The Experience of Exile as a Space of Confrontation Between Culture and Nature in Vladan Desnica’s Winter Holiday

Abstract

Having observed the idea of disharmony as paradigmatic—albeit ambiguously articulated within the structure of Vladan Desnica’s novel Winter Holiday— the author of this paper reconciles its anthropological aspect (the phenomenology of war, the psychology of exiles, and the sociology of the encounter between urban and rural mentalities) with a high-modernist philosophical approach to the perception of tension between culture and nature. The research methodology draws support from several explications within the field of cultural studies, and secondarily presupposes the terminological apparatus of literary imagology. The interpretive hypothesis stems from the mutual interplay [or 'interconnectedness'] of the socio-historical and a more universal, almost ontological problematic layer in Desnica’s novel.