HISTORY AND THE POWER OF NARRATIVE IN SECOND BOOK OF MIGRATIONS BY MILOŠ CRNJANSKI

Abstract

The correspondence between the internal, that is to say fi ctional fi eld of reference and the external, that is to say the referential fi eld of the real, traditional historical fiction attains by taking into account certain limitations by means of which the insertion of the realm of the real into the historical fiction is accommodated. The novel Second Book of Migrations by Miloš Crnjanski reexamines the ontological nature of historical documents, questioning the issue of adequately replacing the past by the documents that cannot sustain the substantiation of their reliability, the same way history cannot fulfill the fate desired by the individual, as well as by the collective. The (im)potence of history is to be introspected in relation to the recently raised novel issues as to the status of death, as having lost its power of subversion.