Evo što poznati engleski pisac J.B.Priestley kaže o engleskom karakteru:" Što on (tj.Falstaff, lice u Shakespearovim djelima )ne radi to je upravo ono što je službena Engleska optužena da radi stotinama godina - to jest, da proizvodi gomile neiskrenog frazerstva, svećane i opasne besmislice, koji su rođeni od licemjerja i dotjerane samoobmane. Engleska je proizvela brda toga, što bi Falstaff prozreo na prvi pogled."(citira no iz ulomka "Što se dogodilo sa Falstaffom" , u knjizi "Esseys of five decades", Penguin izdanje, London 1969.)

Dear Ms Warner,
I had read with interest your essay on the latest book by Dubravka Ugresic in 'The London Review of Books'. While it was never a problem to see Ms Ugresic as a decent and readable author (and so far I would agree with general tone of your essay) I feel compelled to react to those paragraphs in the text in which you, I dare to say, falsify the facts. Or, can I say, which are falsified by Dubravka?
The first fact which does not correspond to actual story is the statement saying that She was forced to leave her job at the University of Zagreb after crucifixes appeared on the walls and national flags on the desks of her colleagues; Serbo-Croat was abolished (the new national language was to be purged of all non-Croatian elements). Even her mother’s birth in Bulgaria was used against her.
Ms Ugresic was not 'forced to leave' by some external force. Ms Ugresic left because her internal demons forced her to leave. Ms Ugresic was (and probably still is) a dye-in-wool 'yugoslav patriot'. Those people's health (physical and otherwise) was conditional and depended on the environment they were living in – like all living creatures that can thrive only in a certain environment and not in some other. Who can blaim them?
Ms Ugresic actually run away from Croatian flag and a crucifix exactly like a vampire (and some would add garlic) and for similar reasons. If a national flag smells and stinks to someone so terribly that she or he cannot look at it and had to turn herself into an emigree because of it, should such flag be abolished in order for make her less anxious? She was not brave enough to burn it and so she left.
Croatian Coat of Arms was another element that convinced Dubravka it is time go. That Coat of Arms, like any other Coat of Arms on a zillion of walls around the planet was not to her liking – the old yugoslav one was much more appropriate for her mind setup and not detrimental for her mental health. And so she left.
And so we came to the point which bothers me most because it is totally without reference to the reality: '...Serbo-Croat was abolished (the new national language was to be purged of all non-Croatian elements…’
From 1974 the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia stipulated that the language in use in Croatia is the ‘Croatian Language’. How and why would a government elected nearly by the acclamation (90% of votes) abolish its own (Croatian) language? One little detail is correct here; yes, the language has started to undergo changes. At least some of the things forced upon it through seventy years of massive attempts to produce ‘serbo-croatian ’ by the same folks that Ms Ugresic obviously belongs to had to go. Like colonists in a strange land, who fought a war with local fauna they finally admitted they lost a war. This is in reality what had happened. Was that war lost for them from the start? Probably it was. Was Yugoslavia lost from the start? For sure it was. When it old motherland finally turned into ashes all those involved into the project with all their mental powers and emotional engagement felt they have no choice but to flee to some less ‘unhealthy’ environment. That was their own choice. Adaptation, the word unknown to Dubravka’s ilk, a prerogative for survival in the constantly changing world around us is out of capacity of many, Ms Ugresic included.
Suggesting that MS Ugresic suffered some kind of targeted abuse by her colleagues is plainly a nasty and ugly lie. Ms Ugresic suffered at that time a temporary lack of inspiration due to emotional stress from changing environment; accolades in the media became rare in parallel with her published work. Authors of different profiles appeared after decades of living underground, the topics and themes changed. Ms Ugresic started feeling out of time and out of space. She used at that time to tell to everyone how strange she felt and how she lost her foundation that she had in the old country. And then she left…
I had personally known Ms Ugresic at that time. She lived alone and she left alone; someone would say she was born émigré.
Ms Ugresic witchcraft and of her four ‘accomplices’ is another anecdote that describes someone’s lack of capacity to adapt. Lacking any means to affect the events or moderate them Dubravka and her friends resorted to denunciation of their ‘object of disgust’ (‘new country’) and attempted to prevent a PEN club congress in Dubrovnik in 1992. ‘Lacking democracy’ was a reason for that. Country that had any notion of ‘national’ in its literature banned during seventy years was accused of ‘taking more care about its writers then about the others (meaning ‘yugoslav’).
Milan Kundera, in one of his books describes two types of people’s behavior during occupation. One of those he calls ‘subtle’ that being the one which cannot tolerate any kind questioning of morality of situation because even such questioning would be enough to force us to choose the sides.
Ms Ugresic has chosen her side (finally) but she wants to convince everybody she was forced to it by ugly others. What a blatant lie. To do it as she did it the only way was by escaping any moral questioning of what in fact was she doing and was done by others. Blaming was the way ahead. One must admit she convinced quite a considerable lot she was doing a right thing.

With regards,

S velikim zanimanjem pratim (i bilježim!) riječi koje se objavljuju u srpskom medijskom prostoru od strane "hrvatskih" intelektualaca (od Puhovskog do Jergovića). Razumijem da se mora od nečega živjeti, ali oni su baš odlučili zaraditi novce pljuvanjem Hrvata i Hrvatske. Nije demokracija najbolje uređenje "na ovim prostorima", jer se doslovno shvaća kao "mogu izgovoriti bilo što bez posljedica".