Balkan Ghosts

Girl at War, Sara Nović (fiction)

The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder (not fiction)

Though we could not have known it at the time, the war and "ethnic cleansing"--that is, genocide--in Yugoslavia foreshadowed all that was to come following the breakup of the Soviet Union. The patched-together, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, polyglot Yugoslavia was itself the creature of another empire's implosion--the Austro-Hungarian, which was, in turn, the mid-nineteenth century remnant of the great Hapsburg Empire founded in 1279.  Large, ungainly conglomerations of people never endure; tribalism trumps cosmopolitanism; hopeful chatter about how people of different "races and religions" can "put away their differences" and "live together in peace" have proven time and again to be illusion.  The horror that erupted in the Balkans in 1991was mostly ignored in the West until the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

Timothy Snyder demonstrates with his usual clarity and enormous erudition--he reads not only the usual European languages but also Polish and Russian--that the Russia of Putin was founded, with sclerotic assistance from Boris Yeltin and the ever-naive West, as an embodiment of eternal principles, that is of idea related to the fascist's disbelief in historical change, in liberal progress, in the dialectic processes that underpin republicanism and democracy. Putin is of course the new Tsar, but, more than that, he embodies Ivan Ilyin's view that history isn't about people at all, rather it is about the recovery of Divine Will as personified by an absolute ruler--a fascist prince not unlike Mussolini, Hitler, or Putin himself.  A ruler who brooks no opposition, no compromise, no critics.

Ilyin, as Snyder shows, is the hero of the New Russia, the court philosopher and, though dead, its guiding light. Of course unquestioning obedience suits a kleptocracy perfectly, and those who worry that any democratic compromises will undercut their power are naturally drawn to the rabid thinkers like Ilyin who loathed any form of popular governance. *

Girl at War, Sara Nović's strong debut novel, answers, with great empathy, the question: "What happens to the victims of war?" We might read about unspeakable crimes--as with the Balkan war, massacres, mass graves, torture centers, rape--but don't have a clue as to how those who survive carry on with their lives. Nović's "girl," the resolute and courageous thirteen-year-old Ana Juric, watches Zagreb, her home, succumb to the Serbian Cetniks (or Chetniks), an ultra-rightest, Serbian nationalist group committed to the "ethnic cleansing" of what they considered "greater Serbia." Her own family falls victim to a Serbian militia, and she finds herself living, and fighting, with the Croatian resistance. A remarkable, yet credible set of circumstances sees Ana rescued from the fighting and sent to live in the United States with the family that has already adopted her younger sister.  

The central section of this triptych of a novel is set ten years after Ana's rescue and describes her difficulty--one can well imagine it--adjusting to a the normal life of an American college student.  We understand that overcoming memory is impossible, and that returning to Zagreb offers Ana the only hope she has of finding--what? People like to say "closure," but what does that mean? "Healing" isn't an option. I think of Ana's return to the scenes of the crimes committed against her and her family as a validation of her identify. She is no longer Croatian, nor is she American; rather she is one of the millions--a number that grows daily--of the victims of war, of forced migration and displacement, of ethnic and tribal hatreds that give the lie to the fantasy of globalism and cosmopolitanism.  

Girl at War powerfully evokes recent history in retelling Ana Juric's story, but the novel is important because its theme is universal. Victors have short memories; it is the victims who are obliged to keep the past alive for the rest of us. 
 

"Now I'm retired, but I'm still in a good mood to kill people," asserts Vojislav Carkic, an Orthodox priest who served with the Chetniks during the Yugoslav war.  God's work, in this priest's view, remains unfinished so long as there are non-Serbs--Muslims and Catholics--in God's Serbia.  This was what Ilyin had in mind back in the 1930's, a righteous Holy War of the Orthodox--Russians in Ilyin's case--a war to cleanse God's earth of sinners and unbelievers.  That war continues.

George Ovitt (June 3, 2018)

*I don't believe that quoting Ilyin makes Putin, or anyone else, a fascist just as, for example, quoting Heidegger doesn't make someone a Nazi. There are other grounds for thinking Putin's government is most akin to fascist governments of the past. Some of the arguments are to be found in Snyder, but others may be found in Masha Gesson's most recent book, The Future is History.