Philological Studies

KILLING OF THE ELDERLY: THE MACEDONIAN CUSTOM “SLAUGHTER OF THE OLD MEN”

Slavcho Koviloski — 2024-10-30

This paper addresses the problem of killing of elderly people,

a custom commonly referred to as “slaughtering the elderly” in Macedonia.

Examples of this myth are registered across various regions of Macedonia,

including Ohrid, Bitola, Prilep, Veles, Skopje and the surrounding areas,

Dojran, the surroundings of Kratovo, Negotino, Debar, Drimkol, and the

expansive hilly-mountainous regions of Maleshevo and Mariovo. The

motivations behind senicide were numerous. It was commonly thought that

during times of famine, killing of the elderly was a means of conserving scarce

food resources. In addition, senicide occurred as a result of land confiscation,

where the property or cultivation rights of the elderly were transferred to their

younger generations. In some cases, these killing were considered an act of

mercy, especially when an individual suffered from an incurable disease, or

faced the challenges of old age, when people could not meet even their most

basic biological needs, thus becoming a burden to the family or the community.

The traumatic experience of sons killing their fathers, according to traditions,

led to the abandonment of this brutal custom.

THE LITERARY TEXT AS A POSTMEMORY RETRAUMATIZATION

Marija Gjorgjieva-Dimova — 2024-10-30

Starting from Marianne Hirsch’s thesis that the notion of

postmemory can be generalised in various contexts of traumatic transfer, this

paper aims to examine the interpretive validity of this concept in relation to

the traumatic experience of political prisoners on Goli otok. The paper focuses

on the novel Silent With the Mouth Open (Молчи со отворена уста) by

the Macedonian authoress Snezana Mladenovska Angelkov, a member of

the so-called postgeneration. The interpretation is focused on presenting the

narrative conventions involved in articulating the postmemorial dimension

in the novel, as well as its features: the elements of secondariness and of

mediativeness of postmemory, as well as the (post-_memorial relation to the

past through imagination, projection and creation.

REPRESENTATION OF THE TRAUMA FROM THE SKOPJE EARTHQUAKE IN 1963 IN THE LAMENT SONGS COLLECTED BY VASIL HADJIMANOV

Ana Martinoska — 2024-10-30

The paper is based on the recently published laments from the

Skopje earthquake in 1963 from the archival materials of Vasil Hadjimanov.

Its objective is to show the representation of the trauma from the Skopje

earthquake as a significant memory determinant of our collective identity.

Hadjimanov’s laments demonstrate the presence of trauma in Macedonian

folk culture and the implications of the catastrophic earthquake to the folkloric

memory of the immediate witnesses of one of the key traumatic events in the

history of the city and the country.

The paper presents the significant differences of motives in

comparison to the previous records of Macedonian laments. It analyzes

the representations of the trauma caused by the natural disaster that

brought sudden death to a huge number of victims. These laments

present numerous details from the biography of the victims talking about

their life before the traumatic event. At the same time, they represent

a description of the social reality as a temporal, spatial and historical

setting in which the trauma takes place. By means of reconstruction of

the event, the individual suffering is merged into the collective trauma.

THE REFLECTION OF THE TRAUMA OF THE MACEDONIAN PEOPLE IN THE NOVELS OF GJORGJI ABADJIEV AND TASHKO GEORGIEVSKI

Valentina Mironska-Hristovska — 2024-10-30

World history is inscribed with wars and revolutions that

history and politics perceive through facts. Psychiatry deals with the traumatic

consequences to people, which often find a place in literature. Numerous

works have been written by direct participants, witnesses of those events, as

well as their descendants. Macedonian history abounds with historical events

that have left deep-rooted traumas to the Macedonian people. During the

19th century, when states and nations were formed, numerous rebellions and

uprisings organized by the Macedonian people who fought for freedom from

five centuries of slavery and for the right to self-determination. However, the

great powers had a territorial interest in Macedonia, which is why they did

not take into account the democratic right of the Macedonian people, and they

turned a deaf ear to their appeals for help. Therefore, in 1903 in Thessaloniki,

a group of young revolutionaries - the Thessaloniki Assassins carried out an

attack through which they wanted to draw attention to the Macedonian issue.

Gjorgji Abadjiev writes about the psychological consequences to one of the

survivors of this historical act in the novel Pustina. The fate of the Macedonian

people had been decided in a most undemocratic manner in 1913, with the

Bucharest Agreement, which had divided the territory of Macedonia, and with

it, the Macedonian people had been disintegrated. Tashko Georgievski writes

about this political andhistorical event, which left a trauma on the Macedonian

people, individually and collectively, and which is reflected to this day, in his

nine novels titled Black Seed.

DEALING WITH TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCES OCCURRING AS A CONSEQUENCE OF DISAPPEARANCE

Jasmina Mojsieva-Guševa — 2024-10-30

In this paper, we dwell on the interpretation of trauma through

the dominant Western model of cultural trauma which relies heavily on the

Freudian conceptualization of trauma and its psychological consequences.

This includes the traumatized subject’s inability to articulate their trauma,

raising of the question of trauma’s delay by focusing primarily on the gap

between traumatic experience and artistic expression.

The consequences left by trauma are practically expolored through the

analysis of the novel The Night We Slept In Pompeii by the Macedonian author

Davor Stojanovski, with several segments taken as reference points. The

central point of the analysis is the disappearance of the two main characters

around whose absence the entire action of the novel is woven.

Narratives of trauma are often called narratives of indirection, in which

textual indeterminacy is indexical to an absent, traumatic referent. The

indirectness in the narrative procedure is indicated by the focus on another

event (the traffic accident), but also the title of the novel itself with the

mention of the ancient city of Pompeii, to which the various associations of the

readers are connected. They are given the active task of filling in the textual

gaps according to their own reasoning. The underdeveloped historical analogy

in this novel is only the author’s initial attempt to show that a non-linear or

fragmented way of storytelling can mimic symptoms of trauma on a formal

level, such as silence and repetitive images characteristic of post-traumatic

stress. The silence of the protagonist Sarah is used to develop the story in

two directions: in the repeated suspicious and aggressive experiences and

behaviors of the second narrator (the mother Kaya) that change her entire life

and in the impossibility of discovering the mystery that is carried by Mrs.

Novitska (the aged Sarah) as the third narrator in the novel.

The idea that a novel can contain something unspoken, something that

cannot be easily named, but which emerges through it in a complex way,

underlies the theoretical elaboration of this paper. The author Stojanovski

not only approaches the challenges of transmitting trauma only in terms of

the limits of language or narration, but through this novel he also points out

other reasons for the occurrence of trauma such as the imperfection of modern

society, the process of growing up and the relationship between parents and

children. It is precisely the emotional sufferings of the parents of the missing

protagonists that constitute the narrative structure of the entire novel. That is

why our analysis relies on the following segments: anticipation, faith, fear,

aggressiveness, sadness, pain and moral dilemmas felt by the parents of the

disappeared.

TRAUMA AND ITS ARTICULATIONS IN THE POETRY BOOK ORDEALS BY SIMONA GRUEVSKA – MADŽOSKA

Goce Smilevski — 2024-10-30

Literary trauma studies place their research focus on the

modes in which personal experience is transformed into a literary work, and

the role that language and memory play in that transformation. Poetry with its

ellipses, symbolism and syntactic syncopations, can capture the most subtle

nuances of traumatic experiences, and through them express in words what is

initially unspeakable in trauma. This text analyzes the poems from the poetry

collection Ordeals by Simona Gruevska - Madžoska, applying the latest

theoretical reflections from the field of cultural and literary studies related to

the trauma.

IN THE RHYTHM OF THE PAST. THE CULTURAL RANGE OF THE KINGDOM OF SLOVENES, CROATS AND SERBS

Larisa Кostić — 2024-10-30

SERBIAN AND SLAVIC EPIC POETRY IN A COMPARATIVE CONTEXT: A STEP TOWARDS SYNTHESIS

Marija Šarović — 2024-10-30

REGIONAL DIALOGUES ON TIN UJEVIĆ – A BELGRADE CONTRIBUTION

Jovana Ivetić — 2024-10-30