Central european literary cosmopolitanism: “Encyclopedia of the dead” by Danilo Kish and “Museum of unconditional surrender” by Dubravka Ugreshich

Background: This work compares the story Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kiš and novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić which were written outside the homeland of their authors. It is used the definition of the literary cosmopolitanism as a kind of cultural cosmopolitanism which is characterized raising the issue of identity of heroes in the perspective of world citizenship, often depicting the coexistence of different identities without the specifying a national one. The article studies the influence of Kiš's poetics on Ugrešić's poetics, intertextual relations in the mentioned works. Purpose: The similarity at the level of motives, symbols, worldviews, structure, genre features, artistic techniques as main characteristics of the literary cosmopolitanism is studied in this article. Results: The Central European literary cosmopolitanism in the works by Kiš and Ugrešić is reflected in narration, images and symbols, motives, quotations of the other texts with the similar, cosmopolitan themes. Here the authors set the task of preserving and reconstructing the past by the various "reservoirs of memory" such as memories, photographs, artifacts, customs. The topic of freedom is extremely relevant as a fundamental one for totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, which is manifested here either through the censorship of memory, or through the fantastic visions of freedom from censorship. Keywords: museum, encyclopedia, library, memory, cosmopolitanism. Assman, A., 2012. Spaces of memory. Forms and transformations of cultural memory. Kyiv: Nika-Tsentr. (In Ukrainian) Birth Certificate, 2021. [online] Cornell University Press. 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