Dubravka Ugresic, a novelist and essayist who, "after her native Yugoslavia broke apart in the early 1990s, found herself ostracized in the new country of Croatia for refusing to embrace its aggressive nationalism and spent the rest of her life abroad," died March 17, the New York Times reported. She was 73.
"Ugresic's writings, both in fiction and nonfiction, are a unique blend of wittiness and compassion," Petar Milat, her principal editor and publisher in Croatia, said by e-mail. "Her passing has resounded strongly in all countries of the former Yugoslavia, where Ugresic was regarded a chief intellectual voice, equipped by an exemplary ethical rigor."
In the 1980s, Ugresic was hailed as one of Yugoslavia's best emerging novelists, especially with the release of Fording the Stream of Consciousness, which won multiple awards in that country in 1988, but her "triumph was short-lived," the Times noted. Soon Yugoslavia was disintegrating and Franjo Tudjman had come to power in Croatia, Ugresic's home region, which declared independence in 1991.
In 1991, she took an extended break, going to Amsterdam and then to the U.S. as a lecturer at Wesleyan University. She returned to Zagreb in 1992 but was vilified in the press and ostracized by colleagues at the University of Zagreb. She was harassed and threatened, she found that she couldn't get published, and she and four other writers were labeled "the Croatian witches."
Ugresic left Croatia for good in 1993. Her essay collection, The Culture of Lies (1995), "a blunt dissection of how national and ethnic identities in the region had been manipulated to serve whoever was in power," the Times wrote.
Ugresic continued to publish fiction and nonfiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1999), The Ministry of Pain (2005), The Age of Skin (2020), A Love Story (1978), and Have a Nice Day (1995).
For at least a decade, Ugresic's name came up as a potential Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, but she never won. In 2009, she was on the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize (won by Alice Munro), and in 2016 she won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Regarding her decision to abandon Croatia, she told Bomb magazine in 2002: "I deleted my ethnic, national and state identity because there was nothing much to delete there. But I found myself in a very ironic position: In Croatia I am not a Croatian writer anymore, but abroad I am always identified as a Croatian writer. That means that I became what I didn't want to be and what I am not.... Still, what I can't delete as easily is my experience. Even if I could, I would not erase it or exchange it for a less traumatic one. That experience is rich and enriching, as well as pretty unique. Not so many people in the world were born in a country that doesn't exist anymore."