Hronotop čekaonice: Narativi o opsadi Sarajeva / Chronotope of the Waiting Room: Narratives of the Siege of Sarajevo

Abstract

The paper presents the concept of the chronotope of the waiting room and explores its characteristics through a corpus of works about the Siege of Sarajevo. The waiting room is depicted as one of the dominant chronotopes in twentieth-century art, with antecedents in literature about epidemics and sieges. Its key features include the spatial isolation of a community, the suspension of time within that isolated space, the disruption of symbolic order, and the spread of violence like contagion within it. The effort of all artistic works analyzed is emphasized in their fight against the evil affecting the community by fostering empathy and individualizing each victim. The paper primarily analyzes the novels The History of a Disease (Istorija bolesti) by Tvrtko Kulenović, Diary of an Exodus (Dnevnik selidbe) and Introduction to Floating (Uvod u lebdenje) by Dževad Karahasan, the theater production Waiting for Godot (Čekajući Godoa) directed by Susan Sontag, as well as the films Death in Sarajevo (Smrt u Sarajevu) and The Perfect Circle (Savršeni krug).