Literature at War

Why have verbal artists since Homer been fascinated with armed conflict and destruction? In the early 1990s, two self-consciously multinational and multicultural socialist states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, broke apart. Soon, people who had lived in countries that proclaimed slogans like "friendship of the peoples" and "brotherhood and unity" were fighting wars with one another, incited by militant nationalism and dreams of conquest. Writers played an important role in these conflicts, usually not as frontline combatants (though it was a former poet who led the genocide in Bosnia) but rather because literature was called upon to explain the failures of the past and disasters of the present, to build up national identities that were newly autonomous yet under attack, or even to recreate a sense of multinational solidarity. In this class we will read literature connected to two wars in which smaller states have faced the violent designs of their more powerful neighbors: the invasion of Bosnia by Serbia (and Croatia) in the mid-1990s, and the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Readings will include works by Miljenko Jergovi, Dubravka Ugrei, Saa Stanii, Serhiy Zhadan, and Andrey Kurkov, in English translation.