문학 속의 정치

Politics in Literature―Yugoslav Literature at the End of the 20th Century and Nationalism

The causes of the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation can be found in many ways, but ‘nationalism’ is the most decisive. However, the issue of “should only the Serbian people be held responsible for the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the civil war?” is a very sensitive issue, and looking at the history of nationalism that existed before the formation of Yugoslavia shows that Serbia and other republics cannot be completely free from that responsibility. In this paper, we examine the historical development and characteristics of ‘nationalism’ in Yugoslavia, particularly in Serbia and Croatia, and based on this, the relationship between ‘literature’ and ‘nationalism’ in Serbia and Croatia around the 1990s. The Serbian and Croatian literary circles have clearly differentiated their position over the dissolution of Yugoslavia since 1991, while the Croatian literary community, which sought to gain independence from Yugoslavia, sought to find its national identity in literature and to make it as distinct as possible. Based on the overall position of Serbian and Croatian literary circles, we examine representative Serbian and Croatian writers who worked on literature around the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian civil war at the end of the 20th century.