Draft:Milka Zicina

Milka Žicina (Prvča, Austria-Hungary, 9 October 1902 — Belgrade,Serbia, 3 February 1984) was a writer of novels with social themes in the period between the two world wars. She mainly dealt with the problems of disenfranchised girls and women. Both her output between the two world wars and after as a "socialist-forced-labor-camp prose" writer was misunderstood, ignored or underestimated by literary scholars. It was only after her death and the breakup of Yugoslavia that her work is now being rediscovered and better understood and appreciated.

Biography

Milka Žicina was born in Prvča near Nova Gradiška, in a poor Serbian family of railway guard Nikola Žica and his wife Cvijeta, née Milojević. Milka was forced to work as a maid in Nova Gradiška in early puberty. After finishing elementary school, in 1917, she went with her mother and sister to Sremski Karlovci and later in Novi Sad, where she matriculated from a Girls Gymnasium.

Life and work between the two wars

In 1919, Milka Žicina moved to Belgrade, got a job at the State Railways Administration and simultaneously studied typing. Then she went to Vienna, where she worked as a maid, and then returned to Belgrade. In Belgrade she failed to find a job again, so left for Hamburg, with the idea of ​​getting a job on a ship and going to the United States of America. Failing to realize this idea, she left Hamburg on foot to Metz, and there to Paris, where she supported herself by making opanke (leather footwear). Then she joined the leather workers' union, where she gave French lessons to workers from home country.

In Paris, she met Ilija Šakić (later head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and married him in 1928. In Paris, she socialized with leftists and sold leftist press, so the French authorities, together with her husband, exiled her to Belgium, where they remained until 1931.

From Belgium, the young married couple returned to Belgrade, where Milka started working in a Cooperative Hostel (at Makedonska 21) as a maid and night watchman. There she wrote her first novel Kajin put ("Cain's Way"). After that, she eventually got a job as a typist, but in 1940 she was fired for organizing a strike. Meanwhile, her second novel Devojka za sve (A Girl for everything) also released in 1940.

She spent the Second World War with her husband illegally, hiding in the house of a village teacher in Dolovo under the name Milica Šakić.

The post-war period and the conflict with the KPJ

After the liberation, she worked on the restoration of schools and cultural life in Pančevo County. After the successfully organized elections in Nova Gradiška in 1945, she became a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). The following year, she was appointed as the editor of the culture column in Rad magazine, and in 1948, by personal choice, she switched to freelance reporting.

In June 1951, she was arrested for cooperating with the Informburo. At the same time, a larger group of writers was arrested under the same charge, and Milka was the only woman among them. She spent seven months in Glavnjača, during which her guilt was determined. In January 1952, she was sentenced to eight years for collaborating with Vojislav Srzentić and his wife Dragica, with whom she was a close friend. She served as a slave in the Stolac women's camp in Herzegovina until June 1955, when her sentence was reduced and she was finally released.

After returning from prison, she lived with her husband in Sevojno until 1959, when they returned to Belgrade. In Belgrade, she lived with her husband at Dobračina no. 36, where she died on 28 February 1984.

Work

Milka Žicina belonged to the social literature movement between the two wars. In the thirties of the 20th century in Belgrade, she moved in the circle of Nolit's left-wing writers at Dobračina 6 (Radovan Zogović, Oskar Davičo, Hugo Klein, Milovan Đilas and others). Already with her first novel, published on the recommendation of Velibor Gligorić, she achieved success. In Paris, she translated socialist writers from French. She collaborated with many magazines, among others Pregled, Naša stvarnost, Žena danas and others.

Renewed interest in the literary work of Milka Žicina appeared with the change of historical circumstances, such as the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Jovan Deretić in the History of Serbian Literature says about Milka Žicina that she "brought the most significant novelty in prose creation... with her two proletarian novels... the second of which is among our better interwar novels".

Published works

• Cain's Way (novel; Belgrade, 1934)
• A girl for everything (novel; Belgrade, 1940)
• Repotraže (collection of reports; Belgrade, 1950)
• Second estate (novel; Belgrade, 1961)
• Notes from oncology (biographical prose; Belgrade, 1986)
• My village (novel; Belgrade, 1983)
• Everything, everything, everything (novel; Zagreb, 2002)
• Alone (novel; Belgrade, 2009)
• Let it be everything (short prose; Belgrade, 2014)

Milka Žicina's novels

Milka Žicina's first novel Cain's Way is a story about a poor rural family. It was published at Nolit press in 1934 and is the first novel in Serbian literature with a clear orientation of the socialist literature movement between the two wars. It experienced considerable popularity. It was translated and published in German (Drei Eulen Verlang, Düsseldorf, 1934) and French (Pabl. L`amitié par le livre, Paris, 1940), and after the war in Czech (Dilo, Prague, 1947) and Bulgarian (Narodna kultura, Sofia, 1948). It also saw a second edition in Yugoslavia (Rad, 1950).

The second novel, Devojka za sve tells about the difficult experiences of the novel's heroine in even more complex conditions of city life.

Her diary "Notes from the oncology clinic" is a brave testimony of the fight for life.

The manuscript about suffering in the Stolac women's camp was published posthumously, only at the beginning of the 21st century, under the "postmodernist" title Sve, sve, sve("Everything, Everything, Everything").

The novel Sam ("Alone") is a manuscript from the legacy of Milka Žicina that was only disclosed at the beginning of the 20th century. This manuscript is considered a prelude to the novel "Everything, Everything, Everything" and together with it a unique testimony of suffering due to the IB-resolution. Both manuscripts were written in the seventies of the 20th century, but the author, fearing repression, hid them. The texts were first published after her death in the magazines Dnevnik (1993) and Letopis of Matica srpska (1998).

Literature

• Српски биографски речник. 3, Д-З; Жицина, Милка. Нови Сад: Матица српска. 2007. pp. 808–809. ISBN 978-86-7946-001-1.COBISS 224742151
• Мала енциклопедија Просвета : општа енциклопедија. 1, А-Ј ; Жицина, Милка. Београд: Просвета. 1986. ISBN 978-86-07-00001-2.COBISS 29216775
• Жицина, Милка (1982). Девојка за све; Јован Деретић: Милка Жицина и "новореалистички" роман. Београд: Нолит. pp. 355–364.COBISS 27846151
• Гароња Радованац, Славица (2010). Жена у српској књижевности. Нови Сад: Дневник. pp. 229–290. ISBN 978-86-7966-032-9.COBISS 246060039
• Деретић, Јован (1983). Историја српске књижевности. Београд: Нолит.COBISS 24896519

References

• Adapted from Serbian Wikipedia.