engleski

Beyond the Cold War Gaze

This presentation will analyze two hitherto undiscovered travelogues created in times, when socialist Yugoslavia severed ties with the Soviet Union and sought its authentic political, economic and social path, becoming the “third way”, i.e. the bridge between East and West. Travelogue of the famous Russian and Slavic scholar Alexander Flaker (1924-2010) were found in his legacy and published in 2020 under the title “Without Line. On ‘Volendam’ from the Netherlands to North America in 1950 and 1951” (Zagreb: Duriex). The book consists of Flaker's impressions from two voyages with the transatlantic ship “Volendam” across Western Europe to North America. “The Railway. An Adventure in Construction” is a collection of observations of British volunteers who participated in the construction of the Šamac- Sarajevo railway, that was edited by the British Marxist historian and culturologist Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1998). Both authors in these books act in two functions at the same time – they are archivists and activists. Although times and authors will change (E. P. Thompson’s book is never mentioned in his biographies, Flaker’s notes were unknown to public until 2020), these records conserve a specific historical moment in author’s individual biographies and provide valuable evidence of a dynamic social and political time as an important part of great intellectual biographies. Both books are considered to be the first recorded testimonies about Yugoslavia under the “Western”, Thompson’s gaze, and Western Europe and North America under the “Eastern” (Flaker’s) gaze before and after 1948, which was a major turning point in Yugoslavia's international position on the Cold War stage. They are connected by mediating the views of young intellectuals from “deterritorialised” positions: the transatlantic ship “Volendam” for Flaker and Bosnia for E. P. Thompson were “incubator for creating new thoughts, ideas and collaborations” (Kolanović 2020), i.e. a heterotopic spaces that function as a reflection of the world permeated by great geopolitical changes. In times when Yugoslav socialism was young and energetic, for both authors the West embodied wrongly established political, social, economic, cultural and human values. In addition to being an aesthetically stimulating docufictions (both books are accompanied by authors’ sketches of people and things), travelogues of A. Flaker and E. P. Thompson actively encourage questions that are extremely relevant to the reflection on particular time and its structuring, especially in the moment after the defeat of the political project of socialism (Petrović, Matošević 2020). My interest in these books is twofold: on the one hand, I believe that past imaginations of the future should be taken seriously because they can offer the potential to reflect on the present and the future, on the other hand, I am interested in the relationship between the lived experience of Western capitalism and Yugoslav socialism and its representations.

travelogues, A. Flaker, E. P. Thompson

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