Raspad Austro-Ugarske Monarhije i stvaranje Jugoslavije u romanu Unterstadt Ivane Šojat
Disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Creation Yugoslavia in Ivana Šojat’s Novel Unterstadt

Summary/Abstract: Unterstadt, a novel written by Ivana Šojat, is a saga about an Osijek family presented through the perspective of female characters, starting with great-grandmother Victoria Richter Meier during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and ending with Katarina Pavković, great-grand-daughter, in the first decade of the 21st century. The novel intertwines the implacable and ruthless weft of history around female characters. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy Victoria’s life moves from the stage of a wealthy and situated daughter of Richter, the owner of a watermill, to the position of a single mother of four children. Victoria is faced with the consequences of the posttraumatic stress of her husband Rudolf Meier, an imperial soldier who, after returning from the battlefield in Galicia in 1918, fails to cope with the new social and state order and history written by the victors, living in poverty, without true bond with the children and the fear with which he lives after the Great War. Through the practice of new historicism, I would like to show the existence of textual history and the historicity of texts (L. A. Montrose) as well as circulation of social energy (Greenblatt) in the novel Unterstadt.

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