Two Examples of Gender-Construct in Balkan Literature: Kostas Tachtsis, Dragoslav Mihajlović
Two Examples of Gender-Construct in Balkan Literature: Kostas Tachtsis, Dragoslav Mihajlović

Summary/Abstract: Two male authors, in two different contexts, imagined their female protagonists: Kostas Tachtsis, a prolific Greek author and himself a homosexual, wrote a novel on a woman's endurance in the challenging and dangerous Greek political urban context over a period of some 50 years, under the title Third Wreath ("The Third Wedding Wreath", 1962); Serbian author Dragoslav MihajloviÊ, a former pro-soviet sympathizer and political prisoner on Goli Otok, at the half-way point to his present-day nationalism, wrote the novel Petria's Wreath (1975), in which a rural female protagonist is a suffering icon ‡ beaten, ill, poor, abandoned, widowed, a metaphor for collective, people's suffering. In both cases, a feminine persona is supposed to deconstruct, construct, or destabilize the ruling/serving female prototype. In both inventions a shadow-male is inscribed into the proposed female model. In both cases, the female protagonist serves as a screen for criticism of the correspondent local male-dominant model. Both authors voice a kind of (male) de-centered gender position, or, put more simply, an endangered sexuality: a sexually instable voyeur, a homosexual, a traumatized/tortured former prisoner. Women's criticism of Balkan men's attitudes does not correspond fully with this: in women's writing men are usually accused of selfishness, inclination to war and violence, and power-struggle. The quest for a similar de-centered gender presentation could revive the debate on gender of the author, somehow lost in the late 70s.

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