Perpetually Peripheral: Life Narratives of/by Sunčana Škrinjarić and Divna Zečević

Résumé

This article looks into the life writing of two overlooked Croatian writers: Sunčana Škrinjarić and Divna Zečević. Life writing, texts that, according to the literary scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, depict (auto-)biographical trajectories, are the predominant mode of Yugoslav women’s literature. Škrinjarić’s and Zečević’s confessional fragments, however, were published both too early and too late: while their works appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, their most important autobiographical texts, a coming-of-age trilogy (Škrinjarić) and an extensive diary (Zečević), were published only after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. Moreover, these two writers never fully participated in Yugoslav second-wave feminism, a dissident political current that affirmed the aesthetic of female writing and thus helped more notable literary figures gain recognition. My analysis acknowledges these historical circumstances while arguing that Škrinjarić’s and Zečević’s texts depicting their lives, as well as the lives of other women, should be interpreted as part of Yugoslav feminist literature. The article is divided into two parts. The first part argues that Škrinjarić and Zečević wrote their autobiographical and biographical texts by comparing female and male life trajectories, and that their feminist stance is evident in women’s inability to follow normative paths to success. The second part analyses their attempts to find feminist foremothers. Škrinjarić and Zečević, did so by researching biographies of two early women’s rights activists, the interwar socialist Zofka Kveder and the nineteenth-century writer Dragojla Jarnević.