THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT OF A CHRONICLE OF A PROVINCIAL CEMETERY
THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT OF A CHRONICLE OF A PROVINCIAL CEMETERY

Summary/Abstract: Travel Companions, a book of prose by Isidora Sekulić, appeared in Serbian literature at a time (1911) when the avant-garde and the desire for new ways of writing were gradually beginning to take shape. The prose style was also undergoing changes: instead of jagged realistic descriptions of situations and characters, a linear composition and a tightly connected plot flow, authors focused on illuminating the personal dispositions of morally and intellectually oversensitive individuals and capturing their fantasies, premonitions and unhinged state of mind in short and pulsating sentences.1 A Chronicle of a Provincial Cemetery, the second collection of short stories by Isidora Sekulić, was published almost three decades after the first, at a time (1940) when the avant-garde was on the wane and when its main representatives were returning to classical narrative techniques while attempting to incorporate the novelties they previously mastered. Even the title of her second collection of short stories indicates that she was reviving the narrative of chronicles, which was unacceptable in all avant-garde movements, as foreign as realistic portrayals of characters in long-form narratives. From today’s perspective, they were two different narrative poetics and two incompatible narrative techniques.

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