The Walnut Mansion Read online

  The Walnut Mansion

  Other publications by Miljenko Jergović

  previously translated into English

  Sarajevo Marlboro

  Ruta Tannenbaum

  Mama Leone

  The Walnut Mansion

  MILJENKO JERGOVIĆ

  TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN M. DICKEY,

  WITH JANJA PAVETIĆ-DICKEY

  YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  Copyright © Miljenko Jergović 2003.

  English translation copyright © 2015 by Stephen M. Dickey and Janja Pavetić-Dickey.

  First published as Dvori od oraha by Durieux, Zagreb, 2003.

  All rights reserved.

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  Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN: 978-0-300-17927-9 (cloth; alk. paper)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015937574

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Stephen M. Dickey

  Translators’ Note

  The Walnut Mansion

  INTRODUCTION BY STEPHEN M. DICKEY

  The Walnut Mansion, published in 2003, is the first novel by Miljenko Jergović, one of the most well-known contemporary writers in Croatia and Bosnia. He has been a major figure in a wave of “new realism” that has been predominant in the fiction of younger writers of the former Yugoslavia since the breakup of the country. But Jergović’s literary artistry is hardly limited to fiction: he has authored several collections of poetry, two collections of essays, three collections of short stories, and one novella.

  The Walnut Mansion won the Bosnia and Herzegovina Writers’ Association Prize in 2003, and Jergović’s other works have earned him numerous other awards. He received the Mak Dizdar Prize and the Goran Prize (both in 1988) for his first collection of poetry, The Warsaw Observatory; the Ksaver šandor Gjalski Prize (1994) for Sarajevo Marlboro; the Matica Hrvatska Prize for Literature and the August šenoa Art Prize for Buick Rivera (2002); the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize (2003) for Mama Leone (1999); his novel Ruta Tannenbaum (2006) won him the Meša Selimović Award for best novel of the year in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro (2007). Most recently, he received the Angelus Central European Literature Award in 2012 for the Polish translation of his novel Srda Sings at Dusk on Pentecost.

  If one judges according to output, literary awards, and the number of translations, Jergović is one of the top two contemporary Croatian writers—the other being Dubravka Ugrešić. If Ugrešić is better known among Anglophone readers, this is due in part to the fact that Jergović has remained continually “on the ground” in Bosnia and Croatia, writing squarely for the local populations of Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs, a position that has resulted in fewer of his works being published in English translations. (Hopefully the present effort will help rectify this situation.) A further reason is that Jergović’s tales are almost without exception situated within lands of the former Yugoslavia—primarily in Croatia and Bosnia. They make almost continual mention of historical and cultural particulars of the region and therefore may seem more difficult to translate and less accessible to an outside readership. (Again, it is hoped that the present work will dispel at least the latter notion.) Indeed, it is this writer’s impression that Jergović is the contemporary paradigm of a Balkan/Southeast European storyteller: he writes stories and novels replete with the charm and tragedy of the region that local and outsider alike simply can’t put down.

  Given his prolific oeuvre, Jergović can only be described as very reticent concerning the details of his own biography; he provides the following statement on his website: “Miljenko Jergović was born in 1966 in Sarajevo. He currently lives outside of Zagreb.”1 In addition to his literary activity, he works as a journalist for the Jutarnji list newspaper and is also a columnist for the Radio Sarajevo website and the Belgrade newspaper Politika. Since Jergović grew up as a Bosnian and has lived and worked for twenty years primarily in Croatia, he is probably best conditionally (and for lack of a clearly better alternative) identified as a Bosnian/Croatian writer.2 (Note that ethnic identification has been no idle game in the former Yugoslavia and its successor states.)

  Though The Walnut Mansion is Jergović’s first novel, in its length and scope it arguably remains his most ambitious (though his latest novel, Kin, published in 2013, surely competes in this regard). It presents the author’s vision of life in twentieth-century Yugoslavia, told through the experiences of a family from the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. In particular, it tells the story of a woman named Regina Delavale, whose life is tracked backward, from her death in 2002 as a demented ninety-seven-year-old woman to her birth in 1905. The chapters are even numbered in reverse, so that the novel begins with chapter 15 and ends with chapter 1. The focus of the novel is, in Jergović’s words, a tale of “the small in the great”—the momentous events of the twentieth century share the timeline with the failed romances, petty arguments, moneymaking schemes, traffic accidents, private obsessions, bedtime stories, jokes, lies, panicked mistakes, births, and all manner of deaths of the members and acquaintances of a common Dubrovnik family.

  In all, episodes from five generations of Regina’s family are narrated in the novel. It includes more than fifty characters and ultimately spans a period of more than one hundred years, taking place mostly in Croatia and Bosnia. It should therefore come as no surprise that in an interview with the newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija in 2003 Jergović described it as an attempt at writing a “quintessential” novel.3 But if The Walnut Mansion has an epic scale, its epic is not the heroism of South Slavic tradition, but (as pointed out above) an epic of small, ordinary people. And it is in particular an epic of women, as the females are the central characters that provide continuity to the story. The central theme of the novel is how these women struggle and endure amid the fallout from the misfortunes and cataclysms (most notably the Second World War) that afflicted those living in the lands of the former Yugoslavia during the twentieth century.

  If the references to the history of the region seem confusing to the uninitiated, it is for good reason. The lands of the former Yugoslavia have basically constituted a frontier zone where the cultures and legacies of the Byzantine (Orthodox), Ottoman (Islamic), and West European (Austro-Hungarian and Italian; Catholic) imperial traditions have coexisted, competed, and also fought throughout the modern era. Within the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina—Jergović’s homeland—has been the region where the interaction among these cultures has been the most intense and immediate.

  The earliest events recounted in the novel occur in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire (the late nineteenth century). The Ottomans had conquered the
Byzantine Empire and the medieval Serbian and Bosnian kingdoms basically by the mid-fifteenth century. The Croatian territories ceded their sovereignty to the Habsburg Empire in the hope of avoiding Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century; this strategy worked, but at the cost of Austro-Hungarian rule until that empire was dismantled following the First World War. This expansion of Austrian rule into Croatia, combined with the rule of the Adriatic coast by the Venetian Republic from the Middle Ages until Napoleon’s conquest of the latter, accounts for much of the historical context of the novel (and Austria-Hungary is mentioned much more frequently than one might expect in a novel about twentieth-century Yugoslavia). Further, the Treaty of Zadar compelled Venice to accept the establishment of the independent maritime Republic of Dubrovnik in 1358. The republic existed from that year until 1808, navigating alternating periods of trade, tension, and outright warfare between the Ottomans and their Austrian and Venetian opponents. The small Republic of Dubrovnik and thus its capital city were known for the value they placed on freedom and their independent spirit. One can arguably see some of that spirit in the actions of the characters in The Walnut Mansion. However, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the independent spirit of Dubrovnik and renowned Balkan stubbornness, and some might even argue that they are one and the same.

  In the early modern era the territories of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina became the locus of a static military frontier between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, a situation that contributed in large part to a frontier mentality and an ethos of resistance (to ideological commitment) to various outside players with an interest in the area. This spirit was conducive to various movements for national independence from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires and, as an outgrowth, the idea of a pan–South Slavic state—Yugoslavia—in the nineteenth century. Complicating such independence movements were actions taken by Austria-Hungary to fill the power vacuum left by the weakening Ottoman Empire, most notably the occupation and subsequent annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1878 and 1908 respectively). As mentioned above, the introduction of Austro-Hungarian rule in the wake of the Ottomans forms the immediate historical background of the novel, which, however, is encountered only at its end.

  The idea of Yugoslavia gained political momentum during the First World War, and the end of the war in 1918 saw the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which was soon plagued by ethnic antagonisms. Royal Yugoslavia hobbled along until the Axis invaded the country in April 1941, in preparation for its attack on the Soviet Union. Hitler’s conquest of Yugoslavia was followed by four years of unprecedented bloodletting, but most Yugoslav casualties were victims of their compatriots. In particular, in the fascist Independent State of Croatia Ante Pavelić’s Ustashas (including both Croats and some Bosniaks) exterminated Jews, Serbs, and Roma; in eastern Bosnia, Draža Mihailović’s Serbian guerillas (Chetniks) massacred large numbers of Bosniaks. Josip Broz Tito’s Soviet-backed Partisans fought both the Ustashas and at times the Chetniks in their war against the Nazis. These names and terms are mentioned repeatedly in the novel.

  After the Second World War, Tito and his communist Partisans took control of the country. Yugoslav communism was not as repressive as Soviet (and especially Stalinist) communism, and Tito’s postwar policies soon earned him the ire of the Soviets, culminating in a tense Soviet-Yugoslav split in 1948, which was welcomed by the West. Tito then steered Yugoslavia on its own independent course, while remaining committed to socialism. His international promotion of the Non-Aligned Movement can be seen as elevating the frontier mentality of the region to the level of global political ideology. After Tito’s death in 1980, it seems in retrospect only to have been a matter of time before the country broke up, as communist Yugoslavia failed badly in the economic sector and also failed (as had its interwar predecessor) to create an identity to replace the ethnic loyalties of its citizens. That time came in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from the country, which had come under the control of the Serbian nationalist technocrat Slobodan Milošević; Bosnia and Herzegovina followed suit in 1992. Bloodletting reminiscent of the Second World War followed as well and was particularly vicious in Bosnia, a situation that led Jergović to leave Sarajevo and settle in Croatia. The outbreak of war in Croatia and the shelling of Dubrovnik by Serbian and Montenegrin forces in 1991 are mentioned in passing late in the chronological time of the novel (which is early in the story, as it is told in reverse).

  If Jergović is a quintessential Balkan storyteller, his literary horizons nevertheless lie far beyond that region. In his interview with Slobodna Dalmacija, he revealed some noteworthy outside influences, including Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen, as they “prove that there is such a thing as an epic of the new millennium and that it makes sense to tackle the big themes on a scale that calls a motion picture to mind.” In addition to other print influences (ranging from Fernand Braudel’s theory of history to Baedeker travel guides), Jergović emphasizes the influence of film (Italian Neorealism and Fellini’s Amarcord, as well as the work of Douglas Sirk) and music (Arab, Latin American, Roma, and the lyrics of Bosnian sevdah and Croatian klapa songs).

  These self-acknowledged connections place Jergović not only in the Yugoslav cosmopolitan milieu that was open to Western influences (and one might consider a “Central European” current in Yugoslav culture), but also in the specifically Balkan (i.e., indigenously Southeast European and/or post-Ottoman) culture of the region. He is less a part of its Orthodox element.

  The Walnut Mansion falls into a rich tradition of the family saga in modern world literature, and I think it is indisputably a rewarding read even for those with no knowledge of the former Yugoslavia. However, in what follows I focus mostly on aspects of the novel as they relate to the literary and political contexts of the former Yugoslavia. The novel is extremely interesting with regard to the post-Yugoslav “space” and deserves some comment in this regard.

  There have been relatively few works that could count as family sagas in the literatures of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. In Croatian literature, Vjenceslav Novak chronicled the fall of a noble family in Senj on the Adriatic coast in The Last of the Stipančićes, and Miroslav Krleža chronicled the rise and fall of the Glembaj family in eleven short stories and three plays. (One might also mention here Ivo Vojnović’s Dubrovnik Trilogy, which, though not a family saga, narrates the demise of the Republic of Dubrovnik and the Dubrovnik nobility, which is echoed in the narrative of a Dubrovnik family in The Walnut Mansion.) Some important single-work representatives of the genre come from Serbian literature: Ivo Andrić’s The Woman from Sarajevo and Mirko Kovač’s The Door of the Womb; one might argue for the inclusion of Borisav Stanković’s The Tainted Blood. None of these novels really covers more than two generations of a family, and in this respect The Walnut Mansion, with its span of five generations, appears to be unique.

  As mentioned, The Walnut Mansion is also remarkable for its focus on female characters, as well as the prominence of female psychological narrative. Into the twentieth century most South Slavs lived in patriarchal societies, and their fiction tended to focus on male characters and values, even when criticizing a patriarchal social order (a perfect example of this is Krleža’s On the Edge of Reason). It is interesting that some notable exceptions to the trend of dominant male characters come from Serbian literature, where the patriarchal social order has been slow in dying out. Here one can mention Stanković’s The Tainted Blood, Miloš Crnjanski’s Migrations, and Andrić’s The Woman from Sarajevo. The Walnut Mansion differs from the first two in that Jergović is not portraying women of exceptional physical beauty (in fact, Regina’s looks are barely described in the novel). It does bear a strong resemblance to Migrations because Regina is the prism through which the narratives of numerous male characters are viewed, just as Dafina in Migrations is ultimately the glue that holds the narratives of the brothers Vuk and Aranđel Isaković together.

  Though The Wo
man from Sarajevo is a rather odd tale of a misanthrope, it anticipates the major theme of The Walnut Mansion: the effect of cataclysmic historical events on an ordinary woman. The withdrawal of the protagonist of The Woman from Sarajevo from society after the First World War arguably subdues this theme, whereas The Walnut Mansion almost continuously foregrounds the watershed events of history and their effect on Regina’s life, beginning with the First World War, continuing with the Second World War and various postwar events such as the death of Josip Broz Tito. The conduct of Jergović’s female characters in these events differs greatly from that of the men in their lives, who with one or two exceptions see these events as opportunities for enrichment, adventure, or revenge and almost inevitably perish, leaving their women to fend for themselves.

  With this in mind, one could describe The Walnut Mansion as a kind of “her-story” of life in twentieth-century Yugoslavia. In one of the bloody climaxes of the novel, the narrator even directly comments on the differences between the sexes with regard to history: “Men write history with knives, and women summon it with words.”

  Regina’s brother Luka, selling cheese at a market, makes a like-minded comment on historical greatness and the attitudes of the sexes toward it:

  The real truth of history hasn’t been written down, but as there are no living witnesses, it’s simplest to say that Napoleon never ate lunch or dinner like ordinary people. Instead of eating, he conquered the world. Instead of drinking, he waged war. So was Napoleon, my good people, a great man? Well, missus, you tell me: would you rather have your husband grab a rifle and shoot up the street, kill all the neighbors, and go on a war of conquest instead of lunching on those delicious mackerels you’ve bought?