ABOUT SEVERAL FEATURES OF THE SHORT STORIES IN “SKARBO” BY JADRANKA VLADOVA

Abstract

The text concludes several short stories from the collections “Skarbo in my Yard” (1986) and “Watermark” (1990) by Jadranka Vladova, jointly republished in “Skarbo” (2024) and dwells on the key poetic features of these short stories: an idea for intellectual humor, self-irony, minimalist thinking of the detail, the recognizable chronotope of the home, the living room, the yard, the nights at the Skopje Bit-pazar, the cinema, the library, etc. With the narrator's emotional and intimate relationship to the space, that prose is perceived as a magical setting of the imagination. Vladova transports the reader to the realm of fantastic and oneiric literature, but with a clear author's message that the most impossible dreams and wishes can only be achieved if they are sincerely wished upon and are derived from good intentions. For all the listed literary qualities, Vladova's short stories, both in an ethical and aesthetic sense, are a demonstration of an artistic narration of deep humanism in the early phase of postmodernism in Macedonian literature.

Keywords: short story; postmodernism; imagination; oneirism; poetics.