The Burden of history in multiculturalism

On the poetry of Dragan Velikić

Abstract

Dragan Velikić sets the historic experience and the questions of existence into the horizon of an open, plural thinking, and formulates the internal and external strata of a travel from Pula to Vienna via Budapest and Belgrade with a refined sensitivity and in a versatile way. He unveils to us the de-mythologised history of this region through the remembrance of the individual and the collective, establishing a strong system of reference. Velikić explains the linking impact of the connective structure on a social layer and temporal dimension, where the chains of actions align into recognisable patterns as an identifiable moment of a common culture. All this is an archived memory, where, to quote Ricouer, the “all-time-self-reality” of the memory is expanded by the “all-time-common-reality” through analogical transmission. The study wishes to research the extent to which the poetics of Velikić is able to mobilize the far-reaching cultural forms and social processes. His novels mark the region in a fluctuating era in which he clearly shows the historical sensibility of being polarised, celebrating the heterogeneity of cultural experience.