BORDERLINE MANUSCRIPT

Abstract

Relying on Derrida’s insight into the relation between fiction and referentiality and literature and politics in the works he describes as returns from the USSR, we discuss their articulation in the reception of the classic return in Croatian literature – Krleža’s Journey to Russia. We start with the fragment of a dialogue between the traveller and the customs officer – the travelogue’s traditional rivals – the analysis of which underlines the problematization of limits and laws which govern the reading process. Statements about literature and art, the contamination of the genre, the contradiction between the authorial function and the intervention in the uniqueness and the unity of the literary work, and a series of narrative and stylistic techniques indicate the constitutive impossibility of reducing the political implications of Journey to Russia for the writer’s politics, or the biographical and historical circumstances of its publication. Playing the laws which govern its reading, Journey to Russia puts the reader in front of its law of contamination and unreadability, smuggling meaning beyond the limits of
interpretation.