The Political Usefulness of Ethnic Inequalities: Nationalism in the Prose of Dubravka Ugresic

The outbreak of the civil war in Yugoslavia was the end of a certain stage in Dubravka Ugresic's writing. The shock experienced by the novelist and essayist in the first half of the 90s radically changed the nature of her literary work. One of the leading themes was that of Croatian and Serbian nationalism producing inequality, which was presented as a politically useful construct. The article focuses on three collections of essays by Dubravka Ugresic: The culture of lies (1996), Nobody's Home (2005) and Fox (2017). The article presents a detailed discussion of the author's attitude to the wartime and post-war reality, which focused on dividing communities that had coexisted for decades in relative agreement. The pessimistic overtone of these ironic essays leaves no illusions as to the nature of nationalism as a dangerous tool in the hands of those who exercise power or wish to gain it by creating ethnic inequalities.