“Sarajevo. Plan grada”: the specifics of the chronotope

Abstract

The scene of the novel written by M. Jergović “Sarajevo. Plan grada” (2015) — the writer’s hometown, the key space for all his writing. It’s some sort of a fluid romanized map. The novel describes several cultural and historical Sarajevoes at the same time, such as an Ottoman city, and Austro-Hungarian, and Sarajevo during the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and a city of the Tito era, and then Sarajevo before and after the war of the 1990s. in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The space of the city in the novel is the past of the today’s city, marked for the author by political and ideological attempts to recode and even erase the historical memory. The fragmented text of the novel consists of personal memories, literary plots, the history of the city, reflections on memory and obliteration — it is a monument dedicated to the old, disappearing or even already disappeared Sarajevo. According to E. Kazas, Jergović created the most voluminous, comprehensive and most reliable image of Sarajevo in Bosnian literature.

For citation
Shatko E. V. “Sarajevo. Plan grada”: the specifics of the chronotope // Slavic Almanac. 2020. Issues 3–4. P. 412–422. DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2020.3-4.4.07