Kulturno (re)konstruiranje Europe u romanu Christkind Borisa Dežulovića
Cultural (Re)construction of Europe in Boris Dežulović’s Novel Christkind

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with imagological aspects of Christkind (2003) – contemporary Croatian novel written by Boris Dežulović. Like other similar works the novel addresses problems of conceptualizations of three categories: reality, border and identity. Analysis of the novel takes into account: a) specific cultural and historical sedimentations of identity, b) metageography (qualifications connected with belonging to certain territory), c) reversing the imperialism of the imagination by the actualizing fiction about Austria in mode that is geoanthropologically identical to Western Balkanistic discourse. Additionally, the paper analyses the vampire as a literary figure whose monstrosity in the novel is a result of geopolitics, since the subject is positioned in the context of the Balkans which can be viewed as a projection of western European collective anxieties and suppressed past. Therefore inclusion of (non)fictional characters in search for the »vampire« killer cannot be conceived simply as a rhetorical game, but as a real situation where superstition developed under the influence of the gothic novel, especially Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), has influenced the imaginary of both individuals and social groups. Hence it is not the conventional story structure that is at a stake in Christkind, but rather the conventional construction of existence based on the model of reverse »mimesis«. In that context a subversive vampire figure is very important for showing the process of the ostensibly coherent »selfhood« constructed in relation to simulated »alterity«, i.e. to something that is »different«, »unfamiliar« and »strange«.

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