Time-Machines in Post-Yugoslav Literature: Navigating Temporal Ruins

• In Event: Yugoslav Configurations II: Warped Time in the Balkans

Abstract

The motif of the time machine—an emblem of both escape and reckoning—features prominently in two post-Yugoslav (and, notably, post-pandemic) novels from 2021: Barbi Marković’s Die verschissene Zeit (The pissed-away time) and Vesna Marić’s The President Shop (2021). In both works, an eccentric older figure constructs a device that bends time, inviting protagonists to reconfigure their relationship to history, memory, and (political) reality.
Marković’s novel immerses readers in the chaos of 1990s Belgrade, where three young characters are caught in a dystopian loop of war, economic collapse, and cultural disarray. Their journey through time is not just an attempt to escape but also a desperate struggle to make sense of history. Meanwhile, in Marić’s novel, the time machine is an eerie window into a future shaped by the very forces the present refuses to acknowledge. The novel depicts a society where war has not yet arrived, but its mechanisms are already in place: an inevitability seen more clearly through the machine’s lens. At the same time – no pun intended – the novel explores queer temporality, as both main protagonists navigate presents and futures that remain foreclosed within the current structures of family and national belonging.
By placing these works in dialogue, this paper examines the time machine as a device for articulating a post-Yugoslav chronotopos, one that is haunted by the past while urgently engaging with speculative futures.

Author

• Olja Alvir, U of Vienna (Austria)