POETICS OF PROSE MILKA ŽICINA

Abstract

A significant part of this dissertation is devoted to the concentration camp experience of Milka Žicina. In the discourse of the former female prisoners’ memories, she also has a pioneering role in the formation of the women’s direction within the framework of a comprehensive discussion on the topic of Yugoslav camps for Informbiro officers. She was arrested in 1951 as a mature fifty-year-old woman, found herself in Belgrade’s Glavnjača prison, from where she arrived at the Stolac women’s camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she stayed from 1952 to 1955. An unusual testimony is presented in the novel Alone about the seven-month investigation and suffering in Glavnjača, which stands out for its high artistic value. The novel was published in 2009, posthumously, at Žicina’s last work, and it was written in the nineteen-seventies, fifteen years after being written, but
the author was forced to hide her manuscripts. Mihajlo Lalić compared her memoirs All, All, All..., which is the prose about herself and the other eighty female prisoners, to Notes from a Dead House.