ABSTRACT
Slaka is a Cold War simulacrum of the other Europe behind the Iron Curtain. Its violent history and politics, unstable boundaries, and its hybrid heritage overridden by socialist realism have been constructed out of a plethora of primary features taken for the essence of the timeless ‘eastern Europeanness’. Although the novel is set in the summer of the British Royal Wedding of 1981, and thus firmly anchored in British/western time, the Slakanian time unfolds in a different dimension. It is locked down at the heydays of communism, when the large portraits of the Party leaders surveyed the streets and the pictures of ‘the happy workers and the clean tractors’ monopolised museum rooms.
