U potrazi za istinom: istorija prema književnosti

Our starting point is the relationship between history and literature as one of the central themes of contemporary Serbian literature, particularly as regards war, which is one of its “products” and constant driving forces. The second world war has provided considerable subject matter and the Serbian novel of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium has dealt with the trauma of war and its distruction as experienced by individuals, ethnic groups or, indeed, entire nations in different, but always dynamic and stimulating ways. While numerous novels glorify the victors simplistically, in black and white terms, there is another, unpoliticized, vein of writing characterized by a reconstruction of the past not only in traditional narrative forms, but also in experimental and post-modern ones. This paper focuses on the novels The Book of Blam by A. Tišma, Goetz and Meyer by D. Albahari on the one hand, and Dungeon by Sv. Velmar Janković on the other. The authors are of different generations, have different literary destinies and use different narrative techniques but are united in their search for truth. In the aforementioned novels this search takes different narrative forms: the truth accepted historically as “objective reality” is often distorted even when documented (in newspapers, historical accounts or archives); there exists too another truth, alive in the memories of the individual (whether hero of the story, witness to the events of war or first-person narrator).On these two levels is developed the conflicting issue of the role of history and its perception in which the individual is involved without the possibility to act and the purpose is to demonstrate how the two truths function in the novels.