Slavenka Drakulić’s integrity was unshakeable. When she described a battle, a society or a human predicament, she was not merely an authoritative observer, however an ethical compass.
The Croatian author’s affect on generations of readers, writers, journalists, feminists – on ladies and men internationally – can scarcely be overestimated. Communism and post-communism, conflict and post-war, crime and justice, altruistic goodness and banal evil, feminism and backlash, love and sexual violence, well being and sickness: she helped us to know all of this. Not by way of some grand narrative or all-encompassing evaluation, however by way of a meticulous and empathetic give attention to the small print: on tampons or rest room paper, a designer bracelet or the laborious, chilly ground beside a mattress within the Covid ward. And on folks.
Slavenka Drakulic in her summer time home in Sovinjak. © CHeFred
In Kyiv in 2014, simply after the Euromaidan had compelled the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Moscow, however earlier than a brand new president had been elected, Slavenka Drakulić was there to participate in a gathering between main worldwide and Ukrainian intellectuals. At one of many metropolis’s universities, she spoke in regards to the bridge in Mostar, about Srebrenica and in regards to the victims of nationalism in her previous Yugoslavia, the place a European conflict had raged not so way back. The corridor was packed to bursting with younger Ukrainians, primarily ladies. They held on her each phrase.
‘When you may now not bear in mind the names of the lifeless,’ she stated, ‘that’s when you realize that the conflict has begun.’
And it felt as if all of us who have been there at that very second understood exactly that. That the conflict had begun. The names of those that had died on the streets round Maidan – ‘the Heavenly Hundred’ – have been nonetheless on everybody’s lips. However the ‘little inexperienced males’ have been already in Crimea, and within the Donbas folks have been dying – folks whose names hardly anybody knew.
For Slavenka, nevertheless, the scenario in Ukraine proved to be a tough take a look at. Her solidarity with the victims of Russia’s conflict of aggression was robust and unwavering. She pressured the necessity to doc Russian conflict crimes and pointed to how the worldwide tribunal in The Hague contributed not solely to establishing justice but additionally the reality in regards to the crimes dedicated within the lands of the previous Yugoslavia. But she additionally struggled to completely grasp a scenario through which the road between crude nationalism and nation-building was not all the time clear-cut. For her, nationalism was the best enemy; it was this – along with patriarchy – that she had fought all through her life as a author.
She herself grew to become certainly one of chauvinism’s foremost targets. In 1992, in direction of the top of the fiercest a part of the conflict in Croatia, she and 4 different writers and journalists have been branded as enemies of the state and actually denounced as ‘witches’. On account of this assault, Slavenka Drakulić might now not reside or work in her homeland and sought refuge in Sweden. There, underneath Arne Ruth’s editorship, she grew to become certainly one of Dagens Nyheter’s most essential writers. A number of of her articles on the wars within the Balkans and the break-up of Yugoslavia have been first revealed in DN.
Throughout these years, she additionally wrote the books that established her worldwide repute: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Café Europa and Balkan Categorical. This was later adopted by the revealing and brave They Would By no means Harm a Fly, about conflict criminals on trial in The Hague. In 2005, that e-book earned her one of many continent’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Leipzig Guide Award for European Understanding.
The 2026 recipient of the identical prize, the Bosnian-Croatian creator Miljenko Jergović, as soon as in contrast Slavenka Drakulić’s try in her work to elucidate her house area to uninterested westerners to translating the classics of German idealism into the language of a Croatian farmer, solely the opposite means spherical. In different phrases, successfully unimaginable. But Slavenka Drakulić succeeded in her job, as a result of she wrote with out bitterness, sentimentality or stereotypes.
What was to be her closing e-book, nevertheless, was not a piece of non-fiction, however one in an extended line of novels and brief story collections (of which the 2 about Frida Kahlo and Mileva Einstein are among the many most generally learn). It’s titled Zašto nisam naučila kuhati (‘Why I by no means discovered to prepare dinner’) and was revealed in Croatia a few weeks in the past. It’s a tragicomic assortment of tales, all of which take their cue from the normal embroideries hung in Balkan kitchens, which, for instance, urge Croatian housewives to be thrifty and keep near the hob, for then they may even be handled to an occasional journey to the cinema. Basic Slavenka Drakulić: hard-hitting feminism, with a eager eye for the small print of on a regular basis life. (And as everybody who had the privilege of sitting in Slavenka’s kitchen is aware of: she was a god-gifted prepare dinner…)
Regardless of two kidney transplants – about which she wrote two books – and a number of other a long time on cortisone and immunosuppressants, the information of Slavenka Drakulić’s passing got here as a shock. She died on Saturday at her house in Sovinjak, Croatia. She was 76 years previous and is survived by her husband, the Swedish creator and journalist Richard Swartz, and by her daughter, the author Rujana Jeger.
An abridged model of this textual content was revealed in Swedish in Expressen on 24 June 2026.
