regulation of established national spaces inasmuch as such narratives suppress
the rights of non-national compatriots and specific social and gender groups
as well as individual liberties. Moreover, they invigorate each other, thereby in-
tensifying aggravation and deepening divisions within and beyond the region,
continuously extending the number of their direct and collateral victims.
This explosive condition of the post-imperial political space induced, in its
turn, various forms of resistance like (1) counter-narratives of national minori-
ties that distance themselves from the new nation-states in which they live
and to which they are connected by a long historical heritage, via recourse to
external national homelands to which they now feel they most truly “belong”
(Brubaker, Nationalism 59–62), or (2) counter-narratives created by transna-
tionally oriented social, political, religious, gender and artistic groups in the

4 In Tracing Global Democracy, I interpret “traumatic constellation” “as a historically induced
political arena or dramatic tableau characterized by asymmetries along its many intersecting
and overlapping axes, each of them for its part a potential generator of trauma” (Biti 5).
Introduction 5

form of political and social liberation programs or avant-garde manifestos, and

finally (3) the clandestine and dispersed individual counter-narratives in the
form of philosophical, theological, sociological, literary, theatrical or film works.
Caused by the devastation of family and social networks, decomposition of
collective memory, economic or symbolic dispossession, stigmatization, mar-
ginalization, exclusion, and exile, individual traumas are usually performed by
suppressed voices sentenced to anonymity and silence. These voices respond
to the established common trauma through an inconspicuous and subtle indi-
cation of their suppressed traumatic experience. Being unsayable in the public
space, this experience can only be “gestured at” through artistic mediation or
fictionalization. (Biti 2–3) The aim of this attentive personal recollection that
takes recourse to personal memory against official history is to re-imagine the
established political space by bringing the values that are ignored in the of-
ficial management of collective identity to public expression. To achieve that,
individual counter-narratives interlock “many co-present disquieting axes” of
their traumatic experience, “in a manner capable of attracting performances
of adjustment and energizing affective attachments. The objective is a new,
refashioned and recalibrated kind of commonality.” (5)
In the proposal for the conference Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics
of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe in Vienna, on November 20–21, 2015,
the participants were requested to investigate the sketched intricate interplay
between the official political narratives of dispossession and various kinds of
counter-narratives that took place in post-imperial Europe. However, the pro-
posal distanced itself from the usual assumption that the ‘subtle and sophisti-
cated’ counter-narratives put an end to the injustices inflicted by the ‘vulgarly
bipolar’ political narratives of dispossession inasmuch as this hypothesis takes
for granted that art (or cosmopolitanism) is by definition superior to politics
(or nationalism). Disaggregating such binary terms which uncritically homog-
enize and substantialize that which they take to be opposites,5 our fundamen-
tal thesis was that all narratives of dispossession conduct a politics of trauma,
i.e. forge alliances among the victims in the form of imagined sacrificial com-
munities. As Jeffrey Alexander put it, “/w/hich narrative wins out is a matter
of performative power. The emotional experience of suffering, while critical,

5 For the analogous strategy of analytical disaggregation of the robust and clear-cut categories
that are “conceptually ambiguous, empirically misleading, and normatively problematic”
(Brubaker, Ethnicity 5), see Brubaker, who states that “common sense—the tendency to par-
tition the social world into putatively deeply constituted, quasi-natural intrinsic kinds—is a
key part of what we want to explain, not what we want to explain things with; it belongs to
our empirical data, not to our analytical toolkit” (Ethnicity 9).
6 biti

is not primordial.” (Alexander 2) To attain such performative power, all nar-

ratives of dispossession, be they politically polarized or artistically complex,
display a strong tendency to interlock. The only way to heal the traumatic
experience that underlies them is to have it publicly acknowledged, which is
why they look for as many allies as possible. The readers are expected to rec-
ognize that the “narrator(s)” tell(s) their own story, i.e. to accept the role of the
“hero” in it—which is by definition subordinate to that of the narrator(s)—
and thus to become “allies”. Due to such surreptitious seizure of power, narra-
tives of dispossession do not eliminate but reaffirm the asymmetry that gives
rise to them. They claim dispossession in order for their narrators to ultimately
achieve repossession. As Athena Athanasiou cautioned, dispossession “carries
the presumption that someone has been deprived of something that right-
fully belongs to them”, and at the same time “it is a term that re-establishes
possession and property as the primary prerogatives of self-authoring per-
sonhood”. (Butler 6) Therefore the other constitutive aspect of the concept of
dispossession—as emphasized by Judith Butler in her conversation with
Athanasiou—has to be restated. In this non-separable perspective, disposses-
sion “marks the limits of self-sufficiency and […] establishes us as relational
and interdependent beings”. (3) One of the conference’s objectives was to keep
both aspects of its central notion in sight.
By covertly aiming at the recuperation of (allegedly) lost sovereignty
the narratives of dispossession thus transform their politics into a “police”.
According to Jacques Rancière (21–42, 61–65), “policing”—as opposed to poli-
tics, which lays its emphasis on the gap amid a political space—means impos-
ing a consensus on that space. However, “consensus” does not establish the
conditions of the possibility of a common identity but rather of a restricted one,
i.e. that of its ‘engineers’. As the conditions of the possibility of one’s identity
become the conditions of the impossibility of another’s, the claim of dispos-
session perseveres. Traumatic constellations that generate individual narrative
responses tend to appear in the form of an inchoate experience of anxiety that
slips slowly and insidiously into afflicted individuals’ awareness. The political
space that was reconfigured through an official political narrative of dispos-
session disaggregates these individuals’ form of life, destabilizes their universe
and thereby mobilizes them to a counter-action. (Biti 6) However, even in
such covert narratives of dispossession, narrators transfer their frustrations
to a broader audience, assimilating the latter into an imagined trauma com-
munity. To escape the disconcerting experience of disaggregation, they assure
themselves of a large-scale historical existence through the attachment to the
space of others. Through the bifurcated rendering of “hi/storytelling” in the
subtitle of our conference, we wanted to emphasize that the public telling of
Introduction 7

collective histories and counter-histories and the covert individual storytelling

each conducts a politics of its own. Neither of these two principal mappings of
the post-imperial European space can establish itself in the position of “police”
because politics, by restricting their sovereignty through their relationality, is
inherent to both of them.

Part One of the volume, The Janus-Face of Dispossession, contains three contri-
butions. In my paper “Ruling (Out) the Province: Sovereignty, Dispossession,
and Sacrificial Violence”, the transition from empires to nation-states is repre-
sented as a translation rather than a rupture, considering that the discrimina-
tion of the one constituency by the other(s) was equally constitutive of empires
as it was of nation-states. The empires’ retroactively and nostalgically celebrat-
ed multitude was equally placed at the service of an agency that operated as
its secret manager. This long-enduring asymmetry between the sovereign and
subordinate constituencies resulted, in late empires, with the distinction be-
tween the ‘educators’ and ‘barbarians’, which, due to an obstinate resurgence
of the latter within the former category, transformed the envisaged mentor-
ing into a persistent irritation by ‘barbarians’ and the concomitant blaming
and denigration of them. While attributing them a self-content with their ‘na-
tional spirits’, Herder envisaged for the Germans, in counter-distinction, a re-
lentless self-propelling. In Hofmannsthal’s reinterpretation, the German spirit
benefits from its openness to rejuvenation, with the important proviso that
only the Austrians can provide it in the same way that the Slavs rejuvenate the
Austrians. In other words, the ‘barbarians’ reach their true fulfillment only if
they put themselves at the service of the maintenance of their mentors’ supe-
riority. Being thus compelled to look at themselves through the contemptu-
ous perspective of their ‘educators’ that aimed at their exploitation, they were
left with practically no other choice but to nourish their sovereignty projects
through a paradoxical rubbing of salt into their open wounds. In the remaining
part of the paper, I investigate which forms of sacrificial violence entailed this
kind of self-exemption from the envisaged frame of recognition, primarily in
the works of Miloš Crnjanski and Miroslav Krleža. One form of violence was
directed toward the others and the other toward their own selves, which was
followed by other subtle ramifications.
In his article “The Time of Dispossession: The Conflict, Composition and
Geophilosophy of Revolution in East Central Europe”, Aleksandar Mijatović
raises the question as to whether the dissolution of the East Central European
states in 1989 was a revolution performed after the model of conflict forged
by Hegel and Marx. In opposition to this model, some scholars follow the
model of composition by regarding the event of 1989 as a rebirth that restores
8 biti

continuity with the past. In fact, as revolution could never be simply defined as
a ‘coming out of age’, but rather as ‘being born again’, revolution and rebirth are
not easily separable from one another. By internalizing the conflict between
the West and the East, the East Central European states perceive themselves
as being less ‘western’ than their mentors but more ‘western’ than their neigh-
bour states, which entails the typically transitional, not-quite-European char-
acter of the region. Mijatović objects that this kind of reasoning is typical of
the model of conflict according to which the type precedes its differentiations,
which is why this model is insufficient. It has to be corrected by the model
of composition, which represents both Western and Eastern Europe as com-
posites exposed to a constitutive “internal differing”. He attributes such a per-
petual re-introduction of external into internal difference to the philosophies
of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, stating that only with the help of their
argument in favour of a fundamental difference can we account for the coex-
istence of tendencies such as racism and nationalism with their counterparts
such as multiculturalism and individualism in both parts of Europe. “With the
notion of the composite, it is possible to reject ‘differences of degree in nature’
and affirm ‘only degrees of difference itself’. On the level of the difference of
degree, there is the opposition between the ‘two’ Europes engendered through
the struggle for recognition. Following a temporalized notion of difference,
Europe is internally differentiated into a multiplicity of compositions irreduc-
ible to the actual geopolitical and cultural entities.”
In her contribution “Manifesting Dispossession: Politics of the Avant-garde”,
Zrinka Božić-Blanuša investigates the avant-garde manifestos that, by almost
violently breaking into the artistic field in the post-imperial age, profoundly
altered the profile of art with their insistence on depersonalization. Manifestos
are public performances that establish the collectives of their adherents, or
their ‘we’, by their very staging. In fact, this ‘we’ challenges the bourgeois idea
of art as an individual and private affair by advocating a resumption of the
pre-modern status of art as an instrument of communitarian being. Georges
Bataille was the first thinker to put forward self-dispossession or self-sacrifice
as art’s underlying principle. In Blanchot’s interpretation, Bataille’s concept of
art amounts to the limitless abandonment of individuality. The subject dis-
solves itself in the wider subjectivity of a community by following the dan-
gerous ideal of a self-empowering self-dispossession that has been cogently
criticized in the philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito. This
ideal reaffirms the sovereignty of the subject instead of questioning it. The
community belongs to no one, as it systematically expropriates all its propri-
etors; the common is what is improper, the opposite of property, of posses-
sion, and it exists only through their persistent undoing. One would therefore
Introduction 9

be better advised to interpret the self-dispossession as detaching oneself from

the sovereign kind of self-positioning, or a creative regeneration of the self as
based on respect for the different but necessary other. It is this foundation of
the self’s relationality and interdependence that the ‘we’ of the avant-garde
collectives ultimately gestures at. Only if being dispossessed of oneself implies
emancipation from being a subject can dispossession be regarded as a pre-
condition for emancipation. Otherwise we are running the risk that Bataille’s
‘community without subjects’ becomes a subject more powerful than those
who disempowered themselves in order for it to come into being.
Part Two of the volume, The Politics of Post-imperial Hi/storytelling, opens
with Petr Kučera’s “Claiming the West for the East: Classical Antiquity as an
Alternative Source of Turkish Post-Ottoman Identity?”, which explores the
transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. The terrible
political, social and economic situation after the Empire’s breakdown induced
the rise of collective melancholia which included both the affirmation and the
denial of the loss. As for the denial, the emptiness was filled by the install-
ment of a westernized self, which was on the one hand firmly determined to
reach the level of Western civilization, but on the other caught in constant
self-criticism for failing to accomplish this task. As for the affirmation, Western
contempt forced the literary movement Blue Anatolia into glorifying ancient
Turkish heritage associated with Anatolian Classical antiquity. Their concept
of history aimed to strengthen Turkish claims to the lands they had been dis-
possessed of both metaphorically (by Western claims that Asia Minor did not
belong to ‘Central Asian’ Turks) and physically (by the post-1919 occupation of
Anatolia and Istanbul). But how could the rooting of Turkish identity in pre-
Islamic and pre-Ottoman sources be harmonized with the political pressure
to accelerate its Europeanization? The reformists wanted to draw the Turkish
habitus closer to the Western model by humanizing it—and what has human-
ized the Europeans better than Classical antiquity? If it had its roots in Turkey,
then the Turks appear to have been greater Europeans than the Europeans
themselves from the outset. Instead of ‘going to the West’ the Blue Anatolians
thus found the West in Turkey, by ‘reviving’ their country’s proper place in
Western civilization. However, even if they emphasized the ethnically mixed
character of the Anatolian population, they shaped their concept of national
identity through the expropriation of Greek Classical antiquity. This is how
discrimination was smuggled back into their inclusive attitude. The Turkish
Humanists’ politics of history dispossessed the Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians
and other non-Turkish minorities of Anatolia.
The next contribution, Guido Snel’s “Andrić and the Bridge: Dispossessed
Writers and the Novel as a Site of Enduring Homelessness”, examines the
10 biti

complex interplay between novelistic poetics and cultural politics in the work
of the Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, which became all the more poignant after
the brutal dispossession of this writer and the cultural-political community
he was considered to embody. Andrić became uprooted after the educational
curricula and cultural policies of the new nation-states that emerged from the
former Yugoslavia dispossessed him of proper belonging, yet it is precisely
through this enforced homelessness that he shares the destiny of the novel
as the epitome of homelessness. Did Andrić not foresee his posthumous fate
when he, in various ways, inscribed the notion of homelessness into his nov-
els? However, as Edward Said cautioned, homelessness is not just a trait of cos-
mopolitan literature but also resides in the very heart of nationalism’s frantic
search for a home. This accounts for the ambiguity of the Yugoslav cultural
space, which displayed two different senses of homelessness, one national,
the other cosmopolitan. The post-WW1 Yugoslav cosmopolitanism, admittedly,
provided a home to all Yugoslav national identities, but what about those who
did not have them, such as Jews for example? This explains the horrified stance
of Max Löwenfeld, the character of Andrić’s story A Letter from 1920, as well as
the other outsiders of multinational communities in his novels. There is no
home that does not imply homelessness seems to be Andrić’s lesson, which
experienced serious distortions in its transmission to the literary canons of the
new South Slav nation-states. The same pertains to the image of the bridge that
in the reception of his work was frequently reduced to banality. In the conclud-
ing reading of Andrić’s story “The Bridge over the River Žepa”, Snel shows that
the bridge does not simply connect but, in a paradoxical gesture, enforces the
borders that it simultaneously denies. It owes this complexity to the mecha-
nisms of fictional performance.
Bernarda Katušić’s article “Anika’s ‘Big Other’ ” is also devoted to Andrić’s
oeuvre. It departs from Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary “small
other” as a projection of the ego and the symbolic “big Other” that, due to its
radical alterity, escapes all the ego’s attempts at its identification. Lacan con-
siders the (big) Other as the precondition of the subject’s (and, concomitantly,
its speech’s) constitution, which remains in the zone of this subject’s uncon-
scious. The task of the analyst is to unblock this unconscious “speech scene”,
i.e. to set free the “full speech” behind the “empty” one produced by the con-
scious ego. As one of the full speech’s characteristics is that speech of the one
is at the same time speech of the other, the analytical objective is to uncover
the truth which does not belong to either of the parties but exists between
them. Katušić’s analysis of the discourse of love in Andrić’s novella “Anika’s
Times” follows this objective. Due to the unrequited love in all love relation-
ships presented in the novella—and love is unrequited by definition because
Introduction 11

it unwittingly desires the unreachable Other—all its characters appear irreme-

diably traumatized. This escapes them because of their inability to confront
the Other that intervenes in their relationships, as Katušić demonstrates by
these relationships’ meticulous disentanglement. Behind their “empty speech”
Andrić lets his readers discern the “full speech” of their unconscious. However,
his “poetics of secrecy” carefully avoids verbalizing the “truth”. The purpose of
his narrative strategy is not to make the omitted motives clearer but, in a sense,
more complicated and obscure. In this respect, silence is this strategy’s most
important aspect. Since the truth resides in the domain of the Other, it escapes
identification and can be merely indeterminately “gestured at”. This clearly
contradicts the usual thesis of the omniscient perspective inherent in Andrić’s
narratives. Instead, Andrić, like his characters, was captured by a silence that
constitutively dispossesses its inhabitants of reliable access to the truth.
Davor Beganović writes about the “Melancholic Dispossession in The Diary
about Čarnojević”, a novel that emerged from the First World War trauma of a
Serb from Habsburg Vojvodina. Next to being Orthodox on the territory of a
Catholic monarchy, these Serbs now became additionally suspicious because
the Crown Prince’s murderer was a Serb. But Crnjanski was equally unwel-
come in the new Yugoslav state, which celebrated the Serbian victors over
the Habsburg Monarchy, this time because (from their perspective) he had
fought on the side of the enemy. He therefore rejects these heroes in favour
of the numerous anonymous victims of the war. The dispossession of the tor-
tured Serbian people from the Austro-Hungarian times thus continues in the
Yugoslav state. The novel The Diary about Čarnojević emerges out of this embit-
tered personal mood as “a paradoxical text, split between the individual and the
collective”, since Crnjanski feels dispossessed of belonging in both spheres. The
narrator presents his pre-war youth as split between patriotism and hedonism,
love for the country and carnal pleasures. The war in its seriousness introduces
an essential imbalance between them, making the choice no longer available as
it contaminates the erotic passion with the feeling of guilt. Love for the country
suddenly becomes an obligation, but in its turn is also deprived of any pleasure,
as Serbian patriotism is out of the question. This impasse entails a melancholy
that overwhelms the narrator by blurring the boundaries of his world, percep-
tion, and self, making the latter disintegrate into two doppelgangers, one col-
lective (Raitch, who is Serbian Orthodox) and one individual (Dalmatian, who
is an “artist”). In his conclusion, Beganović claims that this division reflects the
impasse to which Crnjanski was brought after the war and which caused his
melancholic paralysis. Neither passionate patriotism nor indifferent cosmopol-
itanism as reflected in his artistic “Sumatraism” offered a proper solution to it
and he continued to oscillate between the two, at least for some time.
12 biti

Part Three of the volume, The Post-post-imperial Retake, deals with develop-
ments after the Second World War and the Yugoslav wars and consists of three
contributions. It opens with Nataša Kovačević’s essay “Failures of Community:
Andrić in Andrićgrad”, which brings into conversation the conceptualizations
of community and dispossession in Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina (1945)
and Emir Kusturica’s contemporary project Andrićgrad (2014). In the novel
the bridge epitomizes absence, which, after Roberto Esposito, forms the very
basis of community. It is an idealized artifact that substitutes for the (missing)
communal bond by allowing the narrator to historicize, compare the various
occupations, and highlight historical contexts in a peculiar cumulative narra-
tive strategy reminiscent of epic poem cycles. If history is imperially imposed
from above, then this cycling, mythic experience of time comes from below.
Andrić gives none of these conceptions the ultimate right but subverts one
by the other. Remaining resilient to all human imaginative domestications,
the bridge proves to be the most consistent agent of their demystification and,
concomitantly, the dispossessor of human communal dreams. This pertains to
the Yugoslav community too as the “novel symptomatically ends in a narrative
containment which implies the impossibility of imagining the plenitude of a
liberated community”. Andrić’s consistent skepticism concerning the possibil-
ity of community makes the mythical notion of (Serbian) community as epito-
mized in Andrićgrad, a cultural, educational, and tourist settlement intended
to celebrate Višegrad’s most famous resident, all the more grotesque. Višegrad
emblematizes the dislocations and exchanges of population that took place
following the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. Around 3,000 Muslim inhabitants,
who comprised sixty percent of the population before the war, were murdered
near or on the bridge, and many bodies were thrown off it into the Drina. The
building of Andrićgrad therefore violently dispossessed both Višegrad and
Andrić of their multiple national and cultural significations.
The next essay in Part Three is Marko Juvan’s “Literature and the Politics of
Denial: Slovenian Novels on the ‘Erasure’ ”, which discusses literary represen-
tations of the erasure of around 25,000 citizens, most of them born in other
Yugoslav republics, from the register of permanent residents of the Republic
of Slovenia in 1992. In the first part, the essay traces the genealogy of this scan-
dalous dispossession, which for its part responded to the Slovenian feeling of
dispossession in socialist Yugoslavia, followed by animosity towards members
of other Yugoslav nations. The threatening role of Germans and the German
language in the Slovenian imaginary of the Habsburg age was taken up by
Milošević’s Serbs and the Serbo-Croatian language at the onset of the 1990s.
Such a defensive attitude toward the ‘masters’ was combined with a sense of
Slovenian economic and cultural superiority by spawning an inconsiderate
Introduction 13

ethnonationalism. Neither the authorities nor public opinion questioned the

ethics and constitutionality of the decision for over a decade, while the erased
themselves needed ten years to recover from the shock, to initiate protest ac-
tions and alarm the international community. The theme was peripherally
taken up in literary and theatrical works from 2005 on, but it is only since 2013
that it has started to gain wider attention. The essay focuses on three novels, in
all of which the multicultural neighbourhood inhabited by immigrants from
the less-developed Yugoslav republics defines the protagonists as the typical
victims of the erasure. The first of them, Mazzini’s noir thriller The Erased, is
structured as an exemplary story to influence the public’s sympathy for the gen-
eral issue. Glavan’s Anyway and Bauk’s The End. Again are more expansive in
their scope, cover a longer period and are polyvocal and polyfocal in their nar-
rative structure. The essay concludes with the meticulous reading of their per-
spective, characters, genre complexity and ideological ramifications. However,
“despite the three novels about the erasure, the trauma remains unprocessed”.
The final essay of the volume is Stijn Vervaet’s “Cosmopolitan Counter-
Narratives of Dispossession: Migration, Memory, and Metanarration in the
Work of Aleksandar Hemon”, which states that narratives of dispossession, as a
means of repossession of ruined lives, usually proliferate after social, political
and economic upheavals. In the Yugoslav wars these attempts at the reposses-
sion of the supposedly dispossessed national beings resulted with much more
palpable forms of dispossession. One of these forms was exile, which spawned
the “migrant writers” who precisely through their displacement were well posi-
tioned to reflect on both constitutive aspects of dispossession: the loss of land
and citizenship and the limits of one’s sovereignty. The work of Aleksandar
Hemon richly demonstrates how in the wake of the Yugoslav wars these two
modalities of dispossession are bound to each other. The first part of the ex-
ploration of his narrative techniques of dispossession examines the novella
“Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls” from the collection The Question of Bruno.
Whereas the protagonist’s life trajectory is in many respects reminiscent of the
author’s biography, the “autobiographical pact” (Lejeune) is constantly under-
mined by the narrator’s ironic play with the distance between author, narrator,
and protagonist. The use of metanarrative strategies evokes and mirrors the
paradoxical experience of displacement by emphasizing the impossibility for
the protagonist to transgress the cultural, linguistic, geographic, and temporal
boundaries he faces. The permanent redoubling of established agencies raises
awareness of relationality (and asymmetry) as the ultimate site of identity.
This redoubling narrative strategy, tightly connected with the experience of
exile, continues in The Lazarus Project, which has divergent (hi)stories of dis-
possession converge and intertwine with each other and, in addition, doubles
14 biti

their novelistic presentation in the discursive and visual part (using photo-
graphs taken by Hemon’s friend Velibor Božović). Hemon thus consistently
interweaves two apparently conflicting aspects of dispossession.

As mentioned above, this volume emerges from the conference Claiming the
Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe organized
at the Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Vienna, on November 20–21,
2015. However, for one reason or another, not all conference participants are
represented in it. The represented participants have substantially extended
and modified their papers, while some of them have submitted completely
new ones. My gratitude goes to Bernarda Katušić for her help with organizing
the conference, to Melisa Slipac for her assistance with preparing this volume
for print, and to Sabina Folnović for creating the volume’s index. They have
done an excellent job. Last but not least, I wish to thank the contributors for
their splendid cooperation.

Works Cited

Alexander, Jeffrey. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.
Amselle, Jean-Loup. Affirmative Exclusion: Cultural Pluralism and the Rule of Custom in
France. Trans. Jean Marie Todd. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Bakic-Hayden, Milica. “Nesting Orientalisms. The Case of former Yugoslavia.” Slavic
Review 4: 54 (1995). 917–931.
Barnard, Frederic. Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to
Nationalism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965.
Barnard, Frederic M. Herder, Nationality, Humanity, and History. Montreal and London
and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003.
Berend, Ivan T. Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II.
Berkeley and Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998.
Biti, Vladimir. Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma.
Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.
Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationalism and the national question in the
New Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Brubaker, Rogers. Ethnicity without Groups. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 2004.
Butler Judith. Dispossession: Performative in the Political. Conversations with Athena
Athanasiou. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2013.
Guha, Ranajit. History and the Limit of World-History. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2002.
Introduction 15

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Auch eine Philosophie zur Bildung der Menschheit. Ed.
Bernhard Suppan. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Reinhold Stieg. Vol. 5. Berlin: Adamant, 1891.
Judson, Pieter. The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Cambridge, MA and London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.
Mamdani, Mahmoud. Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity. Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2012.
Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, ed. Becoming
National: A Reader. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 41–55.
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
 Part 1
The Janus-Face of Dispossession

∵
Ruling (Out) the Province and Its Consequences:
Sovereignty, Dispossession, and Sacrificial Violence

Vladimir Biti

1 Translatio imperii: The Divided Descendants

At the time of decolonization and the rise in Holocaust awareness, the numer-
ous atrocities committed by Western European nation-states, both outside and
inside of Europe, compromised them in the eyes of their leading intellectuals.
Several decades later, the nation-states’ growingly bad reputations resulted in
a peculiar nostalgia for the “potentiality of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri
82) of replaced empires. This nostalgia’s chief engineers, the post-Marxist phi-
losophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, directed their critique primarily
at Hegel’s advocacy of the nation-state. Retroactively opposing it, they inter-
preted the establishment of the nation-state as the subjugation of an empire’s
multifarious and abundant possibilities (84).
Yet their celebration of empires’ unbounded freedoms neglects, above all
other things, the process of translatio imperii, which draws empires into com-
petition over their forebear’s legacy. In the transmission of this legacy, which
constitutes the core of translatio, successors claim the exclusive right of con-
tinuity against ‘illegitimate usurpers’. For example, all three of the ancient
Roman Empire’s successors, namely the Islamic, Byzantine and Carolingian
Empires, laid claim to being the sole proper heir to Roman sovereignty.1
Consequently, translatio presents itself as the sovereignty-legitimizing opera-
tion by a group of self-appointed representatives which is directed against their
external and/or internal rivals, i.e. other empires and/or the given empire’s
subordinate constituencies. The representatives of translatio use it to blame
these other pretenders for their disloyalty to what is supposedly the forebears’
genuine will. A case in point is the Serbian modern historiography’s notori-
ous portraying of Orthodox Christianity as the only proper heir to Byzantium

1 In a sense, an empire’s ‘barbarians’ sooner or later become another empire’s carriers. This
means that empires do not precede the division between the core and the periphery but fol-
low on from it; the power relationship inheres to them as their constitutive feature. (Motyl
21–24) A political unit free of divisions is always a compensatory back-projection. For the
‘barbarians’ drawn into the process of translatio imperii after the dissolution of Roman
Empire, see Ausenda 1995.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004353930_003

20 biti

and the rejection of Ottoman Islam as its oppression and destruction, even
though the Orthodox Church clearly “benefited from the imperial dimension
of the [Ottoman] state, and its ecumenical character and policies are com-
prehensible only in an Ottoman framework. It is symptomatic that the seces-
sion of the emerging nations meant also an almost simultaneous secession
from the Constantinople patriarchate, that is, from the Orthodox church of
the Ottoman empire.” (Todorova 164) Even if they broke with the Byzanthine
legacy, the Ottomans seem to have done so to a lesser degree than the Serbs
when they broke from the Ottomans. In a word, Christianity and Islam are not
necessarily opposites. Constitutive of empires no less than for nation-states,
such external and/or internal discrimination explains why their claim to sover-
eignty is, from the very outset, controversial. However, if a controversial ambi-
tion for sovereignty is inherent in empires then these can hardly figure as the
epitome of unconstrained multitude. The grasp of one representative group’s
sovereignty at the expense of others dismantles it as a prefiguration for the
nation-state. Multitude is placed at the service of an agency that operates as its
secret but efficient manager in both an empire and this state.
This discrimination constitutive of empires has not escaped the attention
of prominent political philosophers dealing with imperial legacy. Consider
Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Roman cosmopolitanism for example. The
foreigner in the Roman empire, she says, was included among the contractual
allies not “out of mercy but for the sake of the expansion of the polis which,
from now on, was expected to affiliate even the most foreign members to the
new alliance of comrades” (Was ist Politik, 114–115).2 They were welcomed as
long as they accepted subordination to Roman law. Roman politics, engendered
on foreign soil, “came into being precisely at the point where for the Greeks it
reached its limit and end, in the in-between; that is to say, not between citi-
zens, but between peoples, foreign and unequally opposed to each other and
brought together only by conflict as they are” (108). Yet such a considerable
recalibration of a human community that, by this point, geopolitically extend-
ed substantially further than the Greek polis did not entail its liberation. As
the recent specialist in the field Greg Wolf has put it, we may conceptualize
this operation as the expansion of Roman society through the recruitment of
a colonized population to various underprivileged roles and positions in the
social order (105). The civilizing process of ‘Romanization’ entailed a recogni-
tion that not all races and regions were equally capable of the envisaged culti-
vation. Ultimately, the Romans privileged the South over the North, the West
over the East, the littoral over the continent and cities over the countryside.

2 All translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.

Ruling ( Out ) the Province 21

In the regions where Roman assimilation succeeded, its end effect “might be
compared to the demolition of street upon street of old houses, materials from
which were used to create a tower-block to house the former inhabitants in a
new style” (Wolf 47).
Of course, with the Greek polis’s Romanization, translatio imperii all but
reached its conclusion. Under the guise of reconciliation, it kept on deepen-
ing the asymmetries of the global political space. The civilizing global design
of the Enlightenment, for instance, replaced the religious global design of the
Renaissance. Yet, however secular Enlightenment rationalism was, it shared
structural similarities with the “dogmatic” religion which it sought to displace
(Connolly 2000). The universal Christian mission of early European moder-
nity was underpinned by the colonialist exploitation of the Americas in much
the same way as its secular civilizing follow-up rested on the ongoing British,
Dutch, and French imperialist plunder of Asia and Africa (Mignolo 722, 725–
726). This may explain why modern cosmopolitanism rehearses the colonial
difference between European and non-European peoples. Far from eliminat-
ing this fundamental imparity, its founder, Immanuel Kant, gradually comple-
mented it and refined it with the geopolitical difference between the North,
South and East European nations. In the section of Kant’s Anthropology en-
titled The Character of Nations, we read that England and France “are the two
most civilized nations on the earth” (Anthropology 226). The German, however,
“has a fortunate combination of feeling, both in that of the sublime and in that
of the beautiful; and in the first he does not equal an Englishman, nor in the
second a Frenchman, yet he surpasses both in so far as he unites them” (“On
National Characteristics” 53–54).
Herder deserves special attention in the context of translatio imperii be-
cause he was the designer of new identity politics in both the non-European
and East-Central-European imperial regions. At the outset of the third collec-
tion of his early Fragments on the New German Literature (1766/7), he describes
the “colossus” of European literature as consisting of an Oriental head, a Greek
breast, a Roman belly, Nordic-Gallic legs and German feet (Frühe Schriften
374). Paying tribute to all European nations, he reserves the earthly fundament
and the only dynamic part of this colossal European body for the Germans
who are now expected to move the magnificent European whole forward.
Nonetheless, since ancestors with their complex mindsets are inscribed in the
memory of their descendants, without sensitively and meticulously research-
ing this rich genetic archive, descendants cannot realize who they really are.
That is to say, the Germans cannot properly identify themselves without devel-
oping the Einfühlungsvermögen for the deceased foreign cultures, i.e. ability to
enter into their mindsets. Their retroactive operation of self-finding acquires
22 biti

the pattern of an ongoing specification of the self through subtle differentia-

tion from its otherness-to-itself. According to this pattern, the truth of the self
is to be judged in terms of its future potentiality, while the truth of others is to
be judged in terms of a past perfect being. All people belong to humanity but
they do not occupy the same tense. To engage Elisabeth Povinelli’s vocabu-
lary, the future-oriented autological subject and the past-addicted genealogical
communities part ways with Herder (41–42). The subject pushes forward taking
responsibility for the course of history and shaping his biography as a work of
life-art, whereas communities, relegated to their restricted site in life, appear
to be in need of constant assistance, protection and custody. Frozen in their
exotic particularity, considered to be infantile and immature, unable to change
themselves and develop their capacities, they serve as the backdrop of the
Western self’s untiring disentanglement. “[T]heir inclusion within the realm
of the human is precisely the source of their exclusion” (Rothberg 57–58).
Unexpectedly, however, the envisaged self-propelling of the German
Volksgeist turns out not only to be in need of these indistinctive ‘negative foils,’
but also to be constitutively dependent upon them. To recall Roberto Esposito:
“Only if there are men (and women) who are not completely, or not at all, con-
sidered persons, can others be or become such.” (209) The ‘person’ must leave
behind these ‘non-personal’ groupings to confirm the progress of its distinc-
tion, yet these groupings, instead of being surpassed, obstinately resurge with-
in the ‘person’s’ very body in the form of so-called ‘foreign bodies’ or ‘internal
pockets of exteriority.’ As it turns out that human “spirit contains at its very
heart the wound of the non-spirit” (Remnants of Auschwitz 77), this irritation
induces persistent blaming, stigmatizing and sanctioning of “non-persons”
rather than their envisaged affirmation and regeneration. On the one hand,
for sure, Herder’s generous thesis that “[t]he barbarian subjects, the educated
overcomer cultivates” (Ideen zur Philosophie 706), brought him the avatar of
the new, protective type of colonial administration that replaced the old, as-
similating type. On the other hand, however, he did not consider all subjects to
be able to educate themselves; those whom nature “was obliged to deny nobler
gifts” she has taken care to compensate for this denial by “an ampler measure
of sensual enjoyment” (“Organization” 77). As opposed to the people of “finer
intellect,” their “breast swells with boiling passion” (77). Herder, for instance
counts the Arabs, who unfold their “original character” in a neat communion
with their horses and camels, among those resilient to cultivation (Ideen zur
Philosophie 257). The “Negro” whom nature has placed “close to apes” is not
much better, but parasitic peoples, such as Jews or “Gypsies”, provoke the real
outbursts of his anger (702). Jews hang onto “almost all European nations,”
drawing more or less profit from their juice.” (702) “Gypsies” are a people that
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 23

is “by its birth far removed from everything that is called divine, decent and
civilized” (703).
I am not only claiming that this generous advocate for humankind’s ethnic
diversity did not hesitate to denigrate and stigmatize its various branches but
also that discrimination was a genuine constituent of his cosmopolitan proj-
ect tout court. Herder involuntarily anticipated “one fine day” when, as Arendt
memorably put it, “humanity will conclude democratically—namely by ma-
jority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate
certain parts thereof” (Origins of Totalitarianism 299). While the Slavs celebrat-
ed him as the father of their national revivals, he attributed to these “itinerant,
auxiliary or serving peoples” (Ideen zur Philosophie 696) the “most cunning,
terrible slavish inertia” (698). “Despite their incidental deeds, they never were
as undertaking, belligerent and adventurous a people as the Germans; they
rather tacitly followed behind them, occupying the emptied places and lands”
(696). Nonetheless, Slavic nations’ intellectual elites embraced this humiliat-
ing attitude that lowered them to an object of grooming with the same enthu-
siasm as the elites in African colonies who embraced the shift in colonial rule
toward the enforcing of ‘native’ traditions. Around the mid-nineteenth centu-
ry, both perceived this “generosity” of their imperial centers to be the affirma-
tion of their genuine substance by misapprehending what it had really been.
Since it rested on “two propositions: one, that every colonized group has an
original and pure tradition […]; and two, that every colonized group must be
made to return to that original condition,” Mahmood Mamdani appropriately
designated it as “the first political fundamentalism of the modern period” (50).
Several decades later, this shift in the West European administration of
African and Asian colonies also entailed a restructuring of identity politics in
East-Central European Habsburg and Ottoman empires that, in the same way
as their colonialist counterparts, tried to rescue them from the approaching
catastrophe. This new identity politics introduced the category of the foreigner
in the place of the former category of the settler, which was more suitable to
the imperial conception of nationhood since it was usually rendered in ad-
ministrative rather than ethnolinguistic terms.3 This reorientation of mod-
ern empires deserves attention because, as is known, the French Revolution

3 For the changing paradigm of nationhood through the history of Habsburg Empire, see
Judson 48. As an example of the transition to a linguistic notion of the nation, with the con-
scription law of 1868, Austrian conscripts gained the right to be trained in their own lan-
guage but Austrian officers, prevented as they were from serving in their own regions and
frequently posted to new locations, were unable to learn so many local languages. The local
population treated them as foreigners on the basis of this linguistic inability.
24 biti

politically introduced the foreigner as the French nation-state’s scapegoat

(Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism 299–300).4 One of the after-effects of such
reorientation toward the “indigenization” was, for example, Stalin’s politics of
the Soviet nations’ rooting (korenizatsiia) and the Soviet minorities’ depraving
(lishentsy), which “reinforced the belief of national majorities that minorities
did not belong and should be expelled” (Martin 44). It was designed, if only
unconsciously, on the Habsburg model.5 Viewed retroactively, this concession
by the East-Central European empires to national identity politics spawned
enormous consequences, paving the way for forthcoming ethnic wars in these
regions which are characterized by extremely hybrid ethnic, religious, linguis-
tic and cultural populations.

1.1 The Divided Identity: “One Man’s Meal, Another Man’s Poison”
In fact, Herder’s reconfiguration of the German imperial identity politics of his
time already aimed to outmaneuver the foreign cultural strata in the German
national formation. In order to understand his systematic disentanglement
of identity politics oriented toward national particularity, one has to bear in
mind that Germany was from 1648 onwards not only biconfessional but also,
for many centuries, a frontier state between Germans and Slavs (Brubaker
5–6). Whereas the Germans of Herder’s time were, along with various Slav na-
tions, politically affiliated to their empire by a ‘decision from above,’ he now
invented an indigenous ethnolinguistic affinity between the German past and

4 For the overlapping between the French republican model of national citizenship and that
of Joseph II, see Judson 77. However, by putting emphasis on the integrational force of the
Habsburg resp. Austrian Empire, Judson tends to underplay the explosive, disintegration-
al potential that inhered to these integrational efforts from the outset. To take an illustra-
tion from the French model, verse three of the Marseillaise (Quoi des cohortes étrangères,
Feraient la loi dans nos foyers) expresses the fear that “hordes of foreigners” would come and
dictate the law in the French “homeland”. Although oriented toward assimilation, the French
Empire excluded its colonies’ populations from the main benefits of French citizenship. They
were regarded as ‘foreign races’ and clearly distinguished from the French race. The same ap-
plies to the Habsburg ‘family model’ in which not all family members were equally welcome.
For the asymmetry between the core and its peripheries as the defining characteristics of
empires, see Motyl 1996, and Barkey 1996.
5 The Habsburg Empire supported (rather than opposed, as is usually assumed) the emergence
of nations, with the aim of governing them more efficiently (Judson 9). By following this
model, Soviet and Yugoslav socialist internationalism did not erase the boundaries between
nations but preserve them. In order to prevent the separatist claims of their constituencies,
both were established as federations of equal nations. See Brubaker, Nationalism 23–54 and
Hondius 122, 140, 145–146. For the parallels between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, see
Vujačić.
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 25

its present along a temporal axis, and between domestic and dislocated co-
nationals along a spatial axis. The idea was to separate the Germans from their
non-national co-fellows by establishing the German nation as an imagined
community of shared memory, solidarity and belonging, epitomized in the
concept of ‘national spirit.’ Herder expected the Germans to shape this com-
munity of fate ‘from below’ by re-discovering their past, always anew, from
their present. After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, Hofmannsthal re-
sumed his idea of Germany as a nation on a relentless search for its spirit by
raising the Austrians to the status of its most appropriate carriers (“Reden und
Aufsätze I” 457). As the representative of the imperial nation “naturally en-
trusted” with the cultivation of the Slavs (456), Hofmannsthal profiled Herder’s
idea as the claim to supremacy not only over the small nations but also the
big ones (“Reden und Aufsätze III” 32). While these nations’ well-established
spirits remain self-content, the German spirit capitalizes its openness to reju-
venation. Stating that the Austrians represent for Germans the same that the
Slavs represent for Austrians and that America represents for Europe, i.e. an
“immeasurable quantity of the young and unused (impulses)” to be invested
for “higher purposes” of German and European self-propelling (“Reden und
Aufsätze I” 394), Hofmannsthal unwittingly uncovers this project’s exploitative
design. Taking up Herder’s legacy, in the manner typical of trauma narratives,
he turns the burden of German dividedness into an enormous advantage.
Wounded as they were after the breakdown of their empires, it was not only
Germans who were incredibly attracted to this re-uniting prospect but also the
representatives of all East-Central European nations. After their empires col-
lapsed, leaving their identities unsheltered, they embraced this “fateful” model
even more enthusiastically. The ideologies of sustained, collective sacrifice for
a common national future in the name of an allegedly common past find their
most fertile soil and evoke a most genuine commitment in traumatic political
constellations, in which social uncertainty becomes so pervasive that ordinary
actors are unable to stick to any consistent political strategy for an extended
period of time (Hanson). However fantasized it may be, the force of such af-
fective attachment promises a large-scale historical existence, which might
explain the recourse of numerous national liberation movements to it, from
German Romanticists to those of post-imperial East-Central Europe.
Yet there is an important difference between these two as regards the tran-
sition from empire to the nation-state. Germany was the successor to a long-
lasting empire and, in this sense, was ‘chosen’ by its past to inherit supremacy
over the others. By contrast, the populations of the post-imperial nation-states
were, for many centuries, relegated to the imperial “zones of indetermina-
cy” (Povinelli 3–4) in which, continually serving as the amorphous supplier
26 biti

rather than the articulate designer of imperial commonality, nothing distinc-

tive could emerge. Pressed into these godforsaken margins, their elites were
forced to become other-oriented rather than self-centered, which over time
induced the so-called double consciousness defined by Du Bois as “the sense of
always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others” (8). Du Bois points
to the antagonism genuine to the Afro-American “mongrel selves,” continu-
ously torn apart between their national and racial identity. The same divided-
ness between the affiliation and affinity holds, for instance, for the Bosnian
Muslims during Ottoman and Habsburg rule. Even though territorially and
administratively affiliated with the Bosnian Orthodox and Catholic commu-
nities, they attached themselves both emotionally and culturally to Istanbul,
from where they had expected their ultimate confirmation. Because of this
enduring co-articulation with an ‘elsewhere,’ their ‘original and pure’ tradition
from the pre-Ottoman time fell into complete oblivion. In sharp contrast to the
successor states that claimed a richly resonating imperial legacy, in the case of
provincial peoples, establishing a connection with their long abandoned ‘in-
digenous past’ amounted to an illusory task. It was not only too remote and
strange to belong to their collective memory but, in addition to that, their long-
term marginalization and pauperization disqualified them from such a gratify-
ing succession. This ‘mission impossible’ of the so-called Bosniaks to perceive
themselves within the identity frame that the new imperial center encouraged
them to adopt, generated a persistent grief instead of the envisaged relief. The
underprivileged social strata in particular had the bitter feeling of being forced
into a fake sovereignty, forged by the new Western mentors who had the aim
of better exploiting them. An ever-deeper dissatisfaction with the allocated
road to ‘sovereignty’ became fertile soil for compensatory narratives of dis-
possession, simultaneously directed against the foreign masters and domestic
traitors who benefited from collaborating with the foreigners.6 Brutally cut off
from their identity ambition’s sources of satisfaction, these strata were left with
practically no other choice but to nourish their sovereignty projects through a
paradoxical deepening of their deprivation. This kind of self-exemption from
the envisaged recognition frame, however painful in its consequences, was the
only available response to the cynical imperial policy.

6 For example, the main protagonist in the Bosnian Serb writer Petar Kočić’s satirical play The
Badger in Court ( Jazavac pred sudom, 1903), the peasant David Štrbac, does not ironize only
the Austrians but also the requests for more autonomy by the Serbian Action for Orthodox
Ecclesiastical-Educational Autonomy, because for him this meant collaborating with foreign
rulers instead of overthrowing them (186). In his view, not only foreigners are oppressors but
also compatriots who embrace their idea of national sovereignty.
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 27

1.2 Crnjanski and the Dispossessed Vojvodina Serbs

In delineated circumstances, the sacrificial inclination of the Habsburg Serbs
in Vojvodina at the beginning of the twentieth century deserves a closer inspec-
tion. Religiously, emotionally and culturally attached both to their Southern
compatriots (first under the Ottomans and then autonomous) and the Russian
empire for two centuries,7 the Habsburg Serbs in Vojvodina felt deeply frus-
trated in the Empire which they were affiliated to. Nonetheless, they refused
‘indigenization’ as the method of national identification, proposing politi-
cal self-dispossession in place of the imposed cultural self-possession as the
platform for their liberation.8 In his Lyrics of Ithaca (1919), Miloš Crnjanski, a
prominent member of their community, treats the systematic bereaving of his
compatriots of all identity marks, which ultimately left them nothing but bare
life,9 as the only proper source of national pride. The long history of imperial

7 Migrations of the Serbian population from Vojvodina to Russia, induced by their frustration
within the Habsburg Empire, are planned by Vuk Isakovič, the main protagonist of Miloš
Crnjanski’s Migrations 1 (Seobe 1, 1928) and materialized by Pavel Isakovič, the main protago-
nist of his Migrations 2 (Seobe 2, 1955).
8 This sacrificial politics that insists on the national dispossession of its carriers obviously
draws on the contemporaneous proletarian “wretched on the earth,” which in its turn re-
vivifies the much older pattern of Christian victimhood (for the upgrading of religious by
socialist and then nationalist sacrificial patterns, see Mylonas 7–8). Such amalgamation of
the victimhood’s heterogeneous forms as the mobilizing platforms of resistance was genuine
to the East-Central European post-imperial space in which consecutive strikes, upheavals
and revolutions induced a permanent state of exception (Berend 201). The former imperial
provinces’ typical condition of indeterminacy was thus unleashed from its previously iso-
lated zones. According to Agamben, “World War One (and the years following it) appear as
a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanisms and apparatuses of the state
of exception” (State of Exception 7). However, the state of exception had already entered the
public political sphere with the French Revolution and the sphere of private self-reflection
with Kant’s aesthetic (37–39). Although World War One contributed to its extension and
elaborated its mechanisms, Agamben claims that only today’s world “fully develops” its rule
(13). In fact, he undertakes his analysis of the state of exception as the spreading condition
of indeterminacy in the shadow of 9/11. Since then, “suicidal terrorism” refined its techniques
and globalized its effects, which makes it into the following analysis’ point of departure.
9 The poem “Hymn” (“Himna”), for example, declares: “We have got nothing. Neither God
nor master./ Our God is Blood.” And: “We had got neither home nor mother,/ We moved
our blood.” (Nemamo ničeg. Ni Boga ni gospodara./ Naš Bog je Krv.—Ni majke ni doma ne
imadosmo, /selismo našu krv.) (Lirika Itake 15). It is this utter deprivation of all material and
symbolic properties that, according to Agamben’s analyses in Homo Sacer, disaggregates
human subjects to the condition of bare life. Agamben’s concept, via Arendt, goes back to
the bloßes Leben from Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt” 202) that,
via Derrida’s discussion in The Force of Law (“The Force of Law”), inspires Agamben’s State of
28 biti

frauds and deceptions10 engendered slavish humiliation of his people, which

is why early death became a kind of mission for the contemporary Serbian
youth. In the poems “Dithyramb” (“Ditiramb”), “Ode to the Gallows” (“Oda
vešalima”) and “A Toast” (“Zdravica”), the poet interprets heroic sacrifice as
the single source of national joy. As long as the slaves remain humble, they
do not deserve honor. No matter the price, they must hate and despise their
tyrants.11 “Long live the hate, death and scorn (Da živi mržnja smrt prezrenje),”
reads Crnjanski’s “Our Elegy”, “the scornful laughter of the slaves elevates us
into the heaven (U nebo diže nas/ prezriv osmeh roblja)” (Lirika Itake 20–21).
The poet resolutely rejects the jubilant South Slav nationalism after the libera-
tion, which uncritically evokes the time of medieval glory, because it forgets
the crimes and immorality of this allegedly glorious aristocratic past.12 The
poem “To the Memory of Princip” (“Spomen Principu”) declares that celebrat-
ing this golden age amounts to a lie because it neglects the terrible suffering
of peasants during that time and thereafter: “My people are not the fluttering
emperor’s flag/ But a dishonored mother./ Sweat and poverty and hate/ smol-
dering in the shame of ashes and rocks” (Moj narod nije carski steg što se vije, /

 Exception (37). Authorized by bare life, Benjamin advocates the engagement of divine
“pure violence” against the oppression of “state violence” in fact in the same postwar time
(1920–21) that motivates Crnjanski and Krleža to take into protection the dispossessed.
His messianic argument, itself developed in the dangerous “zone of indeterminacy” be-
tween revolutionary liberation and violent annihilation, unwittingly testifies to a fascina-
tion with the “final solution” that haunts both Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s interwar works
(LaCapra). The general state of indeterminacy after the breakdown of empires shut the
door wide for this fascination.
10 The poem “Grotesque” (“Groteska”) addresses the “thousand time” repeated fake “seals of
the constitution and rights, / laws and statutes” (pečate ustava i prava, / zakona i štatuta)
(Lirika Itake 18–19).
11 See the poem “To the Slaves” (Robovima), published 1918, but astonishingly not included
in The Lyrics of Ithaca. It declares: “The glory will come/ When you will be led by killers”
(Slava će doći/ kad vas povedu ubice) (Lirika Itake 105).
12 This opinion is not only put forth in The Lyrics of Ithaca. Three stories from the collec-
tion Stories about Manly Affairs (Priče o muškom), namely “The Apotheosis” (“Apoteoza”),
“The Great Day” (“Veliki dan”) and “Paradise” (“Raj”) ironize the Serbian officers’ postwar
glorification, portraying them as immoral and grotesque figures (Priče o muškom 28–34,
35–52, 116–132). They ignore the tortured soldiers, it is suggested, in the same way that
the corrupt medieval noblemen disregarded the suffering peasants. However, Crnjanski’s
narrator also mocked the Serbian “Thessaloniki” officers’ cockiness, among other reasons,
because the Yugoslav army rejected his application for the officer position after the war.
As he lived in Vojvodina, he was an Austro-Hungarian conscript in the war and they were
despised by both the “Thessaloniki” heroes and the new Yugoslav officers.
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 29

nego majka obeščašćena … Znoj i sirotinja i mržnja što tinja/ u stidu zgarišta
i stena) (25). In the “Soldier’s Poem” (“Vojnička pesma”), the soldier uncovers
the adored national temples as the sites of slavery (27–28). The same goes for
other South Slav peoples, invited by the poet to proudly confront complete
dispossession as their true destiny. The poem “To Yugoslavia” (“Jugoslaviji”) ac-
cordingly reads: “No glass you drink/ no fluttering tricolor/ is ours.” “We are
true brothers / in shame, penance, and poverty” (Nijedna čaša što se pije/ ni-
jedna trobojka što se vije/ naša nije … U sramu pokoru bedi/ braća smo, braća)
(31–32).
The young poet sees history from below, putting the perspective of the de-
prived at the forefront. As opposed to the foreign and domestic oppressors who
are attached to possession, they are passionately attached to dispossession as
the only remaining belonging that obliges to abstinence rather than boasting.
The poet accordingly abhors the celebration of the medieval imperial courts
“full of Byzantine lust” (Ješić 65).13 If there are national heroes, then they are
not among the feudal nobility but rather the suffering peasantry. Opposing the
canonic poetry of Jovan Dučić and Milan Rakić that glorifies distant kings and
noblemen in its polished and elegant verses, the morally upset poetry of the
young Crnjanski takes the side of a “miserable bloody soldier who dies in the
mud among the carcasses of horses” (Ješić 64),14 a figure clearly reminiscent
of the tragedy that befell the Serbian army in the First World War. The poet
seems to be spontaneously projecting this victimized modern soldier onto the
Serbian medieval peasant, establishing in this way a ‘community of fate’ on
the continuous experience of dispossession. Based on the solidarity among
the silenced victims, his Schicksalsgemeinschaft substantially differs from the
German successors’ one that perceived itself as being authorized by the law of
history. Forging his community in clear opposition to the victors’ triumpha-
lism, young Crnjanski affirms the “silent and modest suffering of those who
died on the pale” (Ješić 65).15 After the First World War, showing respect to the

13 This quotation is from the review article “Ivo Andrić”, Jedinstvo (28 June 1919).
14 This quotation is from Crnjanski’s review of a minor Serbian contemporary poet Milan
Đurčić, Književni jug 11–12/1919.
15 Dying on the pale refers to an Ottoman mean of punishment, which means that the poet
associates the Serbian soldiers’ suffering in the First World War with the Serbian peas-
ants’ suffering under the Ottomans. In the poem “Grotesque” he also melts the Austro-
Hungarian cheating “promises” into the Ottoman deceitful “statutes” ( fermani). Such
application of the Serbian national identity onto the centuries that could not know it sur-
reptitiously endorses the continuity of Serbian martyrdom. At the same time, Crnjanski
explicitly claims that “our nationality begins with Karađorđe /i.e. Serbian uprisings
against the Ottomans in the first decades of the nineteenth century/, everything else
30 biti

innumerous dead was a matter of elementary responsibility. Crnjanski’s post-

war poetry emerges out of shame for those who lack it.16
However, although he is against the aggrandizing of medieval dynasties, his
conception of suffering is anything but “silent and modest.” It not only justi-
fies the vengeful execution of tyrants but invites the sufferers to undertake it.
According to the poem “Dithyramb” (“Ditiramb”), liberation from slavery has
no alternative even if it implies the most terrible sacrifice of one’s own children
and the terrifying of one’s own mother (Lirika Itake 26). Only a merciless de-
throning of oppressors warrants such fame.17 In the poem “To the Memory of
Princip,” the young poet’s revolutionary fervor raises Gavrilo Princip’s assassi-
nation of Franz Ferdinand to the status of a heroic deed. By spontaneously fol-
lowing his great poetic predecessors Petar Petrović Njegoš18 and Đura Jakšić,19
who summoned their compatriots to sacrifice their lives for their people, he
unreservedly endorses heroic victimhood. “Ode to the Gallows” is an exempla-
ry celebration of sacrificial violence, a cynical response to the Dual Monarchy’s
notorious technique of executing the provincial deserters and ‘traitors’ during
the First World War.20 The poem depicts the gallows as the only salvation left

is a false tradition” (Ješić 65). Such self-contradiction did not belong only to Crnjanski
but rather the post-imperial writers’ repertory in general. Even if, from the mid-1920s,
Crnjanski started to embrace the narrative of Serbian martyrdom with ever less hesita-
tion, he did not abandon its questioning. Like Krleža’s or Hoffmansthal’s and Kraus’s sub-
ject, his was on permanent trial as well.
16 See his review referred to in the footnote 5 in which he asks whether “in poetry there
is no responsibility and the feeling of shame” (Ješić 64). The narrator in The Diary
about Čarnojević, himself a returnee from the war, asks “Should I start celebrating with
the bastards and villains who will forget everything, dancing on the ashes”? (Dnevnik o
Čarnojeviću 75).
17 The poem “Dithyramb” declares: “The honorable banner of rebellions and killers./ My
people, you are their elect.” (Steg dičan buna i ubica./ O rode ti si izabranik njin.) (Lirika
Itake 26).
18 Recall the verses from The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac): “Young grains bow your
heads, your harvest has arrived before its time!” (“Mlado žito navijaj klasove,/ pređe roka
došla ti je žnjetva!”).
19 Recall the verses from Fall, brothers (Padajte braćo): “Throw your children into the fire,/
throw away your slavery and shame!” (“Bacajte sami u oganj decu,/ stres‘te sa sebe ropstvo
i sram!”).
20 Toward the end of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, where the First World War’s out-
break is described, its hero Carl Joseph Trotta confronts the dangled “traitors” every-
where in Ukraine (347–49). This topic is also addressed by Karl Kraus in The Last Days of
Mankind, in which Moaner, describing a hanged Ukrainian women, states that “Austria’s
highest majesty is the gallows” and that “la corde savonée is an Austrian specialty, its
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 31

after Jesus forgot his subordinates for long centuries, the only chance for them
to reach the heaven. Since they prefer honorable death over miserable survival,
they trust the gallows will embrace them firmer than any bride.21

While someone from the ‘center’ can ask oneself “How can one be what
one is?” and arrive at abstract philosophical conclusions, the same ques-
tion for someone outside the ‘center’ is “likely to be less abstract and
less serene,” as Matei Calinescu has aptly remarked. It more likely would
evoke feelings of envy, insecurity, inferiority, “frustration or distress at the
marginality or belatedness of his culture.” It can also trigger a mood of
self-abuse; finally, it could provoke resentment that could, in some cases,
be transmuted, by way of compensation, into a superiority complex.
Todorova 57

most famous export article” (505, 508, 511). In Crnjanski’s novel Seobe 1, that describes the
Habsburg Serbs’ warpath from 1744, it is said that the Austrians “started to hang soldiers
caught at thieving just a single head of cabbage in the field” (140, see also 149–50, 159–62,
204). However, both the narrator and various figures in this novel heartily embrace the
Serbian victimhood narrative, as if reinstating Crnjanski’s youthful fascination with it.
The scenes of cruel punishments against the Serbs by Austrians (flogging, 41–43, 202,
217, 223; walloping, 219) and Ottomans (impalement, 191; raping of women, stabbing of
children, and quartering, 201) agglomerate. Nonetheless Crnjanski did not stop mocking
this narrative even thereafter, as we will see in short. Neither did he renounce reaffirm-
ing it, as in the commentary to “Ode to the Gallows”, where he speaks about “the alleys
of gallows raised by Austria in Serbia,” the Austrian walloping of a young teacher and
bestial treatment of “our people.” (Itaka i komentari 99) Crnjanski depicts dangling as
usual means of disciplining in the Austrian army (64, 89, 95), but Austria “conducted a
war” especially “against our people” by treating them “as beasts, as bedbugs” (99). As he
himself repeatedly remarks, his patriotism was near to “madness” (99, 138). In this re-
gard Vojvodina Serbs, because located beyond the geopolitical border of ‘proper’ Serbia
(Prečani), were typically “more popish than the pope himself”. This does not mean, of
course, that the treatment of soldiers and civilians by the Austrian army was humane. The
Habsburg military law was “the most draconian in Europe” but “was not a special system
for Serbia designed by a vengeful army. Harsh penalties all came neatly packaged in the
Militärstrafgesetz and Standrecht (summary justice), old systems of legal coercion already
in place in parts of the Empire during the war” (Gumz 105). The thesis of a vicious system
of law designed specifically to terrorize Serbia, entrenched in Serb historiography, is also
resolutely rejected by Kramer 144.
21 Testifying to the endurance of the national victimhood narrative in the Serbian popu-
lation, the same self-sacrificial logics characterize this population’s famous response to
the Nazi threat in the Second World War: “Better the grave than a slave!” (“Bolje grob
nego rob!”). For the tradition of sacrificial salvation in the Serbian culture, see Mylonas
(147–177).
32 biti

As Lauren Berlant has shown in her book on “cruel optimism,” the passion-
ate salting of one’s own wounds functions in a deprived population as an in-
exhaustible source of not only pleasure but also hope. The more horrible the
pain, the more determined the sufferer is to search for the ‘final solution’ to
get rid of it forever. Compromises do not count. This seems to have been the
guideline of the subordinates’ behavior not only in post-imperial East-Central
Europe but also the U.S.-American postcolonial setting. According to Abdul
JanMohamed, the death-bound Afro-American subjects who, from their birth
onwards, lived under a constant menace of physical violence, responded to it
equally violently without fearing the cruelest execution.

1.3 Krleža and the Dispossessed Croatian Community

Crnjanski was by no means the only post-imperial South Slav writer to advo-
cate sacrificial violence. His ideas corresponded in many ways to those of his
prominent Croatian contemporary Miroslav Krleža who, in his turn, also asso-
ciated national liberation with the utterly dispossessed lower social strata. In
his early novella “The Croatian Rhapsody” (“Hrvatska rapsodija”, 1918), for ex-
ample, he presents the collective portrait of contemporary Croatia by introduc-
ing a third-class wagon of the Hungarian State Railways, overcrowded with the
diseased, widows, mothers with disfigured children, front-line soldiers, sailors,
old people, students, disabled people and the starved Bosnians. This desperate
ensemble is led by the “beaten, wounded, sick, exhausted, stabbed, torn, spat
upon, and despised” Messianic figure of the Croatian Genius (“Hrvatska rap-
sodija” 415). The apocalyptic wagon in the possession of the odious Hungarian
ruler is explicitly identified with the dirty, muddy and flooded homeland. But
there are oppressors among the compatriots as well. In a dialogue between
two students, contemporary Croatian poets and painters are portrayed as
captured in their artificial world without the slightest contact with their plun-
dered country bathed in blood. Krleža has also argued that such weaklings are
not up to the challenge of the present in the manifest “The Croatian Literary
Lie” (“Hrvatska književna laž”, 1919) (just as Crnjanski indirectly objected to
Rakić and Dučić), published immediately after the war, the breakdown of the
Dual Monarchy and the victory of the October Revolution. Even if the flame
of these events swallowed the old world almost overnight in front of his con-
temporaries’ eyes, Krleža criticizes that Croatian artists continued to imitate
outdated foreign patterns as if nothing had happened. Polemicizing against
such irresponsible petty bourgeois behavior, he advocates an enflamed revolu-
tionary Croatianhood that, much like a fire, swallows up all artificial life forms,
which are completely alien to the dispossessed Croatian people (“Hrvatska
književna laž” 32). How close this fire in “The Croatian Literary Lie” is to the
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 33

sacrificial violence in Crnjanski’s The Lyrics of Ithaca can be explained through

the comparison with the fire from “The Croatian Rhapsody.” In it the Croatian
Genius takes up the command over the locomotive, madly accelerates the train
by directing it away from the rails in order to devastate the cathedrals, the-
aters, academies, palaces, parliaments and luxurious Croatian lies. In its wild
rage this sacrificial train leaves behind a wide trail of the flames and blood.
(“Hrvatska rapsodija” 417) Recall that Crnjanski’s “Hymn” repeats “Our God is
Blood”, concluding “It is our terrible pride”. (Lirika Itake 15)
Next to the advocacy of sacrificial violence, Krleža and Crnjanski share a
scorn for their nations’ alleged medieval glory. Like Crnjanski who claims that
Serbian nationality begins with the nineteenth century and “everything else is
a false tradition”, Krleža writes in 1926: “Our whole petty bourgeois history (…)
of one and the same Croatianhood as a supernatural phenomenon, is a falsifi-
cation!” (“Nekoliko riječi” 114) The uncritical back-projection of the nineteenth
century’s national consciousness makes a golden age out of the Croatian popu-
lation’s medieval illiteracy, backwardness and material misery (“Teze za jednu
diskusiju” 493–494) In accordance with Crnjanski, Krleža interprets such falsi-
fication as a regrettable provincial propaganda characteristic of the nationally
overheated atmosphere after the First World War.22 In “The Croatian Literary
Lie” he also ridicules contemporary adoration of the mid-nineteenth century’s
Croatian National Rebirth as a sad continuation of a Croatian medieval tradi-
tion of unconditional surrender to masters. This celebrated movement refused
national liberation on the model of 1848 revolutions, choosing to collaborate
with Habsburgs, in the same way as its contemporary celebrators refuse na-
tional liberation on the model of the October Revolution, choosing to col-
laborate with Serbs instead. (“Hrvatska književna laž” 32–33) In Krleža’s view
national liberation is not a tactical politics but a revolutionary undertaking.
Responding to the utter despair of subordinates, it resolutely rejects pragmatic
compromises. The people’s anger, today, is too fierce to be appeased by such
calculations by its petty bourgeois intellectuals (38).
Because the proposed violence requires victims, Krleža praises Croatian
martyrs such as Matija Gubec, Juraj Križanić or Frano Supilo in the same way
as young Crnjanski identifies with the Serbian martyrs Gavrilo Princip and the
“Dalmatian loiterer,” the narrator’s Doppelgänger (“more than a brother”), in

22 However, this did not prevent Krleža from endorsing the narrative of permanent Croatian
victimhood in innumerous analogies drawn, in the 1920s and 1930s, between the awful
conditions of the Croats in the present and those in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries (“Nekoliko riječi” 106–110, “O patru dominikancu” 58–69, “O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 29).
He used to contradict himself no less than Crnjanski.
34 biti

The Diary about Čarnojević (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću 45–57).23 He is presented as

a thin, exhausted and pale former navy officer with an adventurous father, very
like the narrator’s own (49) and an overtired mother, who terribly reminds the
narrator of his own mother (49). Having nothing on Earth to adhere to, this
fantast is feverishly in love with Heaven (as is the narrator)24 and books (he
learned from my books, says the narrator) (51). For both postwar Krleža and
Crnjanski, therefore, the only appropriate heroes were sufferers and the only
appropriate foundational myths were those based on dispossession. For both,
the road to freedom lead through a victimhood directed at the ‘final solution.’
Krleža’s martyrs were usually fantasts from the lower social strata that did not
let political reality spoil their utopian projects. Their radicalism emerges in the
same “small provincial culture’s neglected and forgotten peripheral existence”
(“Stjepan Radić u Beogradu” 222) that drives this culture’s collaborating intel-
lectuals to rush from one subordination into another. Bitterly disappointed by
the Yugoslav Monarchy, which the representatives of the Croatian people chose
to escape the harsh Hungarian rule, Krleža joins Crnjanski in arguing against
the blindly triumphant Yugoslav elite.25 Even if this carrier group has changed
its political masters, the argument goes, the economic and social condition of

23 Krleža’s gallery of martyrs is huge and reaches far beyond the Croatian borders, comprising
for example St Augustine, Columbus, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Darwin and Lenin. In strict-
ly Croatian terms, alongside the aforementioned figures it contains the Bosnian Bogomils,
the language reformer Ljudevit Gaj, the bishop and donor Josip Juraj Strossmayer, the
poets Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević, August Harambašić, and Antun Gustav Matoš, the nov-
elist Ante Kovačić, the politician Stjepan Radić and the painter Vjekoslav Karas (“Teze za
jednu diskusiju” 496–97; “O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 37).
24 The narrator, it is said (42), is much more attached to Heaven than to women or people
for that matter. The latter attachment would make him a modest particle of the material
world whereas the former enables his ascension, dematerialization, aloofness, a “gentle
smile” of indifference toward the ridiculous political struggle on Earth and thereby a “tre-
mendous power over the affairs of the world” (54). However, in the perennial alternative
of Serbian history between the earthly kingdom of Miloš Obilić and the heavenly king-
dom of Emperor Lazar, his depicted inclination toward Lazar is provisional as he con-
tinually oscillates between the two. At another place in the novel, for instance, he openly
glorifies murder (78).
25 Krleža ridicules this elite most exemplarily in “The Drunken November Night 1918” (Pijana
novembarska noć 1918) written in 1942 and published for the first time 1952. He ironizes
the former Austro-Hungarian officers among the Croats who, in post-war Zagreb, decided
to celebrate the victorious Serbian officers as if they had not hanged them during the war.
Whereas Crnjanski targeted the Serbian officers’ neglect of the fallen Serbian soldiers,
Krleža criticizes the Croat officers’ adulation for their former enemies that hypocritically
aimed at fostering their career in the Yugoslav army.
Ruling ( Out ) the Province 35

the lower social strata remained equally miserable. Krleža is convinced that
only uncompromising martyrs recruited from these strata can really act on
their behalf. To legitimize such revolutionary action, he is at constant pains
to invent the tradition of the dispossessed. Following this thread and using
uncritical retroactive projections like Crnjanski, he ultimately establishes the
‘true’ Croatian national identity on the sacrificial experience of ‘bare life.’
By inventing traditions one usually tries to materialize one’s dreams and
hopes, unavoidably committing violence to the subjects s/he claims to be un-
selfishly speaking for. Eric Hobsbawm has knowingly argued that the continuity
which such “invented traditions” establish with the historic past is largely facti-
tious (1), because “they are responses to novel situations which take the form
of reference to old situations” (2). Old situations are invoked to offer ‘suitable’
solutions for novel ones or to legitimize solutions that fit the inventor’s pres-
ent purposes. In a word, “invented traditions” are arbitrary interpretations that
place the past at the service of present needs. For example, when Krleža in 1935
describes the terrible oppression of the Croatian population executed by the
contemporary Yugoslav police apparatus, he associates it with the Islamization
of the Bogomils (in this particular case the adherents of the so-called Bosnian
Church who become “Croats” through Krleža’s back-projection of the much
later category of nationality) (“Teze za jednu diskusiju” 523–24). This, however,
contradicts the historical facts. Islamization was not violently imposed by the
Ottomans, but a pragmatically motivated voluntary decision by the local popu-
lation under the given circumstances; it was not a promptly executed conver-
sion but a lengthy and multi-staged process; it affected not only the Bogomils
but also the Bosnian Catholics and Orthodox; and Bosnian Bogomils converted
in Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well. (Donia and Fine 14–19) By transferring
all responsibility to the foreign oppressors, i.e. the Ottomans in the case of the
Bogomils and the Serbs in the case of his Croatian contemporaries, Krleža
conceals the involvement of the indigenous population’s carrier groups in the
process of ‘alienation.’ By taking the ‘innocent and oppressed’ Bogomils and
Croats under such generous protection from their ‘tyrants,’ he simultaneously
affirms the non-violent character of his own engagement. If they are nothing
but victims, his argument implies, then acting for them is unselfish. However,
such reasoning repudiates that victims owe their sacrificial profile precisely to
the ‘protector’s’ violent invention. The effect is taken to be the cause.

1.4 Charity Drive: Representing the Victims

Silently passing over its ‘engineering’ character, the ‘beneficence’ of Crnjanski
and Krleža toward the selected martyrs presents itself as a natural continua-
tion to these martyrs’ sacrifice for their community. In the First World War’s
Another random document with
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catalogue, which had been rehearsed so many times.

"There you go again, breaking right into the middle of a

sentence," said Grace. "What would your mother say?"

"Perhaps she would say, 'Don't be always lecturing the

child, Grace,'" said I mischievously, quoting some words I
had overheard from my mother.

Then, as I saw by her rising color that she was really

angry, I threw my arms round her and hugged her.

"There, don't be vexed, Gracy dear; you know I would

not disturb maman for the world. But I do really want to go
to the farm very much to teach Lucille the lace-stitch you
showed me yesterday, and to see the new kittens."

"Kittens! What kittens?" said Grace, who was a dear

lover of pussies of all sorts.

"Why, the new kittens. Don't you remember the

beautiful young cats that David brought to his mother the
last time he came home? One of them has kittens, and
Mother Jeanne says I may have my choice of them."

"Oh, yes; go by all means, my dear; and I hope you will

have a pleasant day. Only be sure you are at home before
dark, and mind you don't wait till it is time you were here
before you set out. And, as to the kitlings, if there should be
a tortoise-shell or a dark brindle, I would choose that,
especially if it have a white face. Such cats are always
good-tempered and good mousers."

"I believe these cats are all white," said I; "the mother
is as white as snow."

Grace's face was shadowed a little.

 "I don't know about that," said she doubtfully. "In
Cornwall, we think that white cats bring ill-luck. My poor
sister had a beautiful white cat come to her, and that very
night she broke her china jug, and the next day her
husband fell from the tall pear-tree and was lamed for life."

"But these are not like common cats, you know," said I,
suppressing a laugh which I knew would mortally offend
Grace and perhaps lose me my holiday. "They are
outlandish cats, with long hair and bushy tails. I should
think that would be different."

"Perhaps so; but I would think about it a little. However,

I will come down and see them myself."

I tiptoed through my mother's room into my own little

cell, collected my working things into the pretty foreign
basket which David had brought me the last time he came
home, and then, kissing my mother's pale cheek, I
descended the stairs softly, and did not give a single skip till
I was beyond the precincts of the tower.

"How full of notions Grace is," I said to myself. "I

wonder if all the Cornish people are like that." * (N.B. † If a
hare had run across my own path, or I had heard a crow on
my left hand, I dare say I should have turned back from my
expedition.) "But I mean to have the kitten in spite of her.
As though I would give up a beautiful long-haired white cat
for such a fancy as that!"

* They are, even to this day.—L. S.

† N. B.—nota bene
 I did not hasten on my way, for it was early, and I found
my walk so pleasant that I had no desire to shorten it. The
bramble-berries and filberts that were ripening by the sides
of the lane had great attractions for me. There were late
autumn flowers to gather, and lizards to watch as they ran
to and fro on the walls or sunned their gilded sides on a
broad flat stone, vanishing like a shadow when one drew
near. A great wind had blown the day before and thrown
down many apples from the trees that overhung the lane.

I filled my pocket with some ripe golden pippins, and

walked on eating one till I drew near the place where the
highway to Avranches, such as it was, crossed our lane.
This was a favorite resting-place, since it commanded a
glorious view of sea and shore and the great fortress-
monastery. There was a kind of crag or projecting rock
some thirty feet high, round which the road wound, and
which, while it presented a perpendicular face to the
highway, was easily ascended by an active person from the
side of the lane.

"I wonder whether they are gathering the vraic," I said

to myself. "I should think a great quantity must have come
ashore after the wind last night. I mean to climb up and
see." *

* The vraic or varech is the seaweed, which is very

abundant on this coast, and much esteemed for manure.
It is regularly harvested in spring and autumn, but may
be gathered at any time.

I climbed lightly up the rude rocky steps, but started as

I came upon Lucille, who was sitting upon the dry moss
which covered like a soft carpet the top of the rock. She
was wrapped closely in her long black cloak, the hood of
which was drawn over her head, somewhat to the detriment
of her clean starched cap. Her unfailing companion, the
distaff, was in her girdle, but the spindle lay idle beside her,
though she seemed to have cleared a flat place especially
for it to dance upon. Her hands were folded over her knee,
and her eyes were fixed upon the high road, which from this
elevated point could be traced all the way to Avranches.

I saw in a moment that she was in one of her moods,

but I was in too high spirits with my walk and my holiday to
mind that. And as she did not seem to hear my approach, I
put my two hands over her eyes, saying, in the words of our
child's game, "Guess whose fingers are all these."

"Vevette, how you startled me!" she exclaimed, rather

angrily. And then, recovering herself, "How did you come
here?"

"On my feet, since I have no wings," I answered, sitting

down beside her on the dry moss. "Maman gave me a whole
holiday because she has a headache, and I thought I would
come down and teach you my new lace stitches. It is well I
took a fancy to climb up here, or I should have missed you.
But now, tell me how came you here?"

"Because I have a holiday as well as yourself,"

answered Lucille, in a tone which had no pleasure in it.
"Aunt Denise has come up from Granville to see my mother,
and maman said I might have a play-day too, and go to see
Marie Lebrun if I liked. But I don't care about going. I know
they only sent me away because they have secrets to talk
about which they don't want me to hear."

"Well, why need you mind?" I asked. "Maman often says

to me, 'Run away, petite, I wish to say something to Grace,'
and I never mind it a bit. Of course grown people have
things to talk about which they don't want children to hear.
Why should you care?"

"But I do care," said Lucille, and her eyes with tears. "I
am not a child like you. I am three years older, and I do
think they might trust me."

"It is not that they do not trust you, silly one," I

returned, a little out of patience with the mood I could not
comprehend. "As I tell you, there are things to be talked
about by grown people which girls do not understand and
ought not to know. Mrs. Grace has told me that a dozen
times. What is the use of minding? We don't understand,
and there is the end. Some time we shall, I suppose."

Lucille did not answer. She fixed her eyes once more on
the highway, and I let mine wander off over the sands and
the shore where people, looking like little black ants, were
busily collecting the precious seaweed, to Mount St.
Michael, whose turrets shone brightly in the sun.

"I wish I had wings," said I at last. "How I should like to

fly over the sands and alight on the top of the mount
yonder, where the great gilded angel used to stand looking
over land and seas. I wonder whether he got tired of his
perch and flew away some night."

"You should not speak so of the holy angels. It is not

right," said Lucille gravely.

"I was not speaking of the angel, but of his image," said
I; "that is quite another thing. Then I would spread my
wings and travel over to the islands yonder, and then to
England, where my uncles live."

"And get shot for a strange water-fowl," said Lucille,

apparently diverted for the moment, and laughing at my
fancy. "Then you would be stuffed and set up to be gazed at
for sixpence a head, and that would be more tiresome than
sitting at your embroidery."

"Yes, I don't think I should like it at all. Let me take the

distaff, Lucille. I have not spun any thread in a long time.
What beautiful fine flax!"

"Yes, it is some that my aunt brought me. She got it of

a ship-captain who came from foreign parts. Take care you
don't break my thread."

We chatted on indifferent subjects a while, and Lucille

seemed to have recovered her good humor, when I
inadvertently disturbed it again.

"Martin said he met your father coming from Avranches

yesterday. What took him so far from home?"

"I don't know; they never tell me anything," answered

Lucille, her face clouding.

"There might be a very good reason for his not telling

you," I remarked in a low tone. "If his journey was about
the Religion, it might be a great deal better for you to be
able to say you did not know. And I dare say it was, for my
father has been away a great deal of late."

"Oh, the Religion—always the Religion!" said Lucille

between her teeth; "I hate the very name of the Religion."

"Lucille, how dare you?" I gasped, rather than spoke. I

was too shocked to say more.

"Well, I do," she returned vehemently. "It spoils

everything. It separates families and neighbors, shuts us up
just to our own little selves, and cuts us off from everything
that is pleasant. Jennette Maury can go to the Sunday fêtes
and the dances on feast days under the great chestnut, but
I must stay at home and read a musty book, because I am
of the Religion. Other people live in peace, and nobody
interferes with them. We live with a sword hung over our
heads, and our daily path is like that over the Grève yonder
—likely to swallow us up any time. And what do we gain by
it in this world, I should like to know?"

"What should we lose in the next world if we deserted

it?" I asked, finding my voice at last.

"I am not talking of deserting it. I am no Judas, though

they seem to think I am by the way they treat me—never
telling me anything. But I don't see why we should not have
kept to the ways of our fathers, and saved all this trouble."

"WE DO keep to the faith of our fathers," said I,

repeating the proud boast of the Vaudois, which I had long
ago learned by heart. "Our church never was corrupted by
Rome, and did not need reforming. But, Lucille, what would
your father and mother say to such words?"

"I should never say such words to them," answered

Lucille, "and I am foolish to say them to you. I suppose,
however, you will go and repeat them to every one, and let
the world say how much better and more religious is the
heiress of the Tour d'Antin than poor Lucille Sablot."

"Lucille, you know better," I answered indignantly; "but

I see you don't want anything of me, so I shall go home
again, as you say Mother Jeanne is busy."

And gathering up my basket and laying down the distaff

in Lucille's lap, I rose to depart, though I trembled so much
with excitement and indignation that I could hardly stand.
 Lucille looked at me in surprise, for in our ordinary
quarrels, I grew cool as she grew angry, and vice versâ.

"Don't go, Vevette. I ought not to have spoken so. I did

not half mean it, but I am so very, very unhappy."

As she spoke, she hid her face and burst into a flood of
tears and sobs.

I sat down again, knowing from experience that when

she recovered from her crying fit, her bad mood would be
gone for that day.

So it proved. After sobbing a long time, she wiped her

eyes and made a great effort to compose herself.

"I am sorry I was so cross," said she; "but I am so

unhappy. There is so much that I cannot understand. Why
should you be the heiress of d'Antin and I only a poor
farmer's daughter? Why should you learn music and English
and dress in silk, while I wear homespun and tend sheep,
and come and go at everybody's call? Why should our
enemies triumph and eat us up like bread, and live in all
sorts of luxury, while we are poor and trodden down like the
mire in the streets, and our Master never put forth a hand
to help us? We give up everything for him, and he lets us be
beaten on every side, and gives us nothing but promises—
promises for another world, from which nobody has come
back to tell us anything. No, I don't understand it."

Lucille spoke with a fire and passion compared to which

her former vehemence was nothing.

I had never thought of these things—never dreamed of

questioning anything that was taught me. Indeed, I believe
I had been too full of dreams to think at all. I was stricken
dumb before her at first, but as she gazed at me with her
dark eyes like sombre flames, I felt I must say something,
so I gave the only answer that occurred to me—the only
one indeed that I have ever found.

"It is the will of God, Lucille, and he must know best."

Lucille muttered something which I did not quite hear.

"And besides, he does help us," I added, gathering

courage. "Just think how all the martyrs have been helped
to stand firm, and what joys they have felt even at the
galleys and in dark dungeons, where they had hardly room
to breathe."

"I know they say so," said Lucille; "but tell me, Vevette,
have you experienced any of these wonderful joys. Because
I know I never did."

I did not know exactly what to answer to this question.

In fact, in those days my conscience was in that uneasy
state in which it always must be with any half-hearted
person. No, I could not say that my religion was any
comfort to me, and I hastened to change the conversation.

"Anyhow, Lucille, I don't think you would be any happier

if we were to change places. You would be lectured and
ordered about, and sent out of the way a great deal more
than you are now, and you would not have nearly as much
time to yourself. I believe, after all, it is more in being
contented than anything else. Look at Gran'mère Luchon.
She has as little as any one I know—living down by the
shore in that dark smoky little hut with her two little
grandchildren, and supporting them and herself with her
net-making and mending and her spinning. And yet she is
happy. She is always singing over her work, and I never
heard her make a complaint."
 "She is not there any more," said Lucille. "The new curé
ordered her to go to mass, and because she would not, he
has taken the children away and handed them over to the
nuns, and nobody knows what, has become of the old
woman."

"The wretches!" I exclaimed.

"Hush!" said Lucille. "Don't speak so loud; nobody

knows who may be listening. I hate living so—in such
constraint and danger all the time. It is odious."

"Don't let us talk about it any more," said I. "I have

some news for you. My cousin, Andrew Corbet, from
England, is coming to visit us. Will it not seem odd to have
a cousin?"

"Not to me," said Lucille, making an effort to throw off

her moodiness. "I have a plenty of them, you know. When
do you expect him?"

"Next week, perhaps; the time is not set."

"What is he like?"

"I don't know; I have never seen him. He is about

twenty years old, and has been educated at a great college
in England, so I suppose he is like other young gentlemen.
Come, let us eat some of Mrs. Grace's cakes and bonbons,
and then I will show you my new stitch. Grace gave me a
nice basket, because she said we might like to make a little
feast under the trees."

Lucille had something too—a bottle of milk and some

wheaten bread which she had set out to carry to Gran'mère
Luchon, when she heard of the misfortune which had
befallen the poor woman. We grew quite merry over our
little feast, and the lesson in needlework went on
prosperously afterward.

"You have caught it beautifully," said I. "Mrs. Grace

would say that you excelled your pattern. But what are you
looking at?"

For Lucille had dropped her work and was gazing

intently in the direction of Avranches.

I turned my eyes the same way and beheld a procession

coming up the road—of what sort I could not at first
discover. There was a cross-bearer and two or three
banners; then a sight dreaded by every Huguenot child in
France—the Host carried under a fine canopy—and then
came a dozen or so of donkeys, each led by a man and
bearing a woman dressed in black, with a white scapular
and long black veil.

"They are the nuns coming to take possession of the

hospital," said Lucille. "It has been all repaired and fitted up
anew, and they are to have a school and teach lace-making
and embroidery."

"Lucille, what do you mean?" I exclaimed; for she had

risen and stepped to the edge of the rock to have a better
view. "They will see you. Come down here behind the
bushes till they are past."

Lucille obeyed rather unwillingly, as I thought.

We peeped through the bushes as the procession

advanced, and had a good view of the nuns. There were ten
of them, riding with eyes cast down and hands folded in
their large sleeves. One or two of them were very pretty,
and all had a ladylike look.
 Last came the two little grandchildren of poor Mère
Luchon. The youngest, a mere baby, was sucking a lump of
gingerbread, apparently quite content; but the sobs and
tear-stained face of the other told a different story. She was
seven years old, and was already a great help and comfort
to the old woman. As she passed, she raised her streaming
eyes as if imploring pity.

My blood boiled at the sight, and if I could have

commanded the lightning from heaven, that procession
would have gone no farther. It was closed by a number of
villagers, all telling their beads, some with a great show of
devotion, others languidly and carelessly enough.

The new curé came last of all. He was a small, thin,

sharp-faced man, with a cruel mouth, and eyes that seemed
to see everything at once. He was certainly a great contrast
to poor Father Jean, who used to go about with his deep
pockets filled with bonbons, which he distributed to Catholic
and Protestant children alike.

"The wretches! The murderous brigands!" said I

between my teeth. "Oh, if I could kill them all! The vile
kidnappers! Oh, why does the Lord suffer such things?"

"That is what I ask," said Lucille. "Why should they be

so prospered and have so much power if the Lord is not on
their side? As to these children, I don't know that I pity
them so very much. The old woman could not have lived
long, and now they are sure of support and a good
education. I think the nuns are very kind-looking ladies, for
my part. And if they were right after all—if one's salvation
does depend upon being a Roman Catholic—then they are
right in forcing people to become so."
 "Why did not our Lord and his apostles force all the
Jews to become Christians?" I demanded hotly enough. "He
said he had only to ask to receive more than twelve legions
of angels. Why did not he do it, and shut up all those people
who did not believe on him, or put them to death, if that is
the right way?"

"He said his kingdom was not of this world, else would
his servants fight," answered Lucille.

"Then the kingdom which is of this world, and whose

servants do fight and oppress, is not his," I answered, for I
could reason well enough when I was roused from my
daydreams.

"We ought to be going," said Lucille, abruptly changing

the subject. "The supper will be ready, and my father will be
angry if I am not there. I am to be kept to rules as if I were
no more than five years old."

Jeanne welcomed me with her usual affection, but her

eyes were red with weeping, and she was evidently absent-
minded.

I told her what we had seen.

"Yes, I have had the story from my sister," said Jeanne,

her eyes overflowing as she spoke. "The poor old woman!
Happily it cannot be long in the course of nature before she
goes to her rest, but my heart aches for the little ones. My
children, you must be doubly careful. This new priest is not
like the old one—he will leave us no peace. You must take
care never even to go near the church, or stop to look on at
any of their doings. Perhaps a way of escape may be
opened to us before long. It would indeed be hard to leave
our home and go among strangers, but exile with liberty of
worship would be better than living in such constant fear."
 "Put thy trust in God, my Jeanne," said Father Simon.
"We are all in his hands. We must remember that the
church has never been promised anything in this world but
tribulation and the cross. The crown is to come hereafter.
Now let us think of something else. Mamselle Vevette, will
you come and help to gather the apples on your own tree?
They are quite ready, and I will carry them up for you when
you go home."

I had been grave quite as long as I liked, and was very

ready to enjoy the apple-picking from my own particular
tree of golden Jeannetons, which had been solemnly
planted when I was born, and now hung loaded with fruit.
Never were such apples as those, I am sure. I wonder
whether the tree is still in bearing? It must be old and
moss-grown by this time, if it has not been cut down.

Jeanne made us a supper of fresh pan-cakes, galette,

fruit, and rich cream cheese, and when I went home, Father
Simon shouldered his hotte * and carried a famous load of
beautiful apples up to the tower.

* A kind of deep, roomy basket, made to be carried on

the shoulders.

I found my mother much better, and able to welcome

me, and to hear all I had to tell her. I hesitated about
repeating my conversation with Lucille on the rock, but my
mind had been so disturbed that at last I thought best to do
so, hoping to have my doubts laid at rest.

"You gave the right answer, my little one," said my

mother when I had finished. "It is the will of God.
Remember that he has never promised his children
temporal prosperity. 'In the world ye shall have tribulation,'
are his own words. Yet he does give his children many
pleasures. There are beautiful flowers and fair fruits
growing even by the side of the strait and narrow way, but
we must not go out of the way to seek them. Neither must
we be discouraged when the path leads over rocks and
thorns, or even through marshes and quicksands; but
remember that our dear Lord has trodden every step before
us, and is waiting to receive us at the end."

Much more she said, in the same wise and gentle strain,
and at last sent me to bed feeling somewhat comforted. The
night was warm, and my door was left ajar for air. I had
hardly fallen asleep, as it seemed to me, when I was waked
by voices, and heard my mother say:

"I do not like what she says about Lucille. I fear the girl
has been tampered with. Perhaps we should warn her
parents."

"We will think about that," said my father. "Ah, my

Marguerite, if you and the little one were but in safety—"

"Do not ask me to leave you, Armand—not yet," said

my mother, clasping her hands. "If we could but send the
child home to my sister, I should be at ease. Could we not
do it, when Andrew comes?"

"We will consider of it," answered my father. "And now,

my Pearl, let us betake ourselves to prayer."

The murmured sound of the prayer sent me to sleep,

and I heard no more, but I turned Lucille's words over in
my mind with a vague uneasiness many times during the
next few days. I was destined to remember them for long
afterward.
 The next day was made memorable by an unlucky
accident. Mrs. Grace was standing in the door of my room
(which I have said was raised several steps), lecturing me
in her usual prim fashion concerning certain untidinesses
which she had discovered about my toilette-table, when,
suddenly stepping backward, she fell down the stairs,
bruising herself and spraining her ankle very badly.

We dared not send for a surgeon. There was an old man

at Avranches who was very skilful, and with whom we had
always been on good terms, though he was a Roman
Catholic; but he had lately taken a young assistant (or
rather had been given one, for we all believed the young
man had been placed as a spy over the old one), and
should it be known that we had a sick person in the house,
we were in danger of being invaded by the priests, striving
to force or coax the sick person into a recantation.

Happily my father had a pretty good practical

knowledge of surgery, and both my mother and Mrs. Grace
herself were strong in the virtues and uses of herbs and
simples.

Mrs. Grace was presently put to bed and her ankle

bandaged. She was in great pain, but the pain was little or
nothing compared to the worry of helplessness,
housekeeping cares, and the necessity of being waited upon
instead of waiting upon others. Truth to say, she was but a
troublesome charge.

My dear mother, who had borne this same cross of

helplessness for many a year, preached patience in her
gentle way.

Mrs. Grace assented to all she said, called herself a

miserable, rebellious sinner, and the next minute fretted
more than ever: over that careless Marie, who would be
sure to burn the marmalade, or that stupid coward of a
Julienne, who would not venture up to the top of the tower
to bring in the drying fruit lest she should see the white
chevalier. For after a long season of absence—for what
ghostly purpose, who should say?—the white chevalier had
again been seen walking on the battlements of the round
tower, or passing the window of his wretched and guilty
wife's apartment.

"Do not trouble yourself about the marmalade, my poor

Grace," said my mother, with a somewhat woeful smile.
"Who knows whether we shall be alive to eat it, or whether
all our stores may not fall into the hands of our enemies?"

"I should like to spice the marmalade for them!"

exclaimed Grace, quite overcome by the idea of her dainties
being devoured by the Papisties, as she always called them.

"And as to the tower," continued my mother, "I think

myself the maids may as well keep away from it. If the
white chevalier and his wife should really have been seen, it
is just as well not to run any risks."

"But whom then will you trust?" asked Grace, with a

startled look.

My mother put to her lips a fresh rose she had brought

in her hand, and glanced at me, and Grace said no more. I
was not annoyed, as Lucille would have been, for I had
become accustomed to such hints; and with a passing
wonder as to whether my mother really believed in the
white chevalier, I plunged into my dear "Arcadia," and
forgot all earthly cares in the somewhat long-winded trials
of the virtuous Parthenia. But I was destined to hear more
of the matter.
 That very evening, about an hour before sunset, my
father asked me to walk with him. This was a great honor,
for in my youth, children were by no means so familiar with
their parents as they are now. Whether the change be for
the better or no depends upon the parents a good deal.

We walked out by the lane, across a field, and through

the loaded orchard bending with golden and ruddy fruit,
some of which was already gathered for the cider-mill. The
low sun shone under the branches, and turned the heaps of
apples to heaps of gold and rubies. It was very still, but the
tide was high, and came in over the distant sands with a
hollow roar, which my father said portended a storm. He
spoke little till we reached a little heathy eminence crowned
with one of the monuments of ancient date so common in
Normandy and Brittany. From this point we had a view for a
long distance around, and nobody could come near us
without being observed. My father sat down on one of the
fallen stones, and motioned me to sit beside him.

"My daughter," said he, taking my hand in his with a

certain solemnity, "you are now almost a woman, and old
enough to be admitted into the knowledge of your father's
secrets. But such knowledge is full of danger. Are you
brave, my child? Are you a worthy descendant of those
valiant Provençal and Vaudois women who hazarded their
lives for the faith? Consider, my Vevette! Suppose you were
required to go into the upper floor of the old tower, even to
the ladies' bower, at night; would you be afraid to do it?
Consider, and give me an answer."

All my better self rose up at this appeal. I considered a

moment, and then answered firmly—

"I might be afraid, but I would do it, if it were my duty."

 "There spoke a true Corbet woman!" said my father,
smiling kindly on me and pressing the hand which he held.
"'MY DUTY!' Let that be your motto, as it is that of your
mother's house, and you will not go far wrong. Now listen
while I impart to you a weighty secret. But let us first make
sure that there are no eavesdroppers."

My father raised himself from the fallen stone and

looked all around, but no one was in sight, and the sparse
heath and short grass could not hide anything so large as a
child of a year old. He even parted the brambles and wild
vines and looked inside the monument (which was one of
those made of three upright stones with a slab laid over the
top), but found nothing worse than a pair of young owls and
their mother, which were terribly disconcerted by his
scrutiny, and hissed and snapped valiantly.

Meantime I waited with anxious curiosity, though I had

a guess of what was coming.

"I have certain intelligence," said he, speaking in a low

voice, "that one of our best and oldest pastors, Monsieur
Bertheau, who has, at the risk of his life, visited and
comforted many of our afflicted brethren in Charenton and
elsewhere, is now flying from his enemies, and will arrive at
this place some time to-night. He must be lodged in the old
tower till the period of spring tides, when I shall hope to
procure a passage for him to Jersey, or to England itself.
Grace, who has usually taken charge of such fugitives, is
now disabled. I must be away this night, and your mother is
unable to do what is needful; besides that, her absence
from her room might excite suspicion. Mathew grows old
and forgetful, and I dare not trust any of the other
servants. Dare you, my daughter, undertake to meet this
venerable man in the ruins of the chapel to-night, and lead
him by the secret passage to the room at the top of the
tower, which has been prepared for him?"

"Yes, my father," I answered; "but how shall I know the

way?"

"I will give you directions which will lead you to the
entrance of the passage. Turn to your right after that, and
you cannot miss your way. When the good man is in safety,
you can come directly to your mother's room by another
passage, which I will also indicate to you. But, my child, I
must not conceal from you that there is danger in this trust.
Should you be discovered by any of our enemies in giving
help to this good old man, your life or your liberty must be
the forfeit."

"I know it, my father," I answered; "but if it is my duty,

I can do it. Besides, there is danger anyhow."

"That is true, my child. He that saveth his life is as like

to lose it as he that layeth it down for the Lord's sake and
the Gospels."

Then my father broke down, clasped me in his arms,

and wept over me in the way that is so terrible to see in a
strong man.

"My child, my Marguerite's only child! My treasure! And

must I lay down thy young life also? Oh, Lord, how long,
how long!"

Presently, however, he composed himself, and laying his

hand on my head, he most solemnly dedicated me to God
and his service, as the most precious thing he had to give.
That dedication has never ceased to affect my life, even
when I have strayed the farthest.