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 talkingabout 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 19^th 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