I discovered that Dubravka Ugrešić had died last month, aged 73, in that strange, uniquely modern way one does: by noticing a sudden proliferation of quotes from her works on Twitter. For a moment I could suspend the sadness and scroll through her sharp-witted wisdom. But there was a darker irony to the scene – one that Ugrešić, a writer all too attuned to the impoverishment of literature in the name of consumption, would have found quite amusing. Visit her website and the text that greets you reads: “Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead … there will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once.” In other words, literature as content, content as literature. Dubravka the playful, Dubravka the prophetic.
Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina in the former Yugoslavia, to a Bulgarian mother and Croatian father, but spent the majority of her working life in exile in Amsterdam. When war took hold of Yugoslavia in the early 90s, Ugrešić spoke out against the creeping nationalism of newly independent Croatia – for which she was shunned by the literary establishment (“whatever that word means,” I can hear her mutter). Booksellers stopped displaying her books and critics boycotted her works. The media even accused her of being a witch. Well versed in the intimate link between the history of sexism and tired literary tropes, Ugrešić would later respond to this charge with characteristic class: “I accepted it as an honourable name,” she told an interviewer in 1999. “I decided to take my broom and fly away.”
