[...]... character of literature written by women from East Central Europe As Alexandra Büchler remarks, there is still “little understanding of the specificity of women’s writing” in the Czech Republic and other post-Communist countries as there is little understanding of women’s issues or the need to theorize them.3 By talking about women’s writing, and particularly women’s prose from East Central Europe, we as editors... in the East Central European historical and cultural paradigm Instead of the revolutionary “recipe” to destroy the old and rebuild everything while denying the past, Lotman proposes a “gradual evolution and integration.” 54 The title of the present volume, The Third Shore, was chosen because it reflects the contents and aesthetics of these texts, which were all written in the 1990s The women writers from. .. Following the outbreak of the civil war and the nationalist propaganda war that accompanied it both in Serbia and Croatia, several of these authors wrote against the current in the Croatian political landscape As a consequence, the Croatian media accused them in the most vulgar terms of being witches, and both Drakulic and Ugrešic , along with a few others, had ´ ´ to leave the country.24 The Croatian... for the writing of literary history in the West, namely, that the literary canon is measured by standards set by a male-dominated establishment, is even more true in this region The efforts initiated over the course of the past decade to begin the writing of women’s literary history and to recognize women’s particular cultural contributions in the past and present have come both from within East Central. .. EUROPE The present anthology is a selection of prose written by women authors after 1989 from countries that were previously referred to in the West as Eastern Europe The term East Central Europe is geographically and historically more adequate, which is why we use it in the title and throughout this introduction Literature by women writers from East Central Europe in English translation has been either... hypocrisy of the Communist espousal of gender equality This gap between the theory and the reality of women’s lives was expressed in the now classic novella by Natalia Baranskaia from 1969, “A Week Like Any Other Week” (Nedelia kak nedelia), which for the first time discussed women’s lives in the Soviet Union and their double or—as some say—triple burden: that of mother, wife, and working woman.44 The 1980s... Hensel), others less (Zsuzsa Kapecz, Renata Šerelyte) or not ˙ at all (Sanja Lovrencic , Nora Ikstena) They can and should be read ˇ´ and understood, on the one hand, in the context of their own literary and sociopolitical history and, on the other, as products of the authors’ different backgrounds and aesthetic approaches Our selection thus offers a wide range of topics that women’s literature of the 1990s... values and lifestyle are not only far from what the communist ideal would have preached but also strangely reflect the lack of guidance and role models in their parents’ generation Zsuzsa Kapecz, on the other hand, in her fluid short prose “South Wind and a Sunny Day” looks at posttransition Hungary through the eyes of the generation born in the 1950s, who lived their formative years under communism and. .. writers.26 The modernism of the 1960s and 1970s was also reflected in Slovenian women’s poetry The past three decades saw the emergence of several interesting women writers and poets, among them Berta Bojetu and Maja Vidmar The end of the 1980s not only redefined the concept of national art in Slovenia, together with Neue Slowenische Kunst and retrogardism, but also reflected on the militancy of the Yugoslav... with the title Transgressions, coauthored by a group of young writers over the period of several years The books helped to introduce and strengthen new tendencies which developed in the literature of the early 1990s when the question of the understanding of a woman’s identity, expressed by women themselves from within their existential experience, came to the forefront of intellectual life.” 47 Currently, . I Am Myself Only Accidentally 23 Lela B. Njatin How We Killed the Sailor 25 Alma Lazarevska 20 Firula Road 33 Ljiljana Ðurd¯ic´ The Story of the Man Who Sold Sauerkraut and Had a Lioness-Daughter. Zrinka Stahuljak (Croatia); Dr. Darja Zavrsˇek and Dr. Metka Zupancˇic´ (Slovenia); Dr. Miglena Nikol- china (Bulgaria); Jozefi na Komporalj and Adam Sorkin (Romania); Jana Juránová (Slovakia); Andrée. “Plaza de Espa a, ” refl ects the life of an Albanian woman intellectual who travels the world in the 1990s while civil war in former Yugoslavia is tearing apart the peace in the Balkans. What