“Walking on the Remains of a Dreamed Future”

Abstract

This essay examines how authors from former Yugoslavia take up the road novel to challenge the ideological strictures of “postsocialism.” A postsocialist genre par excellence, the road novel offers a seductive framework that charts dramas of national entrepreneurial self-becoming against the failed socialist past and the trap of nostalgia for it. But the postsocialist road novel is as unsustainable as the fantasies it espouses, always threatening to become its generic other, the gothic. Turning to two post-Yugoslav road novels, Lana Bastašić’s Uhvati Zeca (Catch the Rabbit, 2018; trans. 2021) and Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road (2021), this article reads their turn toward the gothic as offering a critique of postsocialist ideology and expressing a desire for collectivity that can otherwise be expressed only through nostalgia. Against the foreclosing logic of the road novel, the article concludes by turning to Nika Autor’s film Obzornik 242—Sunčane pruge (Newsreel 242—Sunny Railways, 2013), about the legacy of the international youth brigades’ construction of the 1947 Šamac-Sarajevo railway. By turning from the road to the railroad and foregrounding how people on the move walking along the Balkan Route repurposed it, Autor’s film confronts the question of nostalgia and recuperates the temporalities and memories of Yugoslavia’s internationalist socialist modernity still etched within the ruins of the present.