The Tale of Marko Kraljević in the Novel “Uzidana” by Ivana Nešić
The Tale of Marko Kraljević in the Novel “Uzidana” by Ivana Nešić

Summary/Abstract: The title of novel “Uzidana” (2024) refers to a woman, a character of the famous folk ballad “The Building of Skadar” (“Зидање Скадра”). The main motif of the poem is the human sacrifice—young woman must be walled up in the fortress in order to prevent pulling down. She doesn’t die walled up like in the folk ballad but is rescued by a fairy, supernatural creature of Slavic mythology, ambivalent by its very nature. She gives her a task: to find three specific items that will bring back the harmony broken by a main villain. Our analysis is focused on the formal and substantive elements of the folk tale that appear in this novel, most properly classified and described in “The Morphology of the Folk Tale” by Vladimir Propp, on the process of integration elements from one into another genre, both with quite strict form, on the main characters—Gojkovica and Marko Kraljević, that fluctuate between fairy-tale and epic poetry and their modern embodiment, and on the associations on oral tradition that this contemporary novel successfully stimulates.

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