Folk Odysseus in History: Migration and Literature in East-Central Europe

摘要

The Serbian word seoba has several meanings: 'wandering', 'migration', 'moving to a new place'. The novel Seobe by Milo Crnjanski proves that the Serb folk Odysseus represents in the reality a 20th-century 'labyrinth existence'. Crnjanski's novel borrows its topic from the Serbian history, and it does not talk about the now universal crisis situation in the mood of the aggressive 'national epic stories' of the 20th-century. Between 1945 and 1948, the official ideology of the re-created Czechoslovakia named Slavic nations, i.e., Czechs and Slovaks, state building ones, and it aimed at eliminating the German and Hungarian ethnic minorities from the country. The fact that writing in Hungarian in Czechoslovakia was dangerous between 1945 and 1948 resulted in a rebirth of orality and the use of manuscript distribution.