Aporias, Impasses and Ostalgia

Abstract

Concluding his review of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Serbian critic Teofil Pancic stated that the novel ‘appears as the natural and highly successful completion of a particular “cycle”, as the conclusion of a dif- ficult and challenging chapter; a reckoning with the consequences and (epi)phenomena of the disintegration of the “world of yesterday”’.¹ It must then have come as a surprise, and not just to Pancic, that Ugresic’s next novel, The Ministry of Pain, would actually be a companion piece to Museum, the second part of a diptych. If Museum was primarily a novel of museums and the technologies of memory, its chronotope dispersed throughout the ruins of the European twentieth century, The Ministry of Pain narrows its focus to post-1989 eastern Europe, and more directly, to the Atlantis of Yugoslavia. In contrast to the resigned and occasionally bittersweet tone of its predecessor, The Ministry of Pain is a novel of aporias and impasses: a story that is as nostalgic as it is critical of nostalgia, a novel about being simultaneously ‘homesick and sick of home’,² and about both the necessity of remembering and the disquieting virtues of forgetting. Covering the thematic triptych of war, return and ruins, programmatically outlined by Heinrich Böll, The Ministry of Pain is the novel that perhaps most fully realizes the idea of a post-1989 ‘literature of the east European ruins’.