“Perché i xe bestie?!” Politics, race and exclusion in Vladan Desnica’s The Winter Summer Vacation

Although Vladan Desnica’s novel Zimsko ljetovanje (The Winter Summer Vacation, 1950) has been criticised for being apolitical due to its emphatically realistic depiction and explicit avoidance of the expected themes of the Second World War, it is a prominent example of a political novel. On several narrative levels, the author draws attention to the expectations of the genre’s conventions and reshapes them in an imaginative and politically subversive way. By consistently drawing on officially proclaimed realist procedures and traditional narrative style, Desnica exposes the problematic nature of the ‘pragmatic’ use of literature and reveals hidden social controversies. He makes his ‘civilised’ characters into representatives of a Western colonial discourse and a racist vocabulary, turning them into a synecdoche of hegemonic relations and the production of inequality. Their attitude towards the socially and culturally disadvantaged peasants turns out to be a form of subjugation and production of hegemonic relations that correspond to those in a proclaimed egalitarian contemporary society. Although there was no racial question in Yugoslavia of the time, Desnica uses the colonial and racist discourse of his literary characters as an explicit form of hegemonic politics, referring with them both to imperialist Italy and to the contemporary egalitarian Yugoslav state. With his novel, Desnica evokes emancipatory interventions that work beyond the loose framework of the Morlach population. He steers his narrative towards a fundamental humanist framework in the sense of modernist interest in the representation of subjectivity and the mechanisms of community functioning.