Farewell to Dubravka Ugrešić, a fearless prophet

When Dubravka Ugrešić died at the age of 73 earlier this month, I felt a sharp stab of personal loss, though I’d only encountered her through her ingenious work. Although Ugrešić never achieved the full renown she deserved, her writing — which spanned novels, essays and journalism — showed her to be one of the most acute critics of aggressive nationalism and the overheated culture of the literary marketplace. Who would I turn to now for astringent takes on the apocalypse ahead?

Born in Kutina, Yugoslavia, in the early years of Josip Tito’s oppressive communist regime, Ugrešić grew up with books, the radio and Hollywood movies — the factories produced few toys for children — and became a scholar and an author at the University of Zagreb. Here, she once said to KGOU radio, “I lived like a happy mouse in a huge chunk of cheese.” But this life was disrupted by the Yugoslav wars, and after the 1991 Croatian war for independence and the break-up of Yugoslavia, Ugrešić found herself in possession of a new, Croatian passport.

Angered by what she saw as “the collective self-destructive madness” of war and nationalism, she wrote acerbic pieces against censorship, notably in her essay “Clean Croatian Air”, which was published in both The Independent and Die Zeit. It made her, she explained in a 2019 interview, “a favourite target of Croatian nationalists”. In 1992, the Croatian weekly Globus accused Ugrešić and four other feminists and writers, of being witches and traitors, in an article headlined “Croatia’s feminists rape Croatia!”.

In 1993, Ugrešić went into voluntary exile, first to Berlin and then the US, finally settling in Amsterdam and taking Dutch citizenship. In a 1999 article, she repeated what she had often said: “I myself am neither an émigré nor a refugee nor an asylum seeker. I am a writer who at one point decided not to live in her own country anymore because her country was no longer hers.”

In the early 2000s, democracy seemed triumphant . . . yet I sensed that Ugrešić had seen, through the eyes of an exile, something true and ominous

I discovered Ugrešić’s books over two decades ago, when an artist friend gave me a copy of The Culture of Lies, the “antipolitical essays” Ugrešić wrote between 1991 and 1996. These are biting sketches of the break-up of Yugoslavia, illustrated through alphabet primers (“H for Homeland” etc) and glossaries, capturing a time in the aftermath of war that offered “for criminals the possibility of becoming heroes, for intellectuals of becoming . . . criminals!” In the early 2000s democracy seemed triumphant, far-right politics were some way off, and back home, India’s economic boom had brought prosperity in its wake — and yet I sensed that Ugrešić had seen, through the eyes of an exile, something true and ominous.

It is hardly accurate to say I love her work — reading it is like stepping under an icy waterfall: you emerge scoured, braced, breathless, yet ready for more. But Ugrešić can by drily humorous, too.

In her 2003 collection of essays on literary culture, Thank You for Not Reading, she described Ivana Trump, whom she had met at a London party in the 1990s: “exaggeratedly bleached hair, too-heavy make-up, and lips like fresh hot dogs”. Trump reminded Ugrešić of a heroine of the Czech films of the 1970s — and in that essay, “How I Could Have Been Ivana Trump and Where I Went Wrong”, the writer broadened what might have been just a bitchy aside into a meditation on glamour.

Fellow writers relished her work — Susan Sontag called her “a writer to be cherished” — but unlike many of her contemporaries, Ugrešić predicted the future of publishing too. In 1997, she saw that literature had, fatally, acquired an “aura of glamour”, and that publishers wanted writers to be chiefly “content providers” (the term was new enough then to be carried in quotes). What would become, she asked, of the “outsiders, bookworms, romantics and losers” who used to make up the despised and neglected profession of writers?

Over time, I have turned to Ugrešić’s words not for comfort or pleasure or reassurance — even at her most entertaining, she remained the least reassuring of writers, questioning late-stage democracy’s flaws as fearlessly as she had once seen through the fictions of nationalism — but for clarity.

In a 2020 essay “A Useful Kit”, she laid out her view of a world where powerful corporations blur with state borders and identities, where “Serbia will be renamed Ikea and its inhabitants will be Ikeans, while Slovenia will be renamed Siemens, and its inhabitants will be the Siemensites”. It strikes me now as classic Ugrešić — the voice of a sardonic prophet speaking from a corner of the wilderness, revealing truths that made you laugh until you cried. 

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