Former Yugoslavia

Former Yugoslavia is the shifting landscape of national secession and armed conflict that draws Eduard Limonov first as a visitor and later as a would-be soldier. The narrative begins with distance and uncertainty: wars that can look like ancient local feuds from afar become harder to simplify as Vukovar is destroyed, Sarajevo is besieged, and fighting reignites over Serbian enclaves in Croatia. The region’s significance lies not only in its changing front lines but in the way those changes test the stories outsiders tell about who is victim, aggressor, or liberator.

A federation breaking into competing claims

The narrator initially watches the conflict from afar while working on a biography of Philip K. Dick. At first, with Serbs and Croats the principal parties in view, he compares their apparent enmity to a quarrel between rival villages: a dispute that outsiders might mistake for an ancient feud carried forward over drink and rifles. One example is a field the Serbs regard as sacred because it was the site of their bitterest historical defeat. The comparison conveys the narrator’s early detachment, but it also marks its limits: the violence is not merely an archaic local custom, and the competing claims cannot be understood by treating the people involved as caricatures.

Among the narrator’s friends, Croatian independence is defended as an expression of national self-determination: a nation should not be held in a federation against its will. Others challenge that position by asking whether the same principle would validate every regional separatist movement, and by invoking the different wartime histories of Serbs and Croats. They recall the Croatian Ustaše’s extreme violence against Serbs under the Second World War-era Croatian leadership of Ante Pavelić, including an episode recounted in Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt. The narrator gives particular weight to the vulnerability of Serbs who had lived in Croatia for generations and now faced becoming a minority under a new national government. He points to early measures under President Franjo Tuđman: Cyrillic signs were banned, Serbs were dismissed from the civil service, and the Yugoslav federation’s red-starred flag was replaced by a red-and-white checkerboard flag associated, for survivors of the Second World War, with the German-backed state established in 1941.

This account explains why the early conflict resists a clean moral division. Serbian fears in Croatia could be intelligible even amid propaganda, the narrator argues, without making every Serbian action defensible. The destruction of Vukovar becomes the point at which the situation begins to look clearer to him. The narrative thus makes the city’s devastation a turning point in perception as well as a military catastrophe: the distance that had allowed the conflict to resemble a folkloric feud gives way to evidence of what the war is doing.

Vukovar and the militia wars

In November 1991, Limonov is invited to Belgrade for the launch of one of his books. During a signing, uniformed men ask what he knows about the Serbian Republic of Slavonia, an enclave of Serbs in Croatia’s easternmost region. Its residents had rejected Croatian secession and declared secession of their own; fighting followed, and Vukovar had just fallen. Limonov is invited to go and see the situation for himself. The episode brings him into the conflict at the moment when the narrator’s own distant view is beginning to change.

The wars in the region are described as being fought overwhelmingly by militias rather than regular armies. Jean Rolin and Jean Hatzfeld, whose accounts overlap and who followed the fighting on the ground, supply the narrator with a more concrete picture of this paramilitary world. A roadblock could be manned by fighters whose affiliations were hard to identify. In the early days, men were learning what it meant to carry weapons and use them to intimidate civilians, abuse women, and take what they wanted. Young peasants and soccer hooligans were joined by delinquents, psychopaths, foreign mercenaries, Russian Slavophiles supporting the Serbs, neo-Nazis drawn to the Croatian side, and, later, jihadists allied with the Bosnian Muslims. The militias make the region’s breakdown visible at street level: political and national causes coexist with opportunism, armed bravado, and predation.

Bosnia and the siege of Sarajevo

When the Serb-Croat fighting provisionally subsides and the conflict shifts to Bosnia in the spring of 1992, the narrator’s social circle settles into a more confident moral account. Serb forces, associated with Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, are regarded as aggressors; Bosnian Muslims, represented by Alija Izetbegović, are understood as victims of a grave assault. In France, Sarajevo becomes a symbol of a hoped-for European ideal: its multiethnic society is celebrated through images of book-filled apartments, classical music, and Muslim residents who resemble the secular, humanist figures admired by the narrator’s friends. That image helps explain the strength of the response, but the narrator also shows how easily a population can be turned into an emblem for other people’s political hopes.

Friends of the narrator make repeated trips to besieged Sarajevo. They sleep in bomb-damaged buildings without bathing, cross shattered streets under sniper fire, and live with the thought that any day could be their last. The narrator admits that the experience had a romantic and status-enhancing appeal, but also identifies fear as one reason he did not go: Jean Hatzfeld had just lost a leg after coming under Kalashnikov fire. His hesitation is also political. He distrusts sacred missions, particularly those embraced by his own circle, and worries about how readily people can imagine themselves on the side of unquestionable virtue. Former Yugoslavia is therefore not only a battlefield in the account; it is a test of how observers respond to violence and to the moral certainty that can accompany involvement in it.

Renewed fighting and Limonov’s return

The conflict does not end when the fighting shifts from Croatia to Bosnia. In the account’s later phase, the war between Serbs and Bosnians continues while fighting between Serbs and Croats reignites over the Republic of Serbian Krajina, another Serbian enclave, this one near the Adriatic. With three parties involved, alliances become unstable: an enemy may become a temporary ally because both oppose a third force. Diplomats and journalists struggle to follow a conflict in which the boundaries between fronts and partnerships keep moving.

By this point Limonov no longer wants to work as a journalist. He travels by an almost empty overnight bus from Budapest to Belgrade; an embargo has closed the airport, and Serbia is described as isolated from Europe and sinking into paranoia. The narrator contrasts Limonov’s appetite for war with the despair of reasonable Serbs who oppose Milošević’s campaign, adding that Limonov neither knows nor seeks them out. He wants to enter the fighting and is prepared to lose himself in it, treating war as a possible salvation. His plan is to leave his bag at the Hotel Majestic and present himself to the representatives of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina as a simple soldier. They are surprised by the request, explain that reaching Krajina is difficult, and tell him to wait for contact. The episode closes on that delay: the region has become for Limonov not an object of observation but a destination, though his wish to fight has not yet carried him to the front.