Page 103 - Ekonomija i Biznis_juli-avgust 2016.indd
P. 103
LITERATURE
gun. The subtitle sends a strong female Nikolova assigns to the Macedonian pub-
attitude, changing the generic murders in lic. In the spirit of the post-modern reex-
the woman, although grammatically in- amination of history, however without
correctly named “murders (ubijki)” point- the pragmatic calculations of some of
ing it out with a large K on the book cover. our prose authors. On the contrary. Intel-
The metaphorical mottos are strong ironic lectually powerful, without reservations,
expressions in the context of the strength- although discretely hidden between the
ening of the female action. Even the velvet colorfulness of the other novelettes, the
cover, wherewith the female world will most intriguing novelette according to us
cover the corpse of patriarchy, is histori- is the one about Mara Buneva and Men-
cally attributed to Agrippina. cha Karnichu. To these two persons from
recent history, every year the ideological
Beyond the strict genre reading, there spears brake. Nikolova frames the story in
is one more characteristic which Olivera the dry historical fact that Mara Buneva
killed Velimir Prelic in Skopje in 1928, and
immediately after that she killed herself,
and Mencha Karnichu, the wife of Vancho
Mihajlov, three years earlier, in Vienna in
1925, killed Todor Panica, and despite of
the tuberculosis that she suffered from in
her youth, she lived until 1964. She doesn’t
make historical explication, neither she
sharply denies the attitude of the Supreme
Macedonian Committee as our present his-
toriography. She is more dedicated to the
monstrous character of the leading (male)
position which unscrupulously sends its
associates in death. However, also in such
a situation, the women show resistance,
Mencha Karnichu shows more explicit re-
sistance, and Mara Buneva tried to retain
the idealist view, observing the courage of
Mencha as an ideal, and not the one of the
head of the organization.
The literary revision of the historical
narration is a courageous authorial atti-
tude of Olivera Nikolova. Unfortunately, in
the general absence of the literary atten-
tion and social debate this remained quite
unnoticed. The eventual opening of the
historical, of course, non-literary dilem-
mas, in my opinion, will not deny the sub-
tle literary weaving, which is threaded by
this disputable topic in the sequence of
similar situations from world history. In
this way, it takes away the sharp dimen-
sion of the local context and it gives him a
general human dimension, making the
book appropriate for translations in other
literary surroundings as well. And this is
particularly what makes it a real litera-
ture for the summer – courageous, valu-
able, well-written book.
July-August 2016 103
