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The Culture of Lies
The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešić's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.
With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.
Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.
With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.
Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.
360 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
Dubravka Ugrešić
53 books677 followersDubravka Ugrešić was a Yugoslav, Croatian and Dutch writer. She left Croatia in 1993 and was based in Amsterdam since 1996. She described herself as "post-Yugoslav, transnational, or, even more precisely, postnational writer".
Dubravka Ugrešić earned her degrees in Comparative Literature, Russian Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, and worked for twenty years at the Institute for Theory of Literature at Zagreb University, successfully pursuing parallel careers as a writer and a literary scholar.
She started writing professionally with screenplays for children’s television programs, as an undergraduate. In 1971 she published her first book for children Mali plamen, which was awarded a prestigious Croatian literary prize for children’s literature. Ugresic published two more books (Filip i Srecica, 1976; Kucni duhovi, 1988), and then gave up writing for children.
As a literary scholar Dubravka Ugrešić was particularly interested in Russian avant-garde culture. She was a co-editor of the international scholarly project Pojmovnik ruske avangarde, (A Glossary of the Russian Avangarde) for many years. She rediscovered forgotten Russian writers such as Konstantin Vaginov and Leonid Dobychin, and published a book on Russian contemporary fiction (Nova ruska proza, 1980). She translated fiction into Croatian from Russian (Boris Pilnyak, Gola godina; Daniil Kharms, Nule i nistice), and edited anthologies of both Russian contemporary and avant-garde writing (Pljuska u ruci, 1989).
Dubravka Ugrešić was best known in the former Yugoslavia for her fiction, novels and short stories: Poza za prozu, 1978; Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota, 1981; Zivot je bajka, 1983; Forsiranje romana reke, 1988.
Her novel Forsiranje romana reke was given the coveted NIN-award for the best novel of the year: Ugrešić was the first woman to receive this honor.
Croatian film director Rajko Grlic made a film U raljama zivota (1984) based on Ugrešić’s short novel Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota. Ugrešić co-authored the screenplay, as she did with screenplays for two other movies and a TV drama.
In 1991, when the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-nationalistic stand and consequently an anti-war stand. She started to write critically about nationalism (both Croatian and Serbian), the stupidity and criminality of war, and soon became a target of the nationalistically charged media, officials, politicians, fellow writers and anonymous citizens. She was proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch” in Croatia, ostracized and exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. She left her country of origin in 1993.
Dubravka Ugrešić continued writing since she began living abroad. She published novels (Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, Ministarstvo boli) and books of essays (Americki fikcionar, Kultura lazi, Zabranjeno citanje, Nikog nema doma).
Her books have been translated into more then twenty languages. Dubravka Ugrešić has received several major European literary awards. In 2016, Ugrešić won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
On March 17th of 2023, one of Europe's most distinctive essayists, Dubravka Ugrešić, died in Amsterdam at the age of 73.
Dubravka Ugrešić earned her degrees in Comparative Literature, Russian Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, and worked for twenty years at the Institute for Theory of Literature at Zagreb University, successfully pursuing parallel careers as a writer and a literary scholar.
She started writing professionally with screenplays for children’s television programs, as an undergraduate. In 1971 she published her first book for children Mali plamen, which was awarded a prestigious Croatian literary prize for children’s literature. Ugresic published two more books (Filip i Srecica, 1976; Kucni duhovi, 1988), and then gave up writing for children.
As a literary scholar Dubravka Ugrešić was particularly interested in Russian avant-garde culture. She was a co-editor of the international scholarly project Pojmovnik ruske avangarde, (A Glossary of the Russian Avangarde) for many years. She rediscovered forgotten Russian writers such as Konstantin Vaginov and Leonid Dobychin, and published a book on Russian contemporary fiction (Nova ruska proza, 1980). She translated fiction into Croatian from Russian (Boris Pilnyak, Gola godina; Daniil Kharms, Nule i nistice), and edited anthologies of both Russian contemporary and avant-garde writing (Pljuska u ruci, 1989).
Dubravka Ugrešić was best known in the former Yugoslavia for her fiction, novels and short stories: Poza za prozu, 1978; Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota, 1981; Zivot je bajka, 1983; Forsiranje romana reke, 1988.
Her novel Forsiranje romana reke was given the coveted NIN-award for the best novel of the year: Ugrešić was the first woman to receive this honor.
Croatian film director Rajko Grlic made a film U raljama zivota (1984) based on Ugrešić’s short novel Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota. Ugrešić co-authored the screenplay, as she did with screenplays for two other movies and a TV drama.
In 1991, when the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-nationalistic stand and consequently an anti-war stand. She started to write critically about nationalism (both Croatian and Serbian), the stupidity and criminality of war, and soon became a target of the nationalistically charged media, officials, politicians, fellow writers and anonymous citizens. She was proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch” in Croatia, ostracized and exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. She left her country of origin in 1993.
Dubravka Ugrešić continued writing since she began living abroad. She published novels (Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, Ministarstvo boli) and books of essays (Americki fikcionar, Kultura lazi, Zabranjeno citanje, Nikog nema doma).
Her books have been translated into more then twenty languages. Dubravka Ugrešić has received several major European literary awards. In 2016, Ugrešić won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
On March 17th of 2023, one of Europe's most distinctive essayists, Dubravka Ugrešić, died in Amsterdam at the age of 73.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
December 8, 2011
Great stuff. Greatly powerful, painful, poignant, piercing, peppery, pithy, polemical and personal stuff. An expatriate Croat reviled by a considerable portion of her fellow Dinaric Alpine Slavs in that oddly configured republic for opting to publicly air these stinging rebukes and accusations, Ugrešić grew up within an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse Yugoslavia embracing a Titoist cult of Brotherhood and Unity of which, even then, dark and disturbing undercurrents occasionally left their ozone traces in the forested air, parents staring blankly at an anxious future and muttering softly as they tried to shake dim premonitions of storm clouds. When the country collectively shrugged off its heavy, moth-eaten and cumbersome communist overcoat, it seemed the restraints upon long-standing ethnic, religious, and political hatreds slipped away with it—though the evil deeds were always committed by a malefic other weighted with all the animosities and grievances and oppressions dredged or cooked up from slumbering historical memory and anted up repeatedly by the cynical operators newly playing for and with the levers of power. Ugrešić writes of this, how it came to be, how it played out, how it will likely affect her distant homeland in the future, with an intelligent, pungent, and playfully bitter prose—loaded with snap but also a melancholic tang—appalled and yet unsurprised by the sordidly violent turn all of that promise took. Well worth a look.
August 26, 2014
I found myself trapped reading this book of essays on Serb-Croat pickles and peccadilloes. Plucking it idly from the library, based solely on my previous four sit-downs with Dubravka, I found the content not in my purview. And yet, her engaging voice kept me returning for more until—lo and behold!—all 288pp were completed, and I emerged 1% more knowledgeable about Balkan history (I have, of course, forgotten it all already). This is why reading is imperative for spongeheads like me: while we’re booking it we’re in possession of facts and opinions only a privileged few have access to. We are cranial conquistadors in our armchairs! For comment on the content, as ever, absent friend Chris has it covered and Harry has quotes in boldface, so you don’t forget, for the world is a sponge.
January 26, 2016
Ova knjiga, kako autorica kaže "antipolitičkih eseja" nagrađena je 1996. godine nagradom Charles Veillon za najbolju europsku esejističku knjigu godine, ali u Hrvatskoj je dobila većinom loše kritike. Izdanje koje sam pročitala, iz 1999., na poleđini je namjerno imalo istaknute loše kritike iz hrvatskih časopisa. Pitate se zašto? Pročitajte eseje pa ćete saznati.
January 30, 2026
5-
Maestralno djelo (anti)političke esejistike i polemike. Kultura laži možda je i relevantnija danas nego krajem 90-ih, kada je pisana.
Ugrešić s nevjerojatnom oštrinom i preciznošću, kao i karakterističnom dozom gorčine i ironije, secira nacionalističke laži i manipulacije, tu patologiju koja je dovela do krvavog raspada Jugoslavije. Pritom, Ugrešić opisuje shizofrenost i konformizam izmanipuliranog društva, koje se ne libi pripaliti lomače pod svakim tko odstupi od novokomponirane nacionalističke "istine" i mitologije.
Kultura laži za mene je jedno od najboljih Dubravkinih djela, unikatno i bitno upravo zbog njene "iskošene", "deformirane", autsajderske perspektive, što potvrđuje i moćan kraj knjige:
"Danas, iz svoje nomadske perspektive, svojoj bivšoj sredini mogu biti samo zahvalna. Novac za kupovinu metle pribavila sam sama. I letim sama."
Maestralno djelo (anti)političke esejistike i polemike. Kultura laži možda je i relevantnija danas nego krajem 90-ih, kada je pisana.
Ugrešić s nevjerojatnom oštrinom i preciznošću, kao i karakterističnom dozom gorčine i ironije, secira nacionalističke laži i manipulacije, tu patologiju koja je dovela do krvavog raspada Jugoslavije. Pritom, Ugrešić opisuje shizofrenost i konformizam izmanipuliranog društva, koje se ne libi pripaliti lomače pod svakim tko odstupi od novokomponirane nacionalističke "istine" i mitologije.
Kultura laži za mene je jedno od najboljih Dubravkinih djela, unikatno i bitno upravo zbog njene "iskošene", "deformirane", autsajderske perspektive, što potvrđuje i moćan kraj knjige:
"Danas, iz svoje nomadske perspektive, svojoj bivšoj sredini mogu biti samo zahvalna. Novac za kupovinu metle pribavila sam sama. I letim sama."
February 11, 2015
The Culture of Lies by Dubravka Ugrešić is a book of essays written between 1991 and 1996 — that is, during and just after the wars that resulted from the collapse of Yugoslavia. It is my book from Croatia for the Read The World challenge, although there is a slight awkwardness to that choice. This is from the ‘Glossary’ which Ugrešić includes at the back of the book:
Identity:
A few years ago my homeland was confiscated, and, along with it my passport. In exchange I was given a new homeland, far smaller and less comfortable. They handed me a passport, a ’symbol’ of my new identity. Thousands of people paid for those new ‘identity symbols’ with their lives, thousands were driven out of their homes, scattered, humiliated, deprived of their rights, imprisoned and impoverished. I possess very expensive identity documents. the fact often fills me with horror. And shame.
My passport has not made me a Croat. On the contrary, I am far less that today than I was before.
I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian… Being an ethnic ‘bastard’ or ’schizophrenic’ is my natural choice, I even consider it a sign of mental and moral health. And I know that I am not alone. Violent, stubborn insitence on national identities has provoked a response: today many young citizens of former Yugoslavia, particularly those scattered throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnic labels.
So, although Ugrešić was born in what is now Croatia, and so her book counts for my purposes as a book from Croatia, I should be careful not to label her as a ‘Croat writer’. But then it was never the intention for this challenge that the books and writers chosen should be taken as representative of those countries — or not in a straightforward way. In the context of this challenge, that dynamic between books and countries is quite interesting, but I think it needs a post of its own.
The essays are fascinating. They communicate a sense of an overwhelming cultural trauma, not just because of the war itself but because of the whiplash speed of the changes as all the ex-Yugoslavs created new identities for themselves. Streets were renamed, history rewritten, the literary canon divvied up.
And it wasn’t simply an assertion of a new positive identity for, for example, Croatia, it was necessarily a rejection not just of Serbia and Bosnia but of Yugoslavia. So the country where all of them had lived their whole lives, and which had been an imperfect but functional state for over 80 years, became a ‘prison of nations’, and anyone who questioned this was suffering from the dangerously subversive ‘Yugo-nostalgia’.
This is from the title essay:
I know of a writer colleague who claimed to a foreign journalist that he was ‘the victim of repression’ under Yugo-communism, that his books were banned, and that he had been in prison. That colleague was never in prison nor was he ‘the victim of repression’ and all his books were regularly published. I do not believe that he was lying. Exposed to media brainwashing, terror by forgetting and collective compulsion, my colleague had simply forgotten his personal history, he carried out an unconscious mental touching-up, and in the general context the spoken lie became an acceptable truth. And after all, the foreign journalist had come to hear just such a story, in his Westerner’s head he already carried such a stereotype: the story of a repressed writer in the former communist regime and a happy end in the new, democratic one.
I know of a Zagreb Japanologist who terrorised the whole Yugoslav cultural scene for years with — Japan! Throughout the whole of former Yugoslavia there sprang up haiku circles, haiku poets, ikebana courses, anthologies of Japanese poetry, twinnings between Osaka and Varaždin, festivals of Yugoslav haiku poets. Thanks to the activity of the aforementioned Japanologist, the inflation of haiku poetry during ‘totalitarianism’ had given us all a ‘pain in the neck’. Today the famous Japanologist claims that under the ‘Tito regime’ he was exposed to repression because of … haiku poetry!
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
The essays approach this central subject from various directions — the metaphor of cleanness and cleansing, the relationship between eastern and western Europe, the kitschiness of nationalist aesthetics, pop music — and they are all well-written, thought provoking and rather quotable. But instead of typing out long extracts I’ll just suggest you read it yourself.
Identity:
A few years ago my homeland was confiscated, and, along with it my passport. In exchange I was given a new homeland, far smaller and less comfortable. They handed me a passport, a ’symbol’ of my new identity. Thousands of people paid for those new ‘identity symbols’ with their lives, thousands were driven out of their homes, scattered, humiliated, deprived of their rights, imprisoned and impoverished. I possess very expensive identity documents. the fact often fills me with horror. And shame.
My passport has not made me a Croat. On the contrary, I am far less that today than I was before.
I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian… Being an ethnic ‘bastard’ or ’schizophrenic’ is my natural choice, I even consider it a sign of mental and moral health. And I know that I am not alone. Violent, stubborn insitence on national identities has provoked a response: today many young citizens of former Yugoslavia, particularly those scattered throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnic labels.
So, although Ugrešić was born in what is now Croatia, and so her book counts for my purposes as a book from Croatia, I should be careful not to label her as a ‘Croat writer’. But then it was never the intention for this challenge that the books and writers chosen should be taken as representative of those countries — or not in a straightforward way. In the context of this challenge, that dynamic between books and countries is quite interesting, but I think it needs a post of its own.
The essays are fascinating. They communicate a sense of an overwhelming cultural trauma, not just because of the war itself but because of the whiplash speed of the changes as all the ex-Yugoslavs created new identities for themselves. Streets were renamed, history rewritten, the literary canon divvied up.
And it wasn’t simply an assertion of a new positive identity for, for example, Croatia, it was necessarily a rejection not just of Serbia and Bosnia but of Yugoslavia. So the country where all of them had lived their whole lives, and which had been an imperfect but functional state for over 80 years, became a ‘prison of nations’, and anyone who questioned this was suffering from the dangerously subversive ‘Yugo-nostalgia’.
This is from the title essay:
I know of a writer colleague who claimed to a foreign journalist that he was ‘the victim of repression’ under Yugo-communism, that his books were banned, and that he had been in prison. That colleague was never in prison nor was he ‘the victim of repression’ and all his books were regularly published. I do not believe that he was lying. Exposed to media brainwashing, terror by forgetting and collective compulsion, my colleague had simply forgotten his personal history, he carried out an unconscious mental touching-up, and in the general context the spoken lie became an acceptable truth. And after all, the foreign journalist had come to hear just such a story, in his Westerner’s head he already carried such a stereotype: the story of a repressed writer in the former communist regime and a happy end in the new, democratic one.
I know of a Zagreb Japanologist who terrorised the whole Yugoslav cultural scene for years with — Japan! Throughout the whole of former Yugoslavia there sprang up haiku circles, haiku poets, ikebana courses, anthologies of Japanese poetry, twinnings between Osaka and Varaždin, festivals of Yugoslav haiku poets. Thanks to the activity of the aforementioned Japanologist, the inflation of haiku poetry during ‘totalitarianism’ had given us all a ‘pain in the neck’. Today the famous Japanologist claims that under the ‘Tito regime’ he was exposed to repression because of … haiku poetry!
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
The essays approach this central subject from various directions — the metaphor of cleanness and cleansing, the relationship between eastern and western Europe, the kitschiness of nationalist aesthetics, pop music — and they are all well-written, thought provoking and rather quotable. But instead of typing out long extracts I’ll just suggest you read it yourself.
Read
February 25, 2021Ugrešić is my favorite living essayist. This 1998 translation addresses the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Ugrešić suffered during the war. Her books were burned, she was branded a "public enemy" and "witch", and she went off into self-imposed exile. That said, she never descends into self-pity. Rather, she's a social critic. Her essays employ dry gallows humor to elucidate the failure of Croatian institutions in the early '90s. The media caved to nationalism. Academia caved to nationalism. Colleague turned on colleague. Authors became mere political instruments. Historians rewrote history. Reality stopped being reality. Propaganda displaced truth. I was jarred by the similarity of early '90s Croatia and Trump's U.S. The deception and self-deception, the posturing, the cowardice. Highly recommended.
September 4, 2020
"Danas sam nitko. Ili svatko. U Hrvatskoj ću biti Srpkinja, u Srbiji Hrvatica i Albanka, u Sloveniji Bosanka, u Bugarskoj Turkinja, u Turskoj Grkinja, u Grčkoj Makedonka… Kulturni bastardizam, etnička “shizofrenija”, multiplicirani, transkulturni identitet – moj su prirodni izbor. I nisam usamljena."
August 14, 2023
Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting keeps returning throughout these essays, and with good reason. In the decades of censorship, self-censorship (of which Slavenka Drakulić's essay "A Chat with My Censor" might be the most poignant depiction I know), and political propaganda permeating life like an inexhaustible gas, writers who scrape their way through confusion toward truth signal that it might be possible not to give up.
That sounds like a modest goal if you've never lived in an atmosphere of general hopelessness and erosion of trust. The possibility of truth -- not capitalized nor prefaced with "my" or "your" -- a truth in which it is possible to live together, at least some of the time, is the possibility of social life in which people are not constantly at each other's throats.
The truth I have in mind may be easier to write than to speak. It's a process of excavation and examination without the presumption of innocence, and so it may be impossible off the cuff, in the moment. It requires what Wisława Szymborska described as the magical and necessary words "I don't know." In writing, it's the kind of creation unattached to dreams of fame.
In this volume, Ugrešić faces the shame of her own country's descent into war amid the myth-making that fuels enthusiasm for war. In the final essay of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić observed the process of invoking war through the escalating anticipation of it. Ugrešić pursues the details in these essays, carefully tracing the crude nationalist narratives emerging in the collapsing Yugoslavia. Their basis is the dehumanization of the other (following the extrication of the other from the self). The black-and-white thinking involved in this process breeds new naive myths. And so the fragment from Kundera that creates the possibility of truth in those dire circumstances is the observation that in pursuing a "glorious" future, regimes that do not accept dissent depend on rewriting the past (this is the pertinent quotation).
In my favorite essay from this volume, "The Palindrome Story," Ugrešić writes:
I can't think of a more fitting and succinct way of conveying the difficulty faced by those of us who lived behind the Iron Curtain (even those, like me, for whom that closed off world belongs to childhood memory). It's not merely the difficulty of finding truth -- available only in gasps, glimpses, often in coded language -- but also of not getting carried away by feelings of shame. The grim landscapes and cityscapes that bear diminishing yet still discernible signs of World War II and the decades of poverty that followed it convey some of that difficult truth. But they are also often used to shame those who've lived in them for living in them. Westerners often invoke the shorthand of "Eastern Europe" perhaps inadvertently asking to revive that difficult past as a matter of convenience. But "Eastern Europe" (though not literally, of course) functions as a false palindrome. The reality of it was not uniform, unified, or clear to those who lived it.
In my conversations with people from other countries once thrown into the Soviet sphere of domination, similarities --such as the screening of the Brazilian telenovela that Ugrešić writes about in "Life as a Soap Opera," or cars of the era, food and toilet paper shortages, or housing shared with strangers allocated by the authorities -- are like ropes we use to get over the chasm of our mutual ignorance about each other's countries and their specific realities. How can you relate soundly to a system of countries made to function like somewhat connected prison cells? How can you relate soundly to poverty, when you know how brutalizing it can be for many, and ennobling to very, very few?
But the answer to the difficulty of relating to things that evoke shame is not denial and forceful escape. Just as the opposite of love is not hatred, this kind of flight is by no means freeing from shame. It's merely a pointless cover up of it. Ugrešić's examination of the unfolding war shows how the new myths, in their forceful rejection of the shared past, mire everything in shame, which becomes a convenient excuse for demonization, brutality, and proliferation of lies.
What if the true opposite of a horrifying politics is not more politics offered as a contrast, but cultivating the possibility of an anti-political stance? In my early years in the west, I was repeatedly surprised by the elision and replacement of "ethics" with "political action" in discussions of larger societal or civilizational problems. Starting with ethics, it seemed to me, we invite the magical necessary words "I don't know" into shared deliberation. If we jump over ethics and straight into "political action," those words cannot be spoken lest they invite the accusation of weakness and ignorance or, worse, shirking responsibility.
I'm still left with that question, completely unresolved. And reading about the badly understood and easily forgotten war in these essays, I'm seeing troubling parallels to what is happening in so many places and in the discourse that, thanks to the internet, is now global.
That sounds like a modest goal if you've never lived in an atmosphere of general hopelessness and erosion of trust. The possibility of truth -- not capitalized nor prefaced with "my" or "your" -- a truth in which it is possible to live together, at least some of the time, is the possibility of social life in which people are not constantly at each other's throats.
The truth I have in mind may be easier to write than to speak. It's a process of excavation and examination without the presumption of innocence, and so it may be impossible off the cuff, in the moment. It requires what Wisława Szymborska described as the magical and necessary words "I don't know." In writing, it's the kind of creation unattached to dreams of fame.
In this volume, Ugrešić faces the shame of her own country's descent into war amid the myth-making that fuels enthusiasm for war. In the final essay of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić observed the process of invoking war through the escalating anticipation of it. Ugrešić pursues the details in these essays, carefully tracing the crude nationalist narratives emerging in the collapsing Yugoslavia. Their basis is the dehumanization of the other (following the extrication of the other from the self). The black-and-white thinking involved in this process breeds new naive myths. And so the fragment from Kundera that creates the possibility of truth in those dire circumstances is the observation that in pursuing a "glorious" future, regimes that do not accept dissent depend on rewriting the past (this is the pertinent quotation).
In my favorite essay from this volume, "The Palindrome Story," Ugrešić writes:
"In the theory of puzzle-writing a false palindrome is called a palindromoid. That is a word or sentence that has one meaning when read forwards and a different one when read backwards."
I can't think of a more fitting and succinct way of conveying the difficulty faced by those of us who lived behind the Iron Curtain (even those, like me, for whom that closed off world belongs to childhood memory). It's not merely the difficulty of finding truth -- available only in gasps, glimpses, often in coded language -- but also of not getting carried away by feelings of shame. The grim landscapes and cityscapes that bear diminishing yet still discernible signs of World War II and the decades of poverty that followed it convey some of that difficult truth. But they are also often used to shame those who've lived in them for living in them. Westerners often invoke the shorthand of "Eastern Europe" perhaps inadvertently asking to revive that difficult past as a matter of convenience. But "Eastern Europe" (though not literally, of course) functions as a false palindrome. The reality of it was not uniform, unified, or clear to those who lived it.
In my conversations with people from other countries once thrown into the Soviet sphere of domination, similarities --such as the screening of the Brazilian telenovela that Ugrešić writes about in "Life as a Soap Opera," or cars of the era, food and toilet paper shortages, or housing shared with strangers allocated by the authorities -- are like ropes we use to get over the chasm of our mutual ignorance about each other's countries and their specific realities. How can you relate soundly to a system of countries made to function like somewhat connected prison cells? How can you relate soundly to poverty, when you know how brutalizing it can be for many, and ennobling to very, very few?
But the answer to the difficulty of relating to things that evoke shame is not denial and forceful escape. Just as the opposite of love is not hatred, this kind of flight is by no means freeing from shame. It's merely a pointless cover up of it. Ugrešić's examination of the unfolding war shows how the new myths, in their forceful rejection of the shared past, mire everything in shame, which becomes a convenient excuse for demonization, brutality, and proliferation of lies.
What if the true opposite of a horrifying politics is not more politics offered as a contrast, but cultivating the possibility of an anti-political stance? In my early years in the west, I was repeatedly surprised by the elision and replacement of "ethics" with "political action" in discussions of larger societal or civilizational problems. Starting with ethics, it seemed to me, we invite the magical necessary words "I don't know" into shared deliberation. If we jump over ethics and straight into "political action," those words cannot be spoken lest they invite the accusation of weakness and ignorance or, worse, shirking responsibility.
I'm still left with that question, completely unresolved. And reading about the badly understood and easily forgotten war in these essays, I'm seeing troubling parallels to what is happening in so many places and in the discourse that, thanks to the internet, is now global.
September 11, 2023
5/5. Dubravkini eseji, napisani med leti 1992 in 1997, so predstavljali kar hud družbeni trn v peti v času tuđmanizacije naše južne sosede. Po "diktatorju" se je našel prvovrsten "imitator" in okoli sebe gradil svoj kult, ki pa ga je "čarovnica" Dubravka secirala v prafaktorje. Režimski pisatelji in kulturni delavci so postajali državni pisatelji, bolj rjavonosni pa celo dobivali varnoritne, udobne službe na svetovnih ambasadah. Takih esejev slovenski "razumnik" ali "razumnica" nista uspela napisati, saj je bilo ugodno trobiti v post-disidentske revijaške kroge...
October 14, 2019
Sjajna knjiga, i toliko tužna...
July 23, 2018
A collection of a thought provoking politically critical texts/essays which were written during the collapse of Yugoslavia, war (1991-1995) and in the post-war period, are author’s reflections - focused mainly on a new identity (with the new state you also get new identity-and in many cases also new personality), role of intellectuals-writers and media, nationalism and criminality of war. This thoughts led to the fact that Ugrešić was declared in Croatia as a state enemy, traitor, whore and witch.
My only complaint: repetition.
My only complaint: repetition.
April 30, 2024
"Write: no one, I say to the officials in booths each time they ask my nationality, and they ask me often."
The Culture of Lies is the second of Ugrešić's books I have read: a self-proclaimed Yugoslav writer, yet with Yugoslavia as a non-existent nation, this perhaps makes her simply a writer, as she rejected the national label of Croatian. Her book was published in 1995, at the height of the Yugoslav Wars, and is composed of various essays concerning the conflict. Notably, the views she expresses in this book and elsewhere ultimately led her into political exile from the newly independent state of Croatia in 1993.
Ugrešić took a firm anti-war stance at the onset of the conflict in 1991, which, coupled with her anti-nationalist stance, led to her public villification in Croatia. Primarily, Ugrešić criticizes the new regime of Franjo Tudjman for its push for ethnic homogeneity in Croatia, it's corruption, and its distortion of Croatian history - such as distorting the history of the Independent State of Croatia and its crimes. Alongside this, she attacks the regime of Slobodan Milošević, which likewise parroted nationalist rhetoric to seize and maintain political power. Both nationalisms tragically tore the state of Yugoslavia apart to a great degree of violence.
However, Ugrešić did not condemn nationalism out of great loyalty to the Yugoslav project; instead, she describes the corrosive impact nationalism has on its subjects, and the manner in which it justifies war. Moreover, she recognized the banality of the newly formed national states in the former Yugoslavia, with many members of the CPY shedding their communist credentials to become nationalists - Tudjman foremost among them.
Her stance then, is a simple condemnation of the violence that was engulfing Yugoslavia, among those who largely spoke the same language and who lived together peacefully only 10 years prior. Her story, then, reminds me closely of Krleža's protagonist in On the Edge of Reason. Declaring the whole war as "criminal: a moral, bloody insanity," she was condemned and exiled by the Croatian national community for speaking her conscience. While you may criticize her for offering no solution to solve the economic and national tensions in the Yugoslav territories, her condemnation of nationalism and war as a solution is a far better starting ground than accepting nationalism as a natural political development.
Throughout the book, Ugrešić covers a wide range of topics, from the role of the writer in war to the patriarchal Yugoslav culture and its impact on the war. Often times insightful, at other times her writing would go over my head. Nevertheless, her writing is highly incisive, and she gives an excellent, and unique, perspective on the Yugoslav Wars - and a host of other topics- that is well worth reading.
The Culture of Lies is the second of Ugrešić's books I have read: a self-proclaimed Yugoslav writer, yet with Yugoslavia as a non-existent nation, this perhaps makes her simply a writer, as she rejected the national label of Croatian. Her book was published in 1995, at the height of the Yugoslav Wars, and is composed of various essays concerning the conflict. Notably, the views she expresses in this book and elsewhere ultimately led her into political exile from the newly independent state of Croatia in 1993.
Ugrešić took a firm anti-war stance at the onset of the conflict in 1991, which, coupled with her anti-nationalist stance, led to her public villification in Croatia. Primarily, Ugrešić criticizes the new regime of Franjo Tudjman for its push for ethnic homogeneity in Croatia, it's corruption, and its distortion of Croatian history - such as distorting the history of the Independent State of Croatia and its crimes. Alongside this, she attacks the regime of Slobodan Milošević, which likewise parroted nationalist rhetoric to seize and maintain political power. Both nationalisms tragically tore the state of Yugoslavia apart to a great degree of violence.
However, Ugrešić did not condemn nationalism out of great loyalty to the Yugoslav project; instead, she describes the corrosive impact nationalism has on its subjects, and the manner in which it justifies war. Moreover, she recognized the banality of the newly formed national states in the former Yugoslavia, with many members of the CPY shedding their communist credentials to become nationalists - Tudjman foremost among them.
Her stance then, is a simple condemnation of the violence that was engulfing Yugoslavia, among those who largely spoke the same language and who lived together peacefully only 10 years prior. Her story, then, reminds me closely of Krleža's protagonist in On the Edge of Reason. Declaring the whole war as "criminal: a moral, bloody insanity," she was condemned and exiled by the Croatian national community for speaking her conscience. While you may criticize her for offering no solution to solve the economic and national tensions in the Yugoslav territories, her condemnation of nationalism and war as a solution is a far better starting ground than accepting nationalism as a natural political development.
Throughout the book, Ugrešić covers a wide range of topics, from the role of the writer in war to the patriarchal Yugoslav culture and its impact on the war. Often times insightful, at other times her writing would go over my head. Nevertheless, her writing is highly incisive, and she gives an excellent, and unique, perspective on the Yugoslav Wars - and a host of other topics- that is well worth reading.
December 3, 2024
Incisivo, inspirador, melancólico y tremendamente personal. Una meditación sobre el exilio, la nación, la pertenencia, memoria y ausencia.
September 24, 2021
"And so, what is left us? A box of lead type, and that is not much... but it is all that man has so far devised as a weapon in defence of human dignity." - Miroslav Krleza, Banquet in Blitva
"We've got postmodernism til it's coming out of our ears! It's only soap we're short of!"
"Warriors, the masters of oblivion, the destroyers of the old state and builders of new ones, used every possible strategic method to impose a collective amnesia."
"The political battle is a battle for the territory of collective memory."
"His text is no longer understood as before, something gets in the way, the words no longer mean what they used to, each one rebounds in his face. It seems to our writer that this is because there is no longer a common code. Or else a code has been established and has become common to others, but not to him."
"On the title page there was a photograph of a tired, grey people queuing for sour cabbage or something, somewhere in Bucharest. But I didn't have to queue! Petar Petrovic protested angrily."
"For many Westerners Eastern Europe is a mental empty space. It begins somewhere beyond the iron curtain, somewhere behind the wall, even now when there is neither a curtain nor a wall."
"I wondered how I could so easily have taken on myself the right to explain their own life to them."
"Petar Petrovic the Serb is radically different from Petar Petrovic the Croat. Make up your mind which you are!"
"He learns further that publicly proclaimed patriotism is the best protection against everything. Patriotism is a protective magic circle: all will be forgiven, if we have publicly proclaimed our love for our homeland... Homeland, Institution, We those are the magic formulae which cancel out the danger of the individual act. And where there is no individual act, there is no individual responsibility either."
"Nationalism is the ideology of the stupid. There is no more stupid and tedious ideology than nationalism. Nationalism as a religious and therapeutic refuge is the option of those who have nothing else."
"The Vice-President added that even ordinary citizens could help by writing letters (surely each of us has some friends abroad!) in which they would spread the truth about Croatia. The patriotic duty of every citizen - to spread the truth about Croatia - has legitimized a method which they always employed in any case with great zeal whenever invited to: denunciation of people who think differently - sceptics, 'Yugonostalgics,' intellectuals who once said something critical about the present regime; denunciation of people who travel too much ('while we sit it out here bravely because our homeland is in danger'); denunciation of neighbors (he said, 'Fuck an independent state in which you've nothing to live on');"
"What do we not do to acquaint the world with our skill at dying?"
"Wars are never waged for people. Wars are waged by one kind of people against others. And since the crazed majority cannot be condemned, the criminality of war is wrapped in a package of reasons, causes, and arguments, into something 'comprehensible' to all."
"Europe has always built its identity and its sense of self in opposition to an 'other.'"
"Human unhappiness can easily be transformed into intellectualistic and artistic porn, he sees his colleagues, the bearers of truth, fighting for their media second (for their sound bite!)..."
"It is precisely feelings and sympathy that the West brings as its gifts."
"He watches the terrifying speed with which his colleagues change color, flags, symbols; the passion with which they practise the genres of oral and written confession on which they cleanse themselves of communism and Yugoslavism, in which they denounce each other. Petar Petrovic watches the terrifying passion with which his colleagues scuttle after power and the powerful, the joy with which they accept functions, become loudspeakers, the voice of the people."
"Our intellectual becomes a kind of public animal...not noticing that he is directing his message...to his colleagues. He becomes a kind of moral psychotherapist to people the same as himself. Together they hone their attitudes, multiply misunderstandings, shake their fists, and they are all firmly convinced that they are fighting against evil."
"But in order to awaken the dormant national consciousness, it was necessary quickly to establish differences: in what way were we different, that is, better, than them. Colleagues: university teachers, linguists, journalists, writers, historians, psychiatrists worked fervently in the teams to secure the dormant, lost, 'repressed' national identity."
"You have to give something for the collective, you have to be the same, as part of the collective you must yourself have the nerve to exclude some unsuitable individual."
"The collective paranoia induced in this way, based on perfectly real assumptions, brought with it also a collective readiness to interpret rumors as the truth (after all many interpreted the truth as rumour). Anguished by fear, the loss of relatives and friends, poverty, uncertainty, an information blockade, the terror of war, encroaching chaos, the citizens of Croatia are today ready to grab hold of the one and only truth they are offered, like a straw."
"'We don't need the truth, we need peace."
"The 'ordinary Croatian man' reaches for the proffered sedative."
"Even the dead did not succeed in escaping the national realignment. Danilo Kis, the last Yugoslav writer, a writer who emphasized his Central-European, his Yugoslav identity, who escaped to Paris to avoid the local manipulators...now his name is waved like a national banner by the same people who once drove him away."
"Under the slogan of democratisation of the government in their republics they have created indisputably poorer countries and unhappier people. Instead of real democracy, they have created small, totalitarian communities."
"'Democratisation' has brought a new freedom for patriarchalism."
"How is it for me, then, sitting on the shore among my fellow countrymen, obliged to experience defeat as triumph?"
"In practice, for the Yugoslav writer...that meant living in Zareb and having publishers in Belgrade, readers in Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje, and Pristina. It meant freely living different cultures and experiencing them all as one's own."
"We've got postmodernism til it's coming out of our ears! It's only soap we're short of!"
"Warriors, the masters of oblivion, the destroyers of the old state and builders of new ones, used every possible strategic method to impose a collective amnesia."
"The political battle is a battle for the territory of collective memory."
"His text is no longer understood as before, something gets in the way, the words no longer mean what they used to, each one rebounds in his face. It seems to our writer that this is because there is no longer a common code. Or else a code has been established and has become common to others, but not to him."
"On the title page there was a photograph of a tired, grey people queuing for sour cabbage or something, somewhere in Bucharest. But I didn't have to queue! Petar Petrovic protested angrily."
"For many Westerners Eastern Europe is a mental empty space. It begins somewhere beyond the iron curtain, somewhere behind the wall, even now when there is neither a curtain nor a wall."
"I wondered how I could so easily have taken on myself the right to explain their own life to them."
"Petar Petrovic the Serb is radically different from Petar Petrovic the Croat. Make up your mind which you are!"
"He learns further that publicly proclaimed patriotism is the best protection against everything. Patriotism is a protective magic circle: all will be forgiven, if we have publicly proclaimed our love for our homeland... Homeland, Institution, We those are the magic formulae which cancel out the danger of the individual act. And where there is no individual act, there is no individual responsibility either."
"Nationalism is the ideology of the stupid. There is no more stupid and tedious ideology than nationalism. Nationalism as a religious and therapeutic refuge is the option of those who have nothing else."
"The Vice-President added that even ordinary citizens could help by writing letters (surely each of us has some friends abroad!) in which they would spread the truth about Croatia. The patriotic duty of every citizen - to spread the truth about Croatia - has legitimized a method which they always employed in any case with great zeal whenever invited to: denunciation of people who think differently - sceptics, 'Yugonostalgics,' intellectuals who once said something critical about the present regime; denunciation of people who travel too much ('while we sit it out here bravely because our homeland is in danger'); denunciation of neighbors (he said, 'Fuck an independent state in which you've nothing to live on');"
"What do we not do to acquaint the world with our skill at dying?"
"Wars are never waged for people. Wars are waged by one kind of people against others. And since the crazed majority cannot be condemned, the criminality of war is wrapped in a package of reasons, causes, and arguments, into something 'comprehensible' to all."
"Europe has always built its identity and its sense of self in opposition to an 'other.'"
"Human unhappiness can easily be transformed into intellectualistic and artistic porn, he sees his colleagues, the bearers of truth, fighting for their media second (for their sound bite!)..."
"It is precisely feelings and sympathy that the West brings as its gifts."
"He watches the terrifying speed with which his colleagues change color, flags, symbols; the passion with which they practise the genres of oral and written confession on which they cleanse themselves of communism and Yugoslavism, in which they denounce each other. Petar Petrovic watches the terrifying passion with which his colleagues scuttle after power and the powerful, the joy with which they accept functions, become loudspeakers, the voice of the people."
"Our intellectual becomes a kind of public animal...not noticing that he is directing his message...to his colleagues. He becomes a kind of moral psychotherapist to people the same as himself. Together they hone their attitudes, multiply misunderstandings, shake their fists, and they are all firmly convinced that they are fighting against evil."
"But in order to awaken the dormant national consciousness, it was necessary quickly to establish differences: in what way were we different, that is, better, than them. Colleagues: university teachers, linguists, journalists, writers, historians, psychiatrists worked fervently in the teams to secure the dormant, lost, 'repressed' national identity."
"You have to give something for the collective, you have to be the same, as part of the collective you must yourself have the nerve to exclude some unsuitable individual."
"The collective paranoia induced in this way, based on perfectly real assumptions, brought with it also a collective readiness to interpret rumors as the truth (after all many interpreted the truth as rumour). Anguished by fear, the loss of relatives and friends, poverty, uncertainty, an information blockade, the terror of war, encroaching chaos, the citizens of Croatia are today ready to grab hold of the one and only truth they are offered, like a straw."
"'We don't need the truth, we need peace."
"The 'ordinary Croatian man' reaches for the proffered sedative."
"Even the dead did not succeed in escaping the national realignment. Danilo Kis, the last Yugoslav writer, a writer who emphasized his Central-European, his Yugoslav identity, who escaped to Paris to avoid the local manipulators...now his name is waved like a national banner by the same people who once drove him away."
"Under the slogan of democratisation of the government in their republics they have created indisputably poorer countries and unhappier people. Instead of real democracy, they have created small, totalitarian communities."
"'Democratisation' has brought a new freedom for patriarchalism."
"How is it for me, then, sitting on the shore among my fellow countrymen, obliged to experience defeat as triumph?"
"In practice, for the Yugoslav writer...that meant living in Zareb and having publishers in Belgrade, readers in Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Skopje, and Pristina. It meant freely living different cultures and experiencing them all as one's own."
October 22, 2021
If you wanted to read one, but only one, book on the Balkan Wars to help you understand the effects of the conflict and the complex feelings experienced by those in the region during and after the fighting, you'd find it hard to do better than this collection of biting, insightful, and incendiary essays, written in and around the time of the wars in the early to mid-1990s. Ugresic deftly touches on topics like identity and nationality, truth and its reworking, remembering and forgetting, the place of the artist in a time of war, and politics on both the macro (governmental) and micro (quotidian) level.
Many of these essays are laid out in short, numbered sections with almost Wittgenstinian precision. It's an eye-opening collection, and the rare non-fiction book that manages to be both profound and fast-reading at the same time. With her frank and even-handed evaluation of the conflict and its repercussions (she is as critical of the government and people from her native Croatia as she is of those from the surrounding lands of the former Yugoslavia), it's easy to see how Ugresic ended up an exile from her homeland, an early victim of "cancel culture" before the term existed.
Many of these essays are laid out in short, numbered sections with almost Wittgenstinian precision. It's an eye-opening collection, and the rare non-fiction book that manages to be both profound and fast-reading at the same time. With her frank and even-handed evaluation of the conflict and its repercussions (she is as critical of the government and people from her native Croatia as she is of those from the surrounding lands of the former Yugoslavia), it's easy to see how Ugresic ended up an exile from her homeland, an early victim of "cancel culture" before the term existed.
February 24, 2024
Oof, I really struggled with this one and I'm extra disappointed because I absolutely loved The Age of Skin, another essay collection of hers, beyond all reason. But I didn't even know what was going on half the time here and I only got through it by giving up on one essay (the palindrome one) and skimming the latter half-ish of the book, which actually seemed better than the beginning but I just didn't have the strength for it after fighting with this one over the last six weeks. My husband is from the former Yugoslavia and grew up in the diaspora elsewhere in Europe due to the wars, and I love learning more about the culture and history but this was not compelling or engaging like Age of Skin was. It had its moments of incredible writing and observation but not worth it for the slog. It felt absolutely neverending.
August 29, 2026
Real Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešić's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.
With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.
Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A collection of very wise, trenchant, and tendentious essays to cap off #WITMonth.
Shifting from Yugoslav nationality to Croatian was not a seamless process for Author Dubravka. A new passport under a new governing entity does not change the passport holder's identity or thought processes or, dangerously, political beliefs. Dissent is even more dangerous in a newly created state struggling to distance itself from the burdensome and ill-fitting imposed identity and ideology. Author Dubravka didn't fit in when Yugoslav was a political state's demonym, but neither did loads of other folk. "Croatian" as a political demonym is new enough that to dissent from the new ruling class is to risk losing the right to use it. This is where Author Dubravka ended up, an ethnic Croat instead of a Croatian citizen.
Labels don't matter much to me in my white US male's privilege. Unless I insist on bringing my Otherness to the fore, I can simply walk around being an "American," a label that makes me wince at its arrogance. Author Dubravka did not exist in that bubble of certainty. Her identity, dissenter, observer, critic, meant her labeling got complicated quickly in the upheavals of Communism's death throes. The wry tone of these works does not foreground a thing I perceive, possibly that I interpolate, the trauma and pain of losing an identity, a building block of selfhood. It's clear the fact of that loss is central to Author Dubravka's work; she does not wallow or lament but rather observes and analyzes. I still feel an edge of strong emotion despite it not being foregrounded.
It's not a shouted pain, it's a carefully phrased analysis of trauma's aftermath that shows how very painful it was for all to need to re-craft selves when their world ended. New nationalisms, new canons, new ethnic expressions glorified...all processes we undergo in youth and that are painful enough to live through even in that more mentally agile passage of life; as an older, even an old, person...!
There is a lot to be learned for us in the US on the subject of nationalism and identity in 2026 that a public intellectual from a disintegrating polity can teach us from the 1990s. Author Dubravka felt, though, analyzed, contextualized for us already. I hope more of us will now absorb and appreciate that gift in our own parlous times.
The Publisher Says: The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešić's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.
With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.
Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: A collection of very wise, trenchant, and tendentious essays to cap off #WITMonth.
Shifting from Yugoslav nationality to Croatian was not a seamless process for Author Dubravka. A new passport under a new governing entity does not change the passport holder's identity or thought processes or, dangerously, political beliefs. Dissent is even more dangerous in a newly created state struggling to distance itself from the burdensome and ill-fitting imposed identity and ideology. Author Dubravka didn't fit in when Yugoslav was a political state's demonym, but neither did loads of other folk. "Croatian" as a political demonym is new enough that to dissent from the new ruling class is to risk losing the right to use it. This is where Author Dubravka ended up, an ethnic Croat instead of a Croatian citizen.
Labels don't matter much to me in my white US male's privilege. Unless I insist on bringing my Otherness to the fore, I can simply walk around being an "American," a label that makes me wince at its arrogance. Author Dubravka did not exist in that bubble of certainty. Her identity, dissenter, observer, critic, meant her labeling got complicated quickly in the upheavals of Communism's death throes. The wry tone of these works does not foreground a thing I perceive, possibly that I interpolate, the trauma and pain of losing an identity, a building block of selfhood. It's clear the fact of that loss is central to Author Dubravka's work; she does not wallow or lament but rather observes and analyzes. I still feel an edge of strong emotion despite it not being foregrounded.
I know of a writer colleague who claimed to a foreign journalist that he was ‘the victim of repression’ under Yugo-communism, that his books were banned, and that he had been in prison. That colleague was never in prison nor was he ‘the victim of repression’ and all his books were regularly published. I do not believe that he was lying. Exposed to media brainwashing, terror by forgetting and collective compulsion, my colleague had simply forgotten his personal history, he carried out an unconscious mental touching-up, and in the general context the spoken lie became an acceptable truth. And after all, the foreign journalist had come to hear just such a story, in his Westerner’s head he already carried such a stereotype: the story of a repressed writer in the former communist regime and a happy end in the new, democratic one.
It's not a shouted pain, it's a carefully phrased analysis of trauma's aftermath that shows how very painful it was for all to need to re-craft selves when their world ended. New nationalisms, new canons, new ethnic expressions glorified...all processes we undergo in youth and that are painful enough to live through even in that more mentally agile passage of life; as an older, even an old, person...!
I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian… Being an ethnic ‘bastard’ or ’schizophrenic’ is my natural choice, I even consider it a sign of mental and moral health. And I know that I am not alone. Violent, stubborn insistence on national identities has provoked a response: today many young citizens of former Yugoslavia, particularly those scattered throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnic labels.
There is a lot to be learned for us in the US on the subject of nationalism and identity in 2026 that a public intellectual from a disintegrating polity can teach us from the 1990s. Author Dubravka felt, though, analyzed, contextualized for us already. I hope more of us will now absorb and appreciate that gift in our own parlous times.
May 12, 2017
As someone with both Croatian and Serbian heritage, and having lived in a few of the countries that make up Former Yugoslavia, I was eager to get Ugrešić's feelings on her former country falling apart. This collection of essays is full of longing, bitterness, betrayal, anger, and a strange tenderness for a past that clearly still brings our author pain. This area of the world has been and still is largely ignored, and many people I've talked to about Yugoslavia's breakup can never come to a conclusion about whether that was a good thing or not. In my mind, the breakup of Yugoslavia had been equated with the fall of Communism, and combining that with the longing of many natives I've spoken with for the days of Tito, I had unwittingly begun to think that the breakup was, in itself, a step. But after encountering victims of the horrors of the siege on Sarajevo and of Srebrenica, as well as learning of the tragedies that tore my own family in half with the onset of the wars, this book has brought me to believe that there simply was no winning with the situation, and I find myself sharing Ugrešić's frustration to my own, small degree.
I read this book with the original Croatian and the English translation side-by-side. The writing in both is lovely, and each essay is as unexpected, detailed, and personal as the last. Ugrešić aquaints us with the culture of lies that rejected her and betrayed her, that stumbled on into an uncertain future using uncertain and possibly unknown motivations, beyond ignorance and lies. My reasoning for the 4-star rating instead of 5 is due simply to the lack of a usable conclusion. We are presented with a tragedy, a problem and a cold case gone unsolved and half-forgotten, but little else. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but that is also the nature of the genre. Many classic works from the Former Yugoslavia lay out the tragedies and the sadnesses, and that is that - no plan for the future.
A great read - detailed, informative, full of raw emotion.
I read this book with the original Croatian and the English translation side-by-side. The writing in both is lovely, and each essay is as unexpected, detailed, and personal as the last. Ugrešić aquaints us with the culture of lies that rejected her and betrayed her, that stumbled on into an uncertain future using uncertain and possibly unknown motivations, beyond ignorance and lies. My reasoning for the 4-star rating instead of 5 is due simply to the lack of a usable conclusion. We are presented with a tragedy, a problem and a cold case gone unsolved and half-forgotten, but little else. It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, but that is also the nature of the genre. Many classic works from the Former Yugoslavia lay out the tragedies and the sadnesses, and that is that - no plan for the future.
A great read - detailed, informative, full of raw emotion.
October 20, 2021
Култура лажи је збирка есеја насталих у току рата у Југославији. Есеји се углавном баве или Дубравкиним окршајем са бившим суграђанима, колегама и пријатељима или промишљањем о распаду државе, друштва и некакве кризе некаквога морала.
Речи јесу Дубравкине играчке, цакле јој се као стаклићи калеидоскопа и то можемо да видимо поготову у палиндромском есеју. И због тога иду 2 звездице. Штета је што ту врсту талента не прати макар елементарно познавање природе и друштва, историје, геополитике или макар неке љубави за нешто. Дубравка или није у стању да воли или јој је много лакше да пише о ономе што мрзи него о ономе што воли.
Ауторка је отмено изнад балканског људског пада који се дешава као последица аутентичне беде локалног становништва. Срећом успела је да побегне у друштво које нема таквих проблема те је успела да оствари заиста велику каријеру пишући о варварима.
Наравно, како пристојност налаже, све стране су чиниле злочине, сви су криви, мада када се погледају детаљи Хрвати су углавном криви за извесне стилске недостатке, напросто нису на низоземском нивоу док су Срби углавном разбарушени византијски патолози који силују, кољу и томе слично.
Чини ми се да је стил којим пише као и основна идеолошка мисао доста утицала на савремене објашњиваче наше стварности као што су Дежуловић, Панчић, Иванчић и тако та екипа.
Речи јесу Дубравкине играчке, цакле јој се као стаклићи калеидоскопа и то можемо да видимо поготову у палиндромском есеју. И због тога иду 2 звездице. Штета је што ту врсту талента не прати макар елементарно познавање природе и друштва, историје, геополитике или макар неке љубави за нешто. Дубравка или није у стању да воли или јој је много лакше да пише о ономе што мрзи него о ономе што воли.
Ауторка је отмено изнад балканског људског пада који се дешава као последица аутентичне беде локалног становништва. Срећом успела је да побегне у друштво које нема таквих проблема те је успела да оствари заиста велику каријеру пишући о варварима.
Наравно, како пристојност налаже, све стране су чиниле злочине, сви су криви, мада када се погледају детаљи Хрвати су углавном криви за извесне стилске недостатке, напросто нису на низоземском нивоу док су Срби углавном разбарушени византијски патолози који силују, кољу и томе слично.
Чини ми се да је стил којим пише као и основна идеолошка мисао доста утицала на савремене објашњиваче наше стварности као што су Дежуловић, Панчић, Иванчић и тако та екипа.
April 19, 2025
As someone born in the early days of the 90s, I have been curious to understand the "transitional" processes that happen in the post-communism republics of Yugoslavia. The horrible events of the 90s are naturally not isolated; they anchor in the Yugoslav past, and they have consequences in the decades that follow. While other books focus on what factually happened, I love how this book captures the socio-cultural dimension through seemingly "footnotic" discussions about palindromes, gender roles, the confiscation and rebuilding of memory, appeal to nostalgia, and many more. The book gives a very meaningful layer of interpretation to behaviors that one observes in post-communist Yugo-states through the underlying beliefs and values. Meanwhile, the book is written in such an eloquent and witty tone that makes reading it a pure pleasure despite the weight of its analysis and the underlying events. As a reader, I felt like I was exploring these topics together with the author, as we were discovering the narrative together.
I only regret that I realized too late that the author shared my city of residence until her death. I will make sure to read her other works and fill gaps in the literature she cites, especially the books by Miroslav Krleza.
I only regret that I realized too late that the author shared my city of residence until her death. I will make sure to read her other works and fill gaps in the literature she cites, especially the books by Miroslav Krleza.
December 1, 2025
One essay a day: that was my plan for nonfiction November. I chose Ugrešić’s book because it had been gathering dust on my bookshelf for quite some time. There were always books that needed to be read before this one, themes that felt more pressing. I knew the reading would be a demanding experience, a style one needs to ease into. In fact, I had started the book a couple of times before and put it away as the style did not seem exactly my cup of tea.
But what finally drew me in was the contemporaneity of the author’s voice, even though she wrote her, as she calls them, anti-political essays almost thirty years ago, during and just after the war in the former Yugoslavia. Her essays do not focus on the war itself, they explore the periphery. They dissect national identity, or the lack thereof, the fact of being an outsider, a nomad, not belonging, not defining oneself through the lens of nationality. Dubravka Ugrešić digs deeper, finding solidarity while taking into account other factors, tracing common ground, trying to understand why atrocities were committed and in the name of what entity. Her essays document what it feels like to be labeled a public enemy, a witch, to be ostracized, judged, othered.
Her writing was so timely then, and lamentably it feels just as timely now. I’ll be rereading the dog-eared pages for sure.
But what finally drew me in was the contemporaneity of the author’s voice, even though she wrote her, as she calls them, anti-political essays almost thirty years ago, during and just after the war in the former Yugoslavia. Her essays do not focus on the war itself, they explore the periphery. They dissect national identity, or the lack thereof, the fact of being an outsider, a nomad, not belonging, not defining oneself through the lens of nationality. Dubravka Ugrešić digs deeper, finding solidarity while taking into account other factors, tracing common ground, trying to understand why atrocities were committed and in the name of what entity. Her essays document what it feels like to be labeled a public enemy, a witch, to be ostracized, judged, othered.
Her writing was so timely then, and lamentably it feels just as timely now. I’ll be rereading the dog-eared pages for sure.
February 5, 2017
This book is priceless source of information and thoughts about disappearance of one country, multiple identities, and uncountable memories and histories. Dubravka Ugrešić's essays are anti-political in a sense that they are against the multitudes of systems we know and have to live in, but there is a strong political thought standing behind it all. She opposes all kinds of fascisms and talks about history that most people decided to forget, offering the reader opportunity to think for himself/herself with a bit of help from the proud "witch" living in exile.
June 26, 2018
3.5/5 or 7/10
October 24, 2019
4.5 stars
February 24, 2021
205. Odlično delo, o naivnosti in še vsem drugem.
April 1, 2024
Loved this writing style
April 18, 2024
probably my favorite piece of “political” literature ever written
August 14, 2025
Mislim da sam cetvrti put procitao cijelu Kulturu lazi ovog ljeta, i nevjerojatno je koliko je opet zvucala aktualno, relevantno, kao da je napisana jucer, a ne prije 30 godina...
February 9, 2026
Tuga i bol… ❤️🩹
August 19, 2026
If you want to know more about Yugoslav wars, this is the book to read. Also relevant to today’s politics of the region and wider. Ugrešić always wrote amazingly and this book is no exception.
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