engleski

Zagreb

Formally becoming one city in 1850, Zagreb forged its modern identity most consistently in the first Croatian novel (The Goldsmith’s Gold, 1871), Zagreb and the Croatian novel relying on each other for self-definition. A provincial city in the Habsburg Empire and then in Austria-Hungary (1867-1918), Zagreb negotiated in the novel an emphatically chthonic and relational response to the Austro-Hungarian conceptual apparatus. A sense of autochthony in excess of itself was thereby cultivated, in literary and political terms, that persisted well into the twentieth century, when Zagreb was Croatia’s capital in Yugoslavia – the novel and the city assuming for themselves an Antigonic imperative. In the 1990s, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when Zagreb was no longer a city that defined itself by challenging the mandate of the state and the novel no longer its Antigonic language, it was historicism rather than autochthony that the novel and the city began claiming for themselves, even as this historicism, like autochthony, was still distinctly Austro-Hungarian. It was in this way that Zagreb’s involvement with the novel has shown modernity to be incompatible with hegemony.

Zagreb ; Austria-Hungary ; the chthonic city ; the novel ; the Bildungsroman ; the detective novel ; Antigonic socialism ; masochism ; minoritarianism

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