Kata Kulavkova:
POETICS OF THE NARROW SPACE
The short story reveals itself
through the poetics and metaphysics of the narrow space. It avoids
the indifferent setting towards the long and linear story telling and
stimulates the chronological, semantic and functional inversions,
contractions, parabolas and sublimations! The poetics of the short story
implies a diametrically opposite story telling morphologies: — from a very
short instant short story to a very long story; — from a sketch to
a short novel; — from a story of paradox to a story of atmosphere; — from
stories of intrigue to stories of epiphany and state, where “nothing
happens”; — from a realistic to a fantastic, enigmatic and miraculous
story; — from a hermetical story to a children story; — from a closed
story to an open one; — from a meditation to a satire; — from a
philosophical to a lascivious-erotic story; — from a detective-crime to a
science-fiction and a negative-utopian story; — from a fictional to a
pseudo-fictional story; — from a lyrical story-poem to a story-essay; —
from a psychoanalytical to an autobiographical narrative.
The Macedonian short story has all the significant features
of the short story as a literary genre; the attractiveness of the story,
elypticism, semantic and esthetic paradoxicality, to-the-point, internal
discursive twists, fragmentation and a microcosmic vision of the world,
individuality, play, improvisation and experiment, meta-narration,
interest in the reader, current story, even when it comes from some
previous tradition and when it is part of the collective memory, the
interest for a remake, retouch, and revision of the mythical, legendary,
biblical, and archetypal situations (motif coincidences and nomadism),
flexibility of the form, relation to other border genres, such as the
biblical, church and historiographic writings, with the anecdote, diary,
memoirs, auto-biography and epistles.
In the XX century Macedonian short story production there are
three dominant narrative models: (1) the twist model (grotesque);
(2) the revelation model (epiphany); and (3) the atmosphere model (arabesque),
to find all the narrative kids (morphology of the short story) and isolate
the most important features of the short story as a separate type of
literature. An indication of this is the selected short stories in this
anthology.
Modernization
Slavko Janevski (1920-2000)
is the first short story writer who makes a radical cut with the paradigm
of the modern Macedonian short story between the traditionalized realistic
expression and the modernistic one. His short stories are in an
intellectual relation with his novels, and it is not clear whether the
short story creates the novel cycle or the novel reproduces the short
story. If one excludes the travel mode upon which one of his anthology
short stories (“The Samurais”) is written, the fantastic paradigm of
“polymorphous and polynymic” constructions (Vangleov, 1993) is dominant in
the short story production of Janevski, from The Case (1976) to
Behind the Secret Door (1993). Janevski revives the archetype of the
hidden case and the forbidden room where somebody unknown hides and
– what is more important – a forbidden world. The revelation of the
forbidden world initiates a conflict between the reality and the tabooed
world (the one of imagination, superstition, occult and para-psychological
phenomena).
It is usually considered that
Blazhe Koneski (1921-1993) has published only one book of short
stories The Vineyard (1955). It is only partially true, because his
later interest in the production of poeticized short stories, poems in
prose or inscriptions, as he calls them himself should be taken
into consideration, as well as the other prose texts he publishes in his
selected works in the book dedicated to his Prose (dairy sketches,
lyrical essays). Koneski’s first stories follow the model of arabesque and
epiphany more than the model of grotesque, but in the last phase he also
publishes other, meta-narrative and mystification texts, as well as poems
in prose, to eventually also attempt texts that follow the model of the
postmodern discourse of simultaneous pseudo-citations and mystifications.
The avant-garde part of the second generation cycle where
there are the writers Branko Pendovski
(1927), Tome Momirovski (1927),
Srbo Ivanovski (1928),
Meto Jovanovski (1928), Tome Arsovski
(1928), Petar Kostov (1928),
Boris Vishinski (1929), Simon Drakul
(1930), Cvetko Martinovski (1930-1995),
Dimitar Solev (1930), Kata
Rumenova-Misirkova (1930), Blagoja Ivanov
(1931), Jovan Strezovski (1931),
Dushko Rodev (1932), Vladimir Kostov, that is
Murat Isaku (1928) and
Fahri Kaya (1930), officially, by their
program and manifestly, in a direct polemical confrontation with the
“realists” promotes the short story in an attractive and current
modernistic genre. It concerns the group of “modernists” whose first short
story collections were published in the fifties.
The short stories of several authors who marked the fifties
with their stories and who actively participated in the stabilization of
the short story genre in the Macedonian literary and cultural system are a
symptomatic, and a long time unavoidable artifact, whose resistance to the
esthetic oblivion is impressive. Their poetics profiles itself as a
reaction to the ruling soc-realistic poetics, a reaction that was a
touchstone of this generation of short story writers for a long time.
Later, the group of modernists differentiates among themselves and each
author continues along his own way. Tome Momirovski dedicates his
novels to memorizing events of the people’s liberation war. Srbo
Ivanovski percepts the quiet tragedies of the common people in a
subtle psychoanalytical way. Meto Jovanovski has a diffuse mimetic
interest, which is a reason for his short stories to situate in various
typological frames: from realistic, biographical and travel-adventure
writings, to fantastic and anamnestic visions. Branko Pendovski
focuses modern topics with an existential bitterness in his own dramatic
way, and Blagoja Ivanov elevates his sense of description of
details to a level of pointing out the ironic and naturalistic literary
transcriptions and interventions of the destiny. Tome Arsovski
lives through a personal creative growth in the last stories that open to
the modern forms of montage of fragmentary pragmas of the border area of
biography and imaginary medium. Petar Kostov is a story writer of a
pyrandelian type, looking into the secret chamber of the everyday. In his
last short stories published mainly in the periodicals, he sophisticates
the original perception, which is seen as a degustation of some
post-modern procedures. Boris Višinski is interesting when he
crosses over the threshold of the realistic. From the short stories of
Jovan Strezovski one can point out the poeticized mini stories,
allegories and parabolas.
Dimitar Solev is one of the most prolific Macedonian
short story writers, a spiritus movens of the Macedonian modernism,
a novelist with a huge power of transformation: from lyrical short story
shapes and psycho-analytical prologues, to urban hyper-realistic and
colloquial-rhetorical photographs, socially critical and ironic short
fictions, demistificatory directed, carnevalized, dived into the open
wound of the everyday. The short stories of Solev are a picturesque
literary gallery of characters and existential situations that are
apparently realistic, but inversely focused.
The sixth decade of the twentieth century is very important
for the configuration of the Macedonian short story. In 1962 Paskvelija
of Zhivko Chingo appears, in 1964 The
Seventh Day of Petre M. Andreevski and Dry Winds of
Tashko Georgievski, in 1965 New Paskvelija
of Chingo, in 1967 Fantasti of Bozhin
Pavlovski, in 1969 - Signs by Vlada
Uroshevikj and A Spring for Retelling by
Petre M. Andreevski, and in 1970 - Fire
by Chingo and Selected Stories by Petre M. Andreevski. In 1972
Petar T. Boshkovski publishes the first complete anthology Macedonian
Short Stories which was translated in Serbo-Croatian as well and gives
new options for reception of the Macedonian short story in and outside the
native environment. The sixties are marked with the appearance of the
third generation writers: Petre M. Andreevski (1934), Vlada
Uroshevikj (1934), Branko Varoshlija (1934), Tashko
Georgievski (1935), Mile Nedelkovski (1935), Olivera
Nikolova (1936), Ivan Chapovski (1936), Zhivko Chingo
(1936-1988), Petar Shirilov (1936-1988), Jovan Pavlovski
(1937), Boshko Smakjoski (1938-1998), Paskal Gilevski
(1939), Bogomil Gjuzel (1939),
Trajan Petrovski (1939),
Radmila Trifunovska (1939-1994)…
The stories of Mile Nedelkovski are under the sign of
pragmatic paradoxes, delicate and ironic situations that are a prototext
of the narrative paradoxes. Olivera Nikolova has made several
anthology trials in the short story genre, but as an author she situates
sovereignly in the domain of the so-called children and youth literature
and in the novel genre. Petar Shirilov cherishes the short story in
a convincing way and his stories are read as authentic oral stories and
grotesques. Jovan Pavlovski concentrates on the vivid, almost
memoir noting of unusual events from the World War II, but with an
unhidden intention to turn them into a reading material for the young, and
thus his first literary domain is the novel. Paskal Gilevski is
preoccupied with the current daily topics susceptible for shaping
narrative situations with a tragicomic outcome, but also with an epically
grandiose Aegean theme. Although the short story does not create the
literary identity of Bogomil Gjuzel, it is nevertheless deeply
imprinted in the corpus of the Macedonian story of the time of the modern
movement, as its significant paradigm. Radmila Trifunovska is most
expressive in the simulation of oral stories with an intensive composition
and a shocking effect.
Entering the state of exaltation is not a one time and
momentary act, but a long term decades long process. Therefore the sixties
are an initiation of the Macedonian short story in the stage of
exaltation, in achieving a complete, liberated, self-conscious and
esthetically improved body of the short story discourse. The authors of
the Macedonian modernism who imprinted the stamp of the exaltation in the
short story of the sixties of this century remained active in the last
decades of the 20th century as well, together with some authors
of the older generations and with some authors of the post-modern
generations between the seventies and the nineties.
Petre M. Andreevski is a poet who narrativizes the poem,
a novelist who poeticizes the short story and a novelist who uses the
short story in constructing the novel entity. His literary writing show a
tendency of trans-coding the discourses in whose frames it writes itself.
Petre M. Andreevski has an affinity towards the paranormal phenomena with
a polyvalent semantics, because of which they have a delicate status in
the cultural traditions of various civilizations. The discrete charm of
the transitions between the probable and unbelievable pragmas make Petre
M. Andreevski’s short stories paradigmatic to the model of folklore and
magic realism. They are not so much oneiric descriptions as short stories
of visions basing on the so called participation mystique.
Vlada Uroshevikj is an ecstatic proponent of the theory
and a practical representative of the fantastic story. The effect of the
fantastic is achieved by sudden slips of the realistic course of events
through the cracks of surreal, through a subtle conflict/mismatch between
the illusion of the real and the surreal! At the moment when these two
modes of the same world start to coexist, fantastic appears on stage. The
commodity of the realistic pragmas is interrupted with the intervention of
some character or object which surpasses the borders of the conventional
semantics, the conceptual prototype of the objective reality, which is
disintegrated in fragments (“the lost letter”), and its entity remains an
eternal enigma. Then the short story becomes detectively mysterious and
attractive to the reader, and it tickles the suppressed areas of
consciousness and latent susceptibility of man to believe (both fatally
and intriguely) everything that goes against the rational and
materialistic representations of the world!
Tashko Georgievski is one of the most striking story
writers in the area of the story that feigns an authenticity of the story
and it can be read as a pseudo-citation. His story is short-handedly
elliptic and fast, with suggestive descriptions of tragic events built in
the direction of final eruption of emotions, with doubling the narrative
voice, dramatic monologues – implicit replicas to the invisible colocutor,
the inner listener, with a view of a sovereign connoisseur and tempter of
the Aegean theme and trauma of the exile of the Macedonians.
Zhivko Chingo created his imaginary place (chronotop)
Paskvelija where he placed the grotesque beings of the times of socialist
transformations of the Macedonian village. The stories of Čingo cherish
the procedure of invoking an illusion of realism. In the fictional novel
frames of the Paskvelija microcosm are counter-posed by the author to the
world of monstrous “ideals” of alienated forces of power against the
personified archetype of the cathartic higher humanity of the common man.
Several authors born around the forties
Gordana Mihailova-Boshnakoska (1940),
Liljana Beleva (1940), Luan Starova
(1941), Hristo Krsteski (1941), Bozhin Pavlovski (1942),
Dimitar Bashevski (1943),
Mitko Madzhunkov (1943),
Zoran Kovachevski (1943), Danilo
Kocevski 91946) and others open the story paradigm towards new poetic
and discursive innovations, hybridizations and combinations. Gordana
Mihailova-Boshnakoska follows the tradition of sophistication and
exaltation of the narration. Luan Starova who publishes his first
collection of short stories quite late (1992) places the story in the
biographical and memoir-essayistic arabesques of personal and family
reminiscence. Dimitar Bashevski treats the story as a genre which
is secondary for him compared to the novel and poetry, and therefore we
have only rare, although anthological samples today. Mitko Madzhunkov
equally impressively profiles his naturalistic grotesque writing and
the other one, the oneiric and arabesque one. Zoran Kovachevski
affirms the procedure of intertextual parodies of historical personalities
in local and minor ambiences, but he also builds an atmosphere of Kafkian
mystery and fantastic. Some critics read the essays of Ferid Muhikj
and the travel writings of Danilo Kocevski as a radicalized narration,
which implies that the process of detronization of the short story
prototype is in an indicative stage.
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