in which he and Istref lived together for a while.
At one point the manuscript describes how an ancestor, Milić, a loyal supporter of Miloš Obrenović, is planning a new house for himself. Initially intending to construct a traditional dwelling, he sees one of the new European-style houses then coming into fashion:
He walked around its unfinished walls as if it were a strange woman, stared at its large windows, pillars, entrance with stone steps, the baked bricks with their dazzling red colour, all the while his Turkish house with its foundations just completed paled in his eyes. He stopped work on it, left the cleared ground to be covered by the snow, stacked up the fallen beams, sold off the clay bricks, settled his accounts and began to imagine his new residence. With his Turkish pipe on his lips, legs crossed sitting on a silk sofa, immobile, Milić went on building and reconstructing his invisible house behind the dark, slanting slits below his eyelids. He removed the overhanging bay window from the first floor, made the windows bigger, moved the rooms about then returned them to their original order, building his fairy-tale house with great difficulty. When spring arrived and the snow melted, his new dwelling stood clearly in his mind’s eye in almost every detail.
The house ends by being both European and Ottoman, what Vladan calls “a Moslem wife in a rococo hat!” With its blending and clashing of different cultures, European and Ottoman, the architectural monument to the Hadžislavković family represents the history of Belgrade in microcosm.
At the end of the novel, Istref drives over to Kosančić Crescent. He arrives in the dark of night and looks for the house, but it is no longer there. There is no space between numbers 5 and 9. The ending is a ghostly conclusion, with the disappearance of the house symbolically representing the past slipping from view.
Velmar-Janković has written novels and stories which taken together encompass different districts of Belgrade and much of its history. She has won numerous literary prizes, including one specifically for her life’s work relating the narrative of Belgrade in her fiction. In her 1981 collection of short stories,
Dorćol
, she takes the names of some of the streets in central Belgrade, called after heroes who fought in the Serbian Uprisings such as Vasa Čarapić and Uzun Mirko, as titles. She imagines these historical personages to be spectral figures who still walk in Belgrade, but fixed to the length of the street which bears their name. In one of her tales, she includes the story of Knez Miloš and Kneginja Ljubica, adding her own stamp to Selenić’s theme of a complex and uncanny Belgrade by bringing her ghostly apparitions to street level. Ljubica ponders on her past, her marriage to Miloš, their stormy relationship and the historical times in which they lived. Velmar-Janković remarks that few people today realize that the street was named after her, and that there are “even fewer of them who can recall who, in truth, was the Kneginja”.
Josić Višnjić, born in Stapar, Vojvodina, is recognized as one of the most talented authors of his generation. After several years of difficulties with the communist authorities, he made a dramatic comeback in 1990 with his novel
The Defence and Fall of Bodrog in Seven Turbulent Seasons
(Odbrana i propast Bodroga u sedam burnih godišnjih doba). The book concerns the 1848 uprising of Serbs in Vojvodina at the fictional town of Bodrog, against Hungarian attempts to take away their autonomy. Some of the rebels go to Belgrade in order to raise support for their cause, where they meet with or hear about important people in the city such as Toma Vučić Perišić, the minister of foreign affairs Ilija Garašanin, and cultural figures like Jovan Sterija Popović.
One of the characters in Josić’s novel writes down in a diary his impressions of what he sees in the city. Recalling the adventure many years
At one point the manuscript describes how an ancestor, Milić, a loyal supporter of Miloš Obrenović, is planning a new house for himself. Initially intending to construct a traditional dwelling, he sees one of the new European-style houses then coming into fashion:
He walked around its unfinished walls as if it were a strange woman, stared at its large windows, pillars, entrance with stone steps, the baked bricks with their dazzling red colour, all the while his Turkish house with its foundations just completed paled in his eyes. He stopped work on it, left the cleared ground to be covered by the snow, stacked up the fallen beams, sold off the clay bricks, settled his accounts and began to imagine his new residence. With his Turkish pipe on his lips, legs crossed sitting on a silk sofa, immobile, Milić went on building and reconstructing his invisible house behind the dark, slanting slits below his eyelids. He removed the overhanging bay window from the first floor, made the windows bigger, moved the rooms about then returned them to their original order, building his fairy-tale house with great difficulty. When spring arrived and the snow melted, his new dwelling stood clearly in his mind’s eye in almost every detail.
The house ends by being both European and Ottoman, what Vladan calls “a Moslem wife in a rococo hat!” With its blending and clashing of different cultures, European and Ottoman, the architectural monument to the Hadžislavković family represents the history of Belgrade in microcosm.
At the end of the novel, Istref drives over to Kosančić Crescent. He arrives in the dark of night and looks for the house, but it is no longer there. There is no space between numbers 5 and 9. The ending is a ghostly conclusion, with the disappearance of the house symbolically representing the past slipping from view.
Velmar-Janković has written novels and stories which taken together encompass different districts of Belgrade and much of its history. She has won numerous literary prizes, including one specifically for her life’s work relating the narrative of Belgrade in her fiction. In her 1981 collection of short stories,
Dorćol
, she takes the names of some of the streets in central Belgrade, called after heroes who fought in the Serbian Uprisings such as Vasa Čarapić and Uzun Mirko, as titles. She imagines these historical personages to be spectral figures who still walk in Belgrade, but fixed to the length of the street which bears their name. In one of her tales, she includes the story of Knez Miloš and Kneginja Ljubica, adding her own stamp to Selenić’s theme of a complex and uncanny Belgrade by bringing her ghostly apparitions to street level. Ljubica ponders on her past, her marriage to Miloš, their stormy relationship and the historical times in which they lived. Velmar-Janković remarks that few people today realize that the street was named after her, and that there are “even fewer of them who can recall who, in truth, was the Kneginja”.
Josić Višnjić, born in Stapar, Vojvodina, is recognized as one of the most talented authors of his generation. After several years of difficulties with the communist authorities, he made a dramatic comeback in 1990 with his novel
The Defence and Fall of Bodrog in Seven Turbulent Seasons
(Odbrana i propast Bodroga u sedam burnih godišnjih doba). The book concerns the 1848 uprising of Serbs in Vojvodina at the fictional town of Bodrog, against Hungarian attempts to take away their autonomy. Some of the rebels go to Belgrade in order to raise support for their cause, where they meet with or hear about important people in the city such as Toma Vučić Perišić, the minister of foreign affairs Ilija Garašanin, and cultural figures like Jovan Sterija Popović.
One of the characters in Josić’s novel writes down in a diary his impressions of what he sees in the city. Recalling the adventure many years
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