IN FULL SWING : THE CULTURAL EMBRACE OF THE 18TH CENTURY BALKANS AND HAPSBURG EMPIRE IN FEAR AND SERVANT (2000) BY MIRJANA NOVAKOVIĆ AND 20th CENTURY BALKANS AND AMERICA AS A PROMISED LAND IN BUNKER SWING (2013) BY M. DJURDJEVIĆ & B. MLADJENOVIĆ

The paper analyzes the way popular contemporary Serbian prose writers depict the cultural encounter between the Balkans and the West. Mirjana Novaković describes the cultural meeting point between the 18th-century, medieval-looking, vampire-ridden Serbia and advanced Austrian empire in terms of what Julia Kristeva calls “a crossroad of two othernesses“. Even though Serbian capital Belgrade is described as the bedrock of bohemian lifestyle, bandits, vampires and people who “love and enjoy nothing so much as their belief that a lie is in fact the truth“, the truth is that in this novel Devil, falsely impersonating a secret royal investigator Otto von Hausburg, comes from Vienna.Seen through the eyes of Mirjana Djurdjević and Branko Mladjenović, the life of Serbian immigrants in the U.S. in mid-1920s, full of hardships, is interwoven with a secret desire to return to their home country. This only underlines certain suspicion of the West and the cultural debate between East and West present in the Serbian literary prose of the 20th century. The paper investigates the following possibility: if all the world is, as Novaković suggests, a composite of varying and disagreeing truths, could the balance of the world mostly lie, in Bhabha’s words, in being open to “cultural translation“ – seeking one’s identity in a foreign symbolic and semiotic system. Therefore, this paper tries to view the cultural debate in these two novels as a cultural embrace of the East and the West