Verwandte Artikel zu Age of Skin

Age of Skin - Softcover

Ugresic, Dubravka

 
9781948830225: Age of Skin
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1948830221 ISBN 13: 9781948830225
Verlag: Open Letter Books, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times Editors' Choice

These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka Ugresic, winner of the Neustadt International Prize and one of Europe’s most influential writers, with biting humor and a multitude of cultural references—from La La Land and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, to tattoos and body modification, World Cup chants, and the preservation of Lenin’s corpse—takes on the dreams, hopes, and fears of modern life. The collapse of Yugoslavia, and the author’s subsequent exile from Croatia, leads to reflections on nationalism and the intertwining of crime and politics. Ugresic writes at eye level, from a human perspective, in portraits of people from the former Eastern Bloc, who work as cleaners in the Netherlands or start underground shops with products from their country of origin.

A rare and welcome combination of irony, compassion, and a sharp polemic gaze characterizes these beautiful and highly relevant essays.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work.

Ellen Elias-Bursać is a translator of South Slavic literature. Her accolades include the 2006 National Translation Award for her translation of David Albahari's novel Götz and Meyer. She is currently the President of the American Literary Translators Association.

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"There's Nothing Here!"

1.

The culture of bathing has played a pivotal role in the history of civilization. Although it, the history of civilization, is rooted in wars, conquests, famous battles, and male heroics, there were those, like the old Romans, who left behind them something useful as well. Wherever they passed, Romans built public baths, Roman hot springs, and references to the goddess Minerva, whose name adorns many a hot-springs hotel. Turks, Arabs, the Islamic world, have given civilization public baths, hamamas, and made affordable to all the habit of bathing. Northern Europe has saunas or banyas or baths, the folk mythology of water, legends about miraculous cures and rejuvenation, mythical beings, river fairies, a whole water-bound imagination. The Russian banya is an inseparable part of Russian everyday life, but also a frequent motif in legends, fairy tales, and literature (Mayakovsky, Zoschenko), and in movies as well. The plot of Eldar Ryazanov’s movie The Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath! (1975), begins in a Russian bathhouse; in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007) a London banya frequented by the Russian underworld serves as the site for brutal showdowns. Famous western European spa cities, such as Baden-Baden, were visited by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, while Karlovy Vary was a favorite haunt for Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Peter the Great, Turgenev, and, again, Tolstoy. Milan Kundera wasn’t wrong when he set the plot of The Farewell Party―his little pearl of a novel―in a Czech spa.

One way or another I keep stumbling over hot springs, even when my travels take me there for non-hot-springs reasons, such as when I was invited to the University of Warwick. While there, I explored the Royal Leamington Spa, active in the nineteenth century and visited twice by Queen Victoria herself. I visit hot springs for more reasons than just my bad back. While there I limber up my perceptive capabilities. Hot springs have a sobering and entrancing effect on me, not only do they confront me with my medical needs but with my social status, meanwhile fostering a feeling of general well-being, giving wings to the illusion that things are far better than they actually are.

Abi Wright, an expert on the fast-expanding spa industry, claims that the price of a day at the spa runs from £20 to £2000. The clientele select their place in the social hierarchy. And right here, in this zone, the dynamic is the most intense. People (shall we call them hotspringers?) travel for many miles, as do the Croatian retirees who in semi-secrecy sneak off by bus to the Vrućica baths in the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina―Republika Srpska. The retiree-traitors pay the “despised” Serbs for spa services because the Bosnian Serb spas are cheaper and better in quality than the spas in Croatia. Spas are, therefore, a test of patriotism. When it comes to spas, patriotism gives way to frugality. There you have a detail which makes sense only to Croats and Serbs. The keys for entering one’s password on ATMs in the Republika Srpska offer two language options: English or local. This, too, is something only local people understand. The language of the locals is dragon-tongue: it flicks its three equal tongues, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. And the entire modern complex of hot springs, known as Banja Vrućica, is dominated by an Orthodox shrine, one in a series of recently built, standard-form Orthodox, Muslim, and Catholic places of worship scattered across the landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina, reminiscent of standard-form Chinese restaurants.

2.

Why do I find myself drawn to hot springs? I enjoy playing the anthropologist on a clandestine mission: I watch the subtle flow of people and money where one least expects or notices it. The spas I have in mind were built on earlier Austro-Hungarian foundations (and these were raised on Roman spas), or they sprouted during the Socialist era. Most have not been recently renovated, or if they have, the renovation has been patchy. Many are now in ruins. They were occupied by war veterans from the most recent war (1991–1995) who―beset by alcohol, drugs, and troubles―vented their anger on the hot springs. Under the roofs of spas, the old communist utopia (the dream of highly professional, well-lit, and modern sanatoriums for all) stagnates and mingles with a dose of post-communist human despair, along with mildew festering on the tiles, and the yellowed hydro-massage baths. I read the things around me differently than does the spa staff, postcommunist kids, those cute humanoids whose memory cards have been erased. I’m older than they are and, though I may have no proof, I know a second level lies beneath the surface, and beneath the second there’s a third . . .

In the time of Yugoslavia, rivers of Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, and Macedonians with aching bones streamed to a sanatorium known as the Dr. Simo Milošević Institute in the Montenegrin coastal town of Igalo. Everything was paid for with wanton abandon (or so they say today) by the Yugoslav health insurance system. The institute is an imposing edifice of Yugoslav socialist architecture with probably the largest hotel lobby in the region, and a certain number of capacious hotel rooms, but the place is equipped with a disproportionately small swimming pool. Nowadays, the building excites both admiration and pity, as do all examples of neglect, especially the neglect that followed the fall of Communism and the advent of the misconstrued democracy. The vestiges of the communist era, along with the Adriatic Sea and its affordability, attract the elderly Norwegians, Danes, and Dutch, while the sanatorium staff has been holding their breath in hopes, for years, that the facility would be purchased by a wealthy Norwegian and transformed into a high-priced, classy wellness center. The character of Dr. Škréta, a spa gynecologist, (in Kundera’s The Farewell Party), who dreams of being adopted by Bertlef, a filthy rich American, is in fact a precise anticipatory metaphor for today’s post-communist Europe. Post-communist Europe sees itself as a swanky wellness center frequented by an assortment of rich men who have nothing better to do than satisfy the fantasies of the locals and adopt them once and for all.

Igalo is a destination not merely for Scandinavians with aching bones, but also for the poorer class of Russians. The crassly wealthy Russians have been buying land up on the Montenegrin mountainsides where they build lavish mansions with bird’s-eye views of the sea. The poorer Russians meanwhile buy modest apartments in unsightly Socialist high-rises. I met a Russian woman, an elderly lady, and her son. They’d purchased one of those little apartments and spend every summer in Igalo.

After the Russians bought the Karlovy Vary spa in the Czech Republic and conquered with cash what they’d failed to conquer earlier with tanks, after they turned Montenegro into their resort and the proud Montenegrins into their waitstaff, money launderers, bodyguards, and the like―they moved on in a northwesterly direction and occupied Rogaška Slatina, a Slovenian spa. The Yugoslavs were, long ago, united by brotherhood and unity; now, or so it seems, they are united by the Russians. In vain Tito did declare his historical “no” to Stalin. Today, post-Yugoslavs are mouthing a willing “yes” to capital from Putin’s offspring. How do I know?

In September 2016, I stayed for five days at the Rogaška Grand Hotel, which had been purchased by a wealthy Russian. It should be said that the new owner invested not a cent in renovations. The only novelty were the Russian channels on the TV sets in the guestrooms. Over my five days there I watched my fill of Russian TV and learned that the visible, superficial glow of the “western” style of life is easy to imitate. After Perestroika and the fall of...

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Verlag
Open Letter Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1948830221
ISBN 13 
9781948830225
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
220
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Verantwortliche Person
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