The Memory of the Avant-Garde and the New Wave in the Contemporary Serbian Novel

Abstract

Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 43.2 (2020) This article is dealing with the topic of two past twentieth-century epochs in a few representative Serbian novels at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. These are the 1980s and the New Wave era in Yugoslavia, an epoch close to the past that can still be written about from the perspective of an immediate witness, and the avant-garde era, that is, the period between the two world wars marked in art by different movements of the historical avant-garde. The novels Milenijum u Beogradu (Millennium in Belgrade, 2000) by Vladimir Pištalo, Vrt u Veneciji (The Garden in Venice, 2002) by Mileta Prodanović, and Kiša i hartija (Rain and Paper, 2004) by Vladimir Tasić are being interpreted. In these novels, it is particularly noteworthy that the two aforementioned epochs are most commonly linked as part of the same creative and intellectual currents in the twentieth century.