The Panorama of Social and Political Reflections on the Pavlović Family Nest in Svetlana Velmar-Janković’s Lagum

Abstract

The paper examines the social, historical, political and cultural domains of the identity image of Belgrade refracted through the temporal prism of World War II as a breaking point of the personal profiles of the heroes. The metaphors of memory and the linguistic component become signifiers of personal identity patterns, but more significantly markers of the social and political panorama of the city. Light symbolism is woven into the very core of the Pavlović family circle, determining mutual relations, and more fully conjuring up the Belgrade ambience. Using the analytical method, the poetics of memory (individual, family, group) and the phenomenology of imagination, the individual experience of Belgrade encompassed by transformational processes is alternately observed in the aspect of social and political connections with the formation of the image of an urban metaphor modified by historical processes. The goal of the research is to shape an integral poetic image of a civic environment with a tectonically changed role and significance on the collective social and political level, and the configuration of the family fresco and the functions of household members in new, significantly changed circumstances.