Miljenko Jergović and (Yugo)nostalgia

Nationalists have accused those romanticizing the past and Tito's Yugoslavia of suffering from “Yugonostalgia”. Some of the accused have since “celebrated” that “malady”. We may gain insight into their conflict, on a theoretical level, from research on the general processes that feed both the memory-preserving and “memory-making” of nostalgia. Among those who have sought to remember modern Yugoslavia and to thereby contribute to a more nuanced history of its existence and demise, creative writers have offered some of the most thoughtful and evocative reminiscences. In his autobiographical Mama Leone, “Yugoslav”/Bosnian/Croat writer Miljenko Jergović raises a number of questions, implicitly and explicitly, concerning memory. Yet, he also offers an elegant eulogy to a country, and a childhood, now lost.