Summary
Aleksandar Tišma: Ženarnik
Sexuality in the novel "Ženarnik" is mostly connected with scenes of various violence and sadistic forms of passion. The writer immersed himself in the world of an archaic, primitive community in order to recognize in it the true human nature obsessed with physicality and sexuality, the drive for power and ruling over people, as well as, above all, sadistic obsessions. In the poetic sense, it should be stated that Tišma wrote a true novel of the Desadov type, one of the most expressive of its kind in Serbian literature. If in the greatest and best segment of Tišma's oeuvre, the writer's need to reveal man's passion aimed at destroying norms and committing violations is evident, then this dark need of that destructive part of the human being was very clearly expressed in the novel "Ženarnik". The war situation or the camp environment, as a privileged chronotope of Tišma's prose, thus received a kind of mythic-historical supplement that the great Serbian writer had not attempted until now.
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