“KALEIDOSCOPIC” NOVEL OF JOSIP OSTI IN THE ASPECT OF TRANSCULTURALITY

Abstract

The Slovenian-Bosnian poet, writer, essayist, literary critic, translator and editor Josip Osti (1945–2021) was born in Sarajevo, lived and worked in Slovenia since 1990. Being a recognized poet in his homeland, writing in Croatian, one of the largest translators of Slovenian literature into Serbo-Croatian, since 1997 he has been writing in Slovenian. The transcultural aspects of Josip Osti’s literary works, both poetry collections and novels, are a unique phenomenon. In our study, we turned to the novels of Josip Osti, namely his trilogy — Ghosts of the House of Heinrich Böll (2016), In Front of the Mirror (2016) and Life is a Creepy Fairy Tale (2019). All three works have a strong (auto)biographical component and form a special novel form, which the author calls the “kaleidoscope-mosaic” novel. The latter has a fragmented structure and consists of short stories, life stories, anecdotes, urban legends, essayistic notes, literary-critical digressions, lyrical passages, diary entries, etc. In Osti’s novels, we also find a connection with the tradition of short prose in Bosnian-Herzegovina literature, in particular, with the works of the 1990s by such authors as M. Jergović, D. Karahasan, N. Veličković, K. Zaimović and others. Their texts are characterized by a destabilized genre form, a mosaic narrative, personal and documentary evidence, and a palimpsest narrative model. The kaleidoscopic structure of Osti’s prose texts helps him to reflect the transcultural view characteristic of his intimate and artistic world, to embrace the complex overlap of heterogeneous elements. The novels are written in Slovene, but they are mainly devoted to the space of Sarajevo, the unique multicultural atmosphere of this city, as well as the tragedy unfolding in it; thus, the writer complements the so-called “Sarajevo text”, but already in the field of Slovenian literature, artistically comprehending the interconnectedness of Bosnia and Slovenia. Refs 19.