The writer Dubravka Ugrešić, who has died aged 73, disliked borders, and came to think of herself as transnational or even postnational. While in her native Yugoslavia, as it then was, at the age of 22 she published her first work, a characteristically experimental and effervescent children’s book called Little Flame (1971). Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988) dramatises an international literary conference in which characters from books and their authors turn up to confront scholars who are, in their view, horribly misrepresenting them. Light-footed yet learned, it displays Dubravka’s masterly literary range, expertise, and her love of parody and gift of ventriloquism. The witty, playful, absurdist fictions that followed as her life became more complex won esteem and many prizes.
In the trouble-free days before the former Yugoslavia was consumed in the civil wars of the 90s, she dwelt in opposing worlds, as a strikingly imaginative writer of fiction and an academic at the University of Zagreb, a city that before Yugoslavia’s formation in 1918 had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She specialised in the Russian avant garde, reading and editing works by writers several of whom had been imprisoned or executed, their works censured and forgotten.
After the communist leader Marshal Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia eventually disaggregated into separate nation states, with Croatia and Slovenia declaring independence in 1991, and Dubravka was caught in the crossfire. With a Bulgarian mother, she was not sufficiently pure ethnically, and as a Russian speaker who had studied in Moscow during the Soviet era she was politically suspect for revanchist nostalgia and communist sympathies. An article in 1992 denounced her, alongside four other women writers including Slavenka Drakulič, as “the five Croatian witches”. Crucifixes began appearing in the university’s rooms and personal offices, and when Dubravka expressed horror at the new nationalists’ selective memory, her colleagues shunned her.
In 1993, she left the new nation, almost unthinkingly; as she said later, it was an impulsive move: “I decided to take my broom and fly away.” Her existence as a nomad, a migrant, a transnational began – she rejected the word exile for its claim on glamour. Her writing turned more acerbic and melancholy, characterised by unsparing, Swiftian trenchancy, but nevertheless lit up by mischievous wit and flashes of empathy for the victims of the inane developments she was diagnosing. With an incomparable range of cultural references, she gathered material for scathing essays on the cultural norms in her new places of unbelonging – from psychotherapy to shopping malls, Disney to cosmetic surgery and beauty farms.
Ingratiation and flattery were as foreign to Dubravka as snow on the equator. She liked to invoke Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between foxes and hedgehogs, but, although she identified passionately with the creature that knows many things rather than one big thing, she could be more accurately compared to a porcupine, or perhaps a sea urchin whose prickles are even more barbed and lethal. Have a Nice Day (1994) is an essay collection that dissects American hypocrisies; The Culture of Lies (1996) damns the ideological erasures of history; Nobody’s Home (2005) investigates the question of Europe, the meaning of belonging, the nostalgia for a fantasised past; Thank You for Not Reading (2016) fearlessly attacks the venality of the publishing industry. She liked to invoke as a model the boy in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, who points out what everybody else is failing to see – or at least pretending not to.
Alongside these collections she developed a high-spirited form that she dubbed “patchwork fiction”, composed of autobiography, flâneurism, political satire, literary commentary and carnivalesque plotting. Some of her earliest loves, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol and Velimir Khlebnikov, haunt these dynamic experiments. The novels, like the essays, bubble with her multifaceted enthusiasms – ranging from screwball comedies to children’s literature (Alice, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz), Slavic folklore, animal fables and fairytales from the world over. In these patchworks, such as The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1999), she records, the New York Times reviewer wrote, “not the gory amputation of refugee flight, but arrival’s greyer course of tissue rejection”.
In The Ministry of Pain (2004), thought by some critics to be her finest novel, she mines this rich composite seam to portray the freedoms of the west and their distortions, and retrieve “confiscated memories” in the new political order after 1989. In Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2007) and Fox (2017) she enjoys herself by reclaiming vilified female figures such as crones, shrews – and witches.
Born in Kutina, south-east of Zagreb, Dubravka was the daughter of Veta (Elizaveta, nee Stoikova), from Burgas, who worked as a medical administrator, and Nikola Ugrešić, who had fought as a partisan against the fascists during the second world war, and became director of a petrochemical plant in the city. Dubravka studied comparative and Russian literature at the University of Zagreb and in Moscow, and later taught in the institute of literary theory at Zagreb (1973-93).
After she was forced to leave, she lived hand-to-mouth on her earnings and awards, surviving on coffee and cigarettes, and on visiting fellowships at US universities – Radcliffe, UCLA, Columbia, Wesleyan – and in Germany and the Netherlands, until more by accident than design she settled in Amsterdam. She took out Dutch citizenship in 2004, always refused to call herself a Croatian writer and continued to write in Serbo-Croatian, despite the Serbian and other aspects of the region’s common language being ostracised in Croatia. When the Royal Society of Literature elected her one of their international writers in 2021, she wrote how delighted she was because she had no home but literature.
She did begin to revisit the land of her birth, mainly to be with her mother during her last years; she travelled back with her to Sofia, but, as she relates wistfully in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, they found nothing recognisable. Dubravka also spent summers by the sea on the Dalmatian coast with her brother and his family.
She wrote in a deeply melancholy vein as well as with adroit comic wit: she recognised that she had an element of litost, as explored by Milan Kundera: a pervasive ironical ruefulness which is “a deep understanding of human inadequacy”.
Her unusual mixture of Orwellian stringency and madcap lightness won her readers across 30 languages. Awards included the Neustadt international prize for literature in 2016, and she was much bruited as a candidate for the Nobel. Writing in what she termed “a small language”, studiedly ignored in her own country (her books were even removed from libraries at one time), Dubravka learned to speak English very expressively, but she depended on translators, among them Michael Henry Heim, Celia Hawkesworth and, for the recent works, David Williams and Ellen Elias-Bursač.
Her honesty and straight-talking, her shafts and barbs, did not make her life any easier. Dubravka prided herself that she stood in a proud, endangered writerly lineage; she was also an affectionate, funny, thoughtful and always stimulating friend.
She is survived by her brother Siniša and his children, Korina and Nikola.
• Dubravka Ugrešić, writer, born 27 March 1949; died 17 March 2023
• This article was amended on 19 April 2023. Veta Ugrešić came from the Bulgarian city of Burgas,notVarna as an earlier version said.
