Nosferatu in Sarajevo. Searching for Vampires during the Siege in Karim Zaimović’s Short Story “Čudo neviđeno”
Nosferatu in Sarajevo. Searching for Vampires during the Siege in Karim Zaimović’s Short Story “Čudo neviđeno”

Summary/Abstract: Among contemporary Bosnian writers whose biography and literary work had been indelibly marked by the 1992-1995 war of independence, Sarajevo-born author Karim Zaimović (1971-1995) is without any doubt one of the most representative, considering his tragic fate and the peculiarities of his narrative production. The son of famed painter Muhamed (1938-2011) Karim was among Sarajevo’s leading young intellectuals during the late 1980s, together with relevant figures such as writers Miljenko Jergović and Semezdin Mehmedinović; in particular, he rose to prominence thanks to his essays about comics as an art form, which he published since early adolescence in influential local journals. Zaimović’s profound knowledge of Western comics – which were principally distributed since the 1970s in then-Yugoslavia by the Strip Art Features rights company, owned and managed by Sarajevan publisher Ervin Rustemagić – and his interest in the tropes of genre fiction greatly influenced the short stories he started to write as war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Sarajevo was besieged. These stories, which the author mostly read aloud between 1993 and 1994 during the radio program Jozif i njegova braća (“Joseph and His Brothers”) he hosted on Radio ZID Sarajevo—an independent station founded in 1992 by academic and lawyer Zdravko Grebo (1947-2019) as a way to resist war and nationalism—portrayed life in the besieged city in a darkly surreal way, mixing, as noted by critic Fatmir Alispahić, the factual style of investigative journalism and historical storytelling with elements of horror and science fiction. 1 Such features characterize the majority of Zaimović’s narrative works, which were printed posthumously in the 1997 collection Tajna džema od maline (The Secret of the Raspberry Jam), since the author died in August 1995 after being hit during one of the last mortar attacks on the city. While Zaimović’s figure is currently remembered as a symbol of the incommensurable human and cultural damages left by the conflict, it is interesting to analyze the characteristics and purposes of his production, which make it deeply innovative in the Bosnian literary canon.

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