Mirko Kovač’s Narrative Alloy 
(Biography of Malvina Trifković)
Vesna Vukićević Janković
Univerza Črne gore, Filološka fakulteta Nikšić, Danila Bojovića bb, 81400 Nikšić, Črna gora
teajankovic@t-com.me
Mirko Kovač’s short novel Malvina (Biography of Malvina Trifković, 1971) is 
composed in an indirect, fragmentary sequencing of a variety of forms and 
kinds of discourses. The textual fragmentation principle is exactly what activates 
the reader’s engagement in the process of (re)constitution and (re)construction 
of meaning. Kovač’s poetical principles rise from his commitment to reality, the 
reader, and the literary text. Since it was first published, Malvina has attracted the 
attention of a wide professional and non-professional readership, primarily as 
a narrative about Serbian-Croatian hatred and as the first lesbian novel in the 
South Slavic world. It was not only the choice of narrative forms but also that of 
the topic that marks Kovač’s text as open to those forms of social life placed on the 
margins of society and exposed to repression. Kovač builds up ironic outlines of 
the codes of socio-cultural milieus and of all the forms of social power, providing 
a parodic image of social morality based on subversive mechanisms and partial 
truths. The social, political, ideological, religious, ethic, and aesthetic models of 
the world through which one perceives reality are established in the absence of 
emancipated action and choice. Prohibitions and limitations, stereotypes, and 
taboos, and, on the opposite side, transgression (breaking of boundaries) of all the 
proscriptions, are the object of redescription in this work.
Keywords: Serbian literature / Kovač, Mirko: Biography of Malvina Trifković / narration 
/ intertextuality / ideology / repression
115
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 40.3 (2017)
The novel Malvina (Biography of Malvina Trifković) by Mirko Kovač 
was written in 1970 and was first published in the collection of novel-
las titled The Wounds of Luka Meštrević (Rane Luke Meštrevića, 1971).1 
1 Kovač wrote to Borislav Pekić about how the novel was made (May 17, 1970): 
“I have written one really good things, a short roman fleuve, as Bule calls it, of some 
one hundred pages in all, with a huge family documentation of Malvina Trifković” 
(Pekić, 147). Soon after it was awarded, the book The Wounds of Luka Meštrević was 
judged ideologically inadequate and retrieved from all the libraries in Serbia. The text 
of Malvina was adapted into a theatrical piece and performed in 1973 in Belgrade, in 
Atelje 212. A bilingual edition in Croatian and Italian appeared in 1995 (published in 
PKn, letnik 40, št 3, Ljubljana, december 2017
116
It anticipates Kovač’s shift from “the poetics of modernist hermetism” 
(Beganović, Mirko) towards postmodernism, which will be completely 
realised in his novel An Introduction to Another Life (Uvod u drugi život) 
from 1983.
Malvina appears after Kovač’s novels Gallows (Gubilište, 1962) and 
My Sister Elida (Moja sestra Elida, 1965), marking thus the pivotal mo-
ment in Yugoslavian literature when modernist narrative started to strat-
ify, a “new textuality” was announced, and new postmodernist trends 
were recognized (Jerkov 9). Destablisation of the narrator, deviation 
from the norm, pronounciation of the creative freedoms, interrogation 
of historical truths, insertion of documents in literary texts are some of 
the characteristic of literary forms produced in these years. As Beganović 
also points out: “Being indisputably intertwined with the changes in the 
economic and political systems, cultural events appeared to be their in-
separable parts” (Beganović, Ruganje 30). In an interview from 1986, 
Kovač commented on this epoch of his own literary creation as follows:
Alas, from the publication of Elida in 1965, all the way to 1971, when my 
short novel Malvina appeared in Mašić’s Independent Release – that, if not 
the best, was certainly my strangest book, maybe with a unique literary pro-
cedure – so, in these six years I often found myself quarrelling with myself, 
with my understanding of literature, wondering why all that and what for, 
doubting deeply the written word, the very raison d’être of literature. The 
profession of a writer appeared so futile. I cannot say that I was experiencing 
a crisis, because I wrote a lot at the time, although today I am prone to say: 
when a writer writes a lot, then he is really going through a crisis. I was even 
considering totally devoting myself to film and television. (Aćin 1)
Kovač’s poetic principles grew from his strong social committment, as 
well as his committment towards the reader and literary text. Revisiting 
and rewriting his already published works, Malvina being among them 
(published again by Fraktura as a modified edition in 2007) was his 
aesthetic credo, the very essence of his literary endeavours. He showed 
it by constantly revising his already published works, as well as by his 
conscious position beyond, or above the social and political condition-
ing of the time, with an unremitting challenge to continuously, as he 
said, counter its literary and ideological puritanism (cf. Kovač 2017). 
Istra). After this came another separate edition, in 1977, when its critical reception for 
the first time recognized it as a novel. At the begining of the 1990s it was published 
in France (as a pocket edition Rivages poche with 20.000 copies), while it had three 
editions in Sweden. Apart from Italian, French, and Swedish, the novel was also trans-
lated into English, Dutch, and Hungarian.
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This resulted in his fate of being also continuously celebrated and per-
secuted at the same time, as well as of being deprived numerous awards 
due to his ideological stands.2 His “steady opposition which, undoubt-
edly, determined the reception of his work and the fate of the author 
himself, resulted at the beginning of the 90s in Kovač’s determination 
to leave Belgrade and move to Rovinj because he was exposed to real 
life danger” (Meić 242).
The cohesive agent of the novel Malvina (Biography of Malvina 
Trifković) is the destiny of a homosexual (anti-)heroine who is mak-
ing her way from Orthodox education to a monastery through a se-
ries of deflections: after the suicide of her school friend and lover, 
she runs away from a religious female school into a marriage with a 
man of Catholic denomination; she leaves him due to her love for 
his sister; and after an unsolved crime in which her adopted daughter 
was murdered (the daughter of her lover who died at parturition), 
she runs away to an Orthodox monastery where she becomes a neo-
phyte. The narrative is indirect and develops through a fragmanted 
succession of a variety of forms and kinds of discourses. The bordering 
literary forms: letters, testaments, confession, reports, forensic docu-
ments, black and white photographs (as mimetic and representational 
forms or as iconic material) are used with an aim to raise the implica-
tions of the documentary proceeding in its “high level of imagination” 
(Kovač, Evropska 51). The story, which grows up from a concatenation 
of relatively independent narrative fragments, is characterised by an 
exchange of diverse narrative perspectives and points of view, which is 
especially noticeable on the ideological and phraseological levels of the 
work. The play with the narrative strategy determined semantic trans-
formations, which are dependent upon the perception “of the narra-
tor, his function, i.e. his actantial status in the text” (Meić 269). It 
also points to both the transformation of the historically marginalized 
heroine (victim) into an anti-heroine (torturer), and to the deviation 
from the traditional expectation from the generic convention signaled 
initially in the title (biography).
2 Kovač’s works are translated into more than ten languages. He received interna-
tional awards (Herder and Tucholsky), as well as numeorus Yugoslavian awards, in-
cluding: Vilenica (Slovenia), Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša, 13. jul, Njegoševa nagrada (Mon-
tenegro), Bosanski stećak and Meša Selimović (Bosnia). Wounds of Luka Meštrević 
(1971) received Milovan Glišić award, but it was taken away from him in 1973, and 
the book was retreived from bookshops and libraries. A revised edition of the same 
collection came out in 1980, and the new short story from the book (“Pictures from 
the Meštrević Family Album”) received Andrićeva nagrada (Andrić Award).
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118
Repression and subordination
Since its publication in 1971, Malvina has attracted attention of a wide 
readership and professional audience, who used to read it predomi-
nantly through the key of Serbian-Croatian hatred or in light of the 
fact that it was the first Yugoslavian lesbian novel. Exactly, the novel 
was not only challenging because of its choice of the narrative form, 
“which in the context of desireable poetic models of the time was often 
considered deviant and unacceptable” (Meić 255), but also because of 
its thematic choice and its unrelenting referencing to the socially mar-
ginalized forms of life and the forms exposed to repression. “Linguistic 
and political, rethoric and repressive – these are the connections which 
this type of functional presentation sets against (humanistic) faith in 
language and its ability to present a subject or ‘truth,’ past or present, 
historical or fictive” (Bogutovac 72).
Kovač paints ironical contures of the codi of the social and cul-
tural millieus, while parodying the morality of the society based on the 
subversive mechanisms and partialized truths. Exactly, social, political, 
ideological, religious, ethical and aesthetical models of the world, on 
the basis of which human being perceives reality, emanate from the ab-
sence of emancipated action and choice (Lotman 295). In this sense, in 
Foucaultian fashion, Biography is a picture of the forms of the social ex-
clusion of the unwanted. Prohibitions and limitations, stereotypes and 
taboos, and, in contrast to these, transgression (breaking of boundaries) 
of all the proscriptions are precisely the object of the redescription in 
the work.
The story about Malvina is a story about an incessant chain of ex-
communications – her escape from the Serbian Orthodox and edu-
cational female collective (the syntagm points to a whole series of 
ideologically closed systems), her being reported dead by her father 
(because of her marriage to a Catholic, and even accounted as dead in 
his testament, whereby the totality of his moral hypocrisy is revealed), 
her departure from the family home because of the prohibited love to 
her sister-in-law, and her exclusion by her brother-in-law because of 
her Orthodox denomination, which is also a result of her self-exclusion 
from her parental home because of her love for young Katarina and her 
escape into a monastery, as the final denial to the social millieu which 
weaves rumours about the unsolved crime. Her double position: the 
position of the victim and the position of the torturer (which is realised 
in the most delicate female role – that of a mother) points to her rejec-
tion to fit into the norm, in the law of the community, or to accept any 
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other given role. Her devotion to and care of Julka Dumča presents an 
emotional contrast to her irresistible hatred and the emotional hyper-
trophy towards her adopted daughter and her unaccomplished double. 
Repressive mechanisms that inflict the operation of the characters are 
congruent with their emotional register that ranges from hypertrophic 
empathy to exalted hatred.
The foundational elements of the formation of female identity 
in a patriarchal system of values, “in which male and female beings 
(sex) become men and women (gender)” and in which “men have the 
power to negate women’s sexuality or to enforce its desireable forms” 
(Zaharijević 138), are respresented in this short novel as a structure 
which Malvina is constantly breaking with her behaviour. That system 
is already incarnated in the first Manuscript, in the letter to Malvina’s 
father, in which the head of the school, Petronela Barota, presents the 
agreeable social frame for an Orthodox girl: “Our aim is to make our 
female children capable of upholding appropriate and deserving places 
in the variety of relations within family, domestic, and social life, and 
to assume all the virtues of reputable, humble, educated, and hard-
working housewives, so that they can be satisfied and happy in their 
lives” (Kovač, Malvina 5).
Even the phraseological plan signals discriminatory use of language, 
while “linguistic visibility reveals what is reality to a society” (Savić 
304). Within this sociolinguistic frame, Petronela Barota annouces: 
“Therefore, only when enlightened and educated enough, can a woman 
become deserving companion to her husband” (Kovač, Malvina 5). 
Already the first three manuscripts addressed to Đorđe Trifković, 
Malvina’s father, show the subordinating union of language, gender, 
and power, as well as the position of woman whose virtues include 
“primarily the good knowledge of the science of the Orthdox faith” 
(13) and “all the virtues of a hardworking housewife” (15).
Malvina’s homosexuality is a form of her sexual identification, which 
leads her to the production of the abject beings, while, on the other side, 
her multiple alienation, actually, reflects the alienating representation 
of the society. Her disgust over Kirilo’s phallus metaphorically presents 
a mode of resistance to the male power/domination. All the hetero-
sexual relations in the novel are deprived of a vital sense of love and to-
getherness and reduced to a mere convention of mutual tolerance and 
extra-marital satisfactions. What remains after the tragic finalization of 
the short marital union of Kiril and Malvina Pavčić is documented in 
the last message issued to the wife to have her husband’s shirt and socks 
washed, while her own dead body is left in the kitchen.
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120
Malvina is presented as an object of various forms of coercion, while 
the forms of her subjugation and subversion are projected through the 
point of view of others and in accordance with various social models. In 
her book The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection Judith Butler 
points out:
As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power 
external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, how-
ever, that what ‘one’ is, one’s very formation as a subject, is in some sense 
dependent upon that very power is quite another. We are used to thinking of 
power as what presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates, 
sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order. This is surely a fair description 
of part of what power does. But if, following Foucault, we understand power 
as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence 
and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but 
also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we har-
bor and preserve in the beings that we are. (1–2)
Going in this direction, Malvina’s characterisation is realised exactly 
through autonomous forms of citing the norm and in the area of subjec-
tion to established rules (performativity), trying to avoid being includ-
ed among the abject beings (cf. Butler Gender 169–170). Paradoxically, 
she is included among them by her brother-in-law, and not because 
of her sexual determination but because of the nationality and her 
Orthodox faith.
That national and religious hatreds are brought to their zenith is 
shown already in “Manuscript M,” through Katarina’s comment on 
Ivan’s hatred and his irresistible revulsion towards Malvina:
[T]hat the rift in the family’s authority, the fame of the Pavčićs, came exactly 
because a Serbian woman brought misfortune and chaos in the harmony of 
our father, that that very same one would even her children turn towards her-
self only, even from the time of their childhood, and the only God’s answer 
was family’s tragedy: Anton’s mental illness and madness, and so is Katarina’a 
misfortune to be mentally excluded from the world of men-women relations, 
that finally all the wrath of the Fate would topple down on Tomislav, the devil 
sends him a Serbian for a wife … (Kovač, Malvina 83).
This assertion most completely exposes the absurdity towards which 
nationalistic and religious hatred leads; it turns Ivan even against the 
person who gave him life, while it also made Malvina’s father Đorđe 
Trifković to disavow his own daughter in his testament, because she 
has “trampled on our sacred Orthodox church by marrying a man of 
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Roman-Catholic faith” (29). The use of the ironic disocurse in the novel 
is particularly explicated in the istance of Ivana Pavčić’s (Manuscript) 
and Đorđe Trifković’s narratives. Through the use of archaic language 
(both Croatian and Serbian), these narrations focus on the ideological 
exclusivism and animosty towards the Other, but also on their national 
and religious identity founded on the same exclusivism. Actually, the 
linguistic identity of the characters becomes a mirror of their ideologi-
cal point of view, but also a mediator in the projection of an image of 
a desired reality. Behind this all is their care for their posession, the 
family heritage, so that the real motivational drive for the extension of 
hatred and the destruction of family relations is, in fact, the property 
and the preservation (even the false one) of the family’s name and re-
spectability. Those are the manuscripts J (Ladislav Pavčić, the glory and 
the pride of the proud Croatian nation) and K (Also Juraj Pavčić, follow­
ing the spirit and the steps of his brother) that announce the parodically 
doubled discourse – made on the basis of a documentary3 template and 
its fictional processing, that is on the basis of the situation in which his-
toriographic metafictions are placed within historical discourse, while 
they, at the same time, reject to renounce their autonomy as fiction 
(Hačion 1996: 208). The parody often turns grotesque, because the 
importance of the document is placed in the superposition over the 
common-sense understanding of things. Such examples are present in 
the narration of the following type: “You know, respected mandatory, 
that I speak of the gentile, thinking primarily of the Orthodox, because 
if they sneak in our graves, tomorrow they will sneak in our homes, 
our families, our mothers and sisters, in our wives, tomorrow they will 
conquer us and turn our churches into their Orthodox temples …” 
(Kovač, Malvina, 71).
Passages as such consecrate one of the fundamental auto-poetic com-
mitments of Mirko Kovač: that nationalisms are products of the mythol-
ogising consciousness and alibis for justification of all kinds of atrocities.
3 In his letter to B. Pekić, Kovač wrote: “I only read some old books. One of them 
is 108 Saborska sjednica – a discussion whether it should be allowed that Serbs are bur-
ied in the Catholic cemeteries in the Kingdom of Croats, Slavonians and Dalmatians” 
(Pekić 172). While in An Introduciton to Another Life (Uvod u drugi život), he says: “I 
wanted it to be a book in which I would play the role of a snoop. I had a testament 
at my disposal, as well as a bundle of family photographs, mostly found at junk yards 
or received from connoisseurs who were working on the old chests, or they were rum-
maging through depositories. … When in a curiosty shop I found a decomposing 
annual of the Serbian Orthodox female collective St. Mother Angelina in Budapest, 
everything was solved …” (344).
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122
Textual concentration and amplification of informativneness
Fragmentation, as the basis of the narrative manoeuvre, points to a 
multiply focalised narration (Marčetić 220), given through sixteen 
fragments labelled as manuscripts and marked by a letter in alpha-
betical order (A–P), as well as through the editor’s Final View on the 
Little Bundle of 16 Newly Arrived Manuscripts. The exchange of differ-
ent narrative instances determines a strongly explicated polyphony as 
a logical consequence of the culturaly and ideologically heterogenous 
narrators, who have their distinct points of view. Thus, the projected 
narrative structure represents a certain world with its own unique sys-
tem (Lotman 347). This is especially supported by the use of archaic 
ekavian and ijekavian dialectological variants “depending on who is the 
narrator of the given ‘manuscript’ – Malvina herself, her father, who 
comes from central Serbia, or Malvina’s husband’s brother, her broth-
er-in-law, who was born in Croatia” (Cidilko 142), with the presence 
of regionalisms and the heterogenous stylistic nuancing. These kinds of 
proceedings give rise to the “paradoxical choice of the traditional nar-
rative form and the postmodernist relativism of the narrators from the 
perspective of continual vicissitude” (Paić 63).
Instead of offering solutions to the accumulated uncertainties, and 
this thanks to the insight into all points of view (in the intersection of 
all the individual truths), The Final View, as a super-textual construct, 
suggests a restrictive informativeness as a consequence of the unreadi-
ness of the extradiegetic narrator (who, according to Genette, is the 
narrator “from this side of the treshold, who separates the real worlds of 
the writer and the reader from the fictive world of the hero,” Marčetić 
89) to offer information to the editor of the manuscript. This restric-
tion in the domain of knowledge of the unknown editor activates a 
receptive effort in mastering the story, by transfering the focus from 
the character onto the society. Apart from this, The Final View serves 
to demystify the strategy and to demolish any possibility of an omni-
scient narration. This is also supported by the doubled metaficitonal 
position – the existence of the anonymous editor of Biography and of 
its reviewer’s, Father Justinijan, to whom The Final View on the work 
of the editor belongs: “I cannot precisely determine if the picture of 
Malvina Trifković was composed out of itself, from a midden, from a 
battered book, from some heritage, or, rummaging through these cabi-
nets, you have obtained this image of hopelessness just as you wanted 
it to be” (Kovač, Malvina 97). In other words: “There’s no need to 
identify the origin of a manuscript, especially when the biography of 
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123
Malvina Trifković composed itself up in one, allow me too to say, 
novel” (98).
What the reader envisages through the character of the reviewer 
is the fact that the credibility of the documented material cannot be 
accepted unreservedly, just as the story about Malvina’s life cannot be 
reconstructed as true or complete. We see that the reviewer’s view is 
turned towards problematizing the borders between fact and fiction 
in a literary text, but also the borders between the text and non-fiction 
(the documented material). This, at the same time, forces us to con-
sider the problematic perspective of the narrator, when it comes to 
both his ideological and ethical positions, as well as the intensified pro-
cess of desacralisation. His letter to the editor begins with a comment 
on how the editor visited St. Petka on Easter of the previous year: “I 
was delighted when you brought that young man. He certainly cannot 
be older than twenty. You must be enjoying his company, too. You 
were gentle and enlightened by God’s transparency. Like male seed, 
the drops of tallow-candle were falling upon your black jacket” (97).
The obivous homosexual affinities of Father Justinijan and his com-
ment on the editor’s enlightment by the divine transparency intensify 
desacralisation of the monastery, whereas, on the other hand, he issues 
multiple invitations to take the pledge of keeping Malvina’s secret. This 
double perspective of the editor and the reviewer of the manuscripts, 
inserted in the formation of the presented text, as well as the signal that 
there are four more mansucripts under the pledge of secrecy, point out 
to the existence of a third version of the story. Apart from that, the 
reviewer’s knowledge is not limitless when it comes to shedding light 
on crime: “Yet, if all these events should be proclaimed suspicious, then 
history would suffer from them too …” (100). All the while, Kovač sug-
gests an axiologically superior position of the editor in the development 
of Malvina’s story, because he offers the readers their own “personal 
insight” (98) into things. The novel combines documentation about 
historically marginalized destinies, by connecting it within a literary 
template that is to “establish and save from forgetfulness the picture of 
Malvina Trifković’s life” (101):
However, after these comments in The Final View on the Biography of Malvina 
Trifković, I am disturbed by a notion: can there be something dishonest in 
the fact that a personal insight in all the occurrences in the representation 
of Malvina Trifković’s destiny is already made public, although it would not 
cause a spiritual revolution if one surrenders the manuscript, even if one burns 
it. Because, it is the fact that the writer makes one’s destiny and then passes it 
into the hands of the reader, a proof of self-glorification is ugly, and the satis-
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124
faction he feels while tidying up and complementing his manuscript already 
brings in enough doubts in the honesty of the vocation and the good inten-
tion, and so the temptation to cherish the secret and be cautious overpower 
the reason and the will. Admittedly, you are allowed more, therefore I am not 
suggesting that you should regret. (98)
The very ending of the text is the testimony about the factographic 
unreliability of the data and the human intervention in the composi-
tion—(re)construction—of the present narrative, about the doubts in 
the truth of the expertise and the use of inaccurate facts that “bring in 
more of evil blood than could be imagined” (99), about the fact that 
“data disappear themselves” (99), as well as that “if all the events were 
to be proclaimed suspicious, then history would suffer from them” 
(100). Father Justinijan’s statements reflect some postmodern attitudes 
about the relation between historical and literary truth, especially when 
referring to the overall opinion that writing about the past is always a 
discourse, that is a human construction (Hačion 98), that it irrevocably 
changes each one-sided notion about what is real and what’s a reference 
(45), and that to question the past in fiction or history means to open 
history for the present and to save it from being final and theologi-
cal (186). This poetic position becomes especially interesting when ap-
proached from the aspect of novelistic oscillation between modernism 
and postmodernism.
The self-conscious position of the narrator also suggests that not 
everything could be subjected to suspicion, because by doing this, as 
it is expressed in the reviewer’s narration, history itself would be ques-
tioned. By doing this, the measure of vagueness grows, but so does also 
the informativeness of the text (Lotman 380). Kovač, therefore, strips 
the process of reconstructing of the factographic truth as human cre-
ation, parodying all the while the relations of the fictive and the factual 
in the structure of the text.
The concluding part of the reviewer’s View offers semantic punc-
tuation of two indexing and symbolical signs: the cemetery and the 
railway, which is indexically additionally represented by the appearance 
of the black arson stains that is lichen (Kovač, Malvina 101). If we are 
to semantically determine an earlier indexing and symbolical sign, the 
one from the will of Malvina’s father: the bell that “strikes on one side 
only during burials and thus endlessly announces her death to her fa-
ther Đ. Trifković” (29), along with Malvina’s departure by a passenger 
train which is followed by a comment that “nobody escorted her, just 
as nobody but her escorted Katarina when she went into those Trebinje 
graves” (88), the intersection of these signs opens a semiotic space of 
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death for the world that exists as yet another disturbing factor of the 
linear causality of the text.
Generic destabilisation
The fragmentation principle of the text activates the reader’s engage-
ment in the process of (re)constitution and (re)construction of mean-
ing. The ending of the series of manuscripts is not the end of the subject 
matter, because we know that it is to be complemented by four more 
manuscripts that are crucial for the illumination of the crime and of 
Malvina’s position in all the events. The factographic material that we 
are shown is chipped, incomplete, by which its referentiality becomes 
destabilized. Destruction of the cause and effect series opens space 
for connotative charges: “It is true, it happens that the data disappear 
themselves, and I like datum, even the true one” (Kovač, Malvina 99), 
but also to a specific deviation from the lustful curiosity: “It is true, the 
stories would never end, especially if we gave in to them and ourselves 
entangled us in them” (101). Polarisations on all the levels of the text, 
fragmented in the manuscript material, are brought this way to univer-
sal values, because the stories of all the others appear as an asymmetric 
perspective of the masses in their relation with one story – Malvina’s 
version of the events that will be offered to the reader after her death.
The narrative heteroglossia produces incoherency of spatial struc-
tures, points of view, dissolution of ideological dogmas, a reversed 
image of the world (experiencing the masses as an anti-system), which, 
along with the decanonization and hybridisation of the genre, a docu-
mentary basis and referential relations to the Biblical subtext, supports 
a possible reading of Kovač’s literary achievement “at the origin of the 
binaries between existentialism and carnival” (Beganović, Ruganje 31). 
The illusion of the documentary is constantly being established and 
then lost, even in the seemingly framed segments – in the narrations 
of Ivan Pavčić and Malvina Trifković, because we can see that both of 
these characters are narratively awakened, that is that they have an acti-
vated relationship with the reader by possessing “an excess of narrative 
consciousness” (Jerkov 97).
With the initial signal of the text (which in the first edition rep-
resented the title, while it later appeared as a subtitle following the 
name of the female protagonist), Kovač suggests that the text has to 
do with a life story, which activates an expectation in relation with a 
canonized prototypical textual model and an insight into “mimetic and 
PKn, letnik 40, št 3, Ljubljana, december 2017
126
variational and transformational successions” (Juvan 180) and into a 
means “for awakening the reader’s gender cosciousness” (181). In this 
sense, Biography of Malvina Trifković presents a specific ironic distanc-
ing from the generic signal (life story, biography), i.e. it is a test that “by 
evoking the prototypes in front of a model reader, displays the fictional 
construction of setting [itself] wihin the generic tradition” (Juvan 179). 
In the first place, life story/biography as a form of historical narrative 
is characterised by linearity and chronological ordering. Lešić points 
out that “biography, which in the natural limits of life establishes an 
illusion of conclusiveness, remains an open form because history of life 
of every historical personality can always be complemented by facts 
learned afterwards. If, however, it is constructed as a closed narrative 
and semantic structure, then it attains the form of novella or a novel” 
(Lešić 422). Apart from this, a biographical text should also paint the 
social conditions surrounding the life in question (Popović 90), i.e. it 
should offer an insight into “how external facts, the circumstances of 
someone’s life, determine the character of the protagonist and how, on 
the other hand, that character determines them” (Marčetić 13).
The text shows a broken temporal scheme whose linear flow devel-
ops on a succession of segments of subjective time, so that the objective 
time becomes deprived of causality. The absence of a unique flow of 
the fabula, its bifurcation into a series of stories (branches), listing and 
detailing about some moments unimportant to the story, with, on the 
other hand, an evident restriction of the narrator’s knowldge when it 
comes to those data important for the denouement, implication of the 
consequences that are to be revealed only in the manuscript to follow, 
and which will be focalized through another narrative instance, refusing 
an answer to the accumulated questions, dispensing with a final solu-
tion, associating the temporal point of view with the consciousness of 
the narrator, together make that the objective time loses its significance.
Intertextual strategies
Kovač paints a picture which contains unmasking of all the forms of 
social and cultural dictates. Meić points out that Mirko Kovač’s overall 
poetics is in a constant “polemical gesture towards monologizing and 
ideological uniformity (primarily the Yugo-communist one, but also 
the nationalist one), and, consequently, against artistic dogma, too” 
(Meić 243). The enclosure of black and white photographs represents 
an incursion of the visual within the narrative. Refraining from portaits 
Vesna Vukićević Janković:     Mirko Kovač’s Narrative Alloy (Biography of Malvina Trifković)
127
represents a kind of anti-ekphrastic procedure, or a specific renounce­
ment of ekphrasis (Javor 703, quoting Jay David Bolter). Therefore, 
we are facing the exchange of external portraiture for black and white 
photographs as a form of an intermedial interpolation of visual (two-
dimensional) sequences with clearly emphasised cuts, which elevates 
semiotic implications of the text by spreading out its sense and adding 
up its meanings. This opens intertextual spaces for the reader, by which 
Juvan understands:
[A] play and intertwinement of heterogenous semiotic spaces that have been 
replanted into the text from some other place: be those the other represen-
tational spaces (from textual or visual worlds), or through an evocation of 
culturally characteristic locations, where certain languages, dialects, sociolects, 
registers and genres circulate. Intertextuality produces transgressive spaces. It 
is achieved by doubling, splitting, and widening of the central inner textual 
space and by deteritorrialisation of the pespective (265).
Intertextual passages, biblical quotes marked off with italic letters, are 
subordinated to the main idea of this short novel – irreversible rela-
tion with all the cultural norms and the canonized principles, which 
results with de/mystification of irresistible hatred (contrary to universal 
love) in all the forms of its appearance. Kovač’s texts are characterized 
by the use of “narrative strategies that are jeopardizing and degrading 
the traditional narration with its featured elements, such as: narrative 
instance, time, space, composition, characters,” so that “the canonized 
forms and values become questioned and, in a specific way, degraded” 
(Sekulović 670). Juvan maintains that citationality is a specific docu-
ment of a mentality, that is “a means for modelling of a semantic, ethi-
cal, stylistic, and generic profile of a literary work with the background 
of the literary and cultural tradition and the contemporary mass of 
sociolects” (294), and that, in relation with this, it always provokes 
interactive relation between the text and its readers, on one, and the 
cultural tradition on the other side. All the while Kovač’s short novel is 
“filled with a series of biblical quotations and allusions, which are often 
used to contradict their original meaning and to, in an indirect way, tell 
about the hypocrisy of the community” (Ahmetagić 155).
If we semantically determine the interpolation of the biblical text 
into the mansucripts, after the typology of citationality developed by 
Dubravka Oraić Tolić, we find that this text is characterized by illumi-
native citationality (Oraić Tolić 34). While keeping in mind that it is 
opposite of the illustrative citation, it means that Malvina’s citationality 
is directed exactly towards de(con)struction of the “the most correct 
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128
cultural pyramid in the history of Western civilisation,” on whose top 
stands “the Word of God and the Biblical text in which it is written 
down” (57). Citational interpolation of the biblical prototext serves 
as an alibi when Malvina has the homosexual intercourse with Julka 
Dumča, which not only destroys its fundamental meaning, but also 
desacrilizes it. Starting from Juvan’s narrative, which points that the 
citationality is a narrative strategy that counts on the activation of cul-
tral memory (Juvan 294), we realize that the articulation of prayer as 
an additional means in achieving love ecstasy between the female pro-
tagonists of the novel supports the breakthrough of the profane into 
the sacred and annihilate the conventionally established distinctiveness. 
The representative contents from the cultural tradition aims at shelter-
ing the transgression and justifying the deviation from the stipulated 
rules of behaviour.
Biblical quotations, allusions, parodies, and installations activate a 
citational relation of the reader and the prototext, and serve as an “ad-
ditional means of characterisation” (Ahmetagić 155), while the basis 
of characterisation is their Manuscript. Ivan’s epistle about the irresist-
ible hatred paradoxically represents “the most poetic moment on the 
pages of Biography of Malvina Trifković … focusing our attention on 
the turnover that happened in this world, and its message, while it calls 
for hatred as a special spiritual endownment, is opposed to Paul’s First 
Epistle to the Corinthians” (Ahmetagić 160). Therefore, the principles 
of contrast and metonymy rest at the semantic level, which ultimately 
leads to the destruction of the originally established meaning, to desa-
cralisation, and to the conviction: “And the world, gentlemen, can only 
be ruled by the ideology of irresistible hatred and repulsion” (42). By 
deforming the reference material and producing transgression of con-
ventional notions, Kovač opens a field of ontological destabilisation of 
the Christian cultural matrix. The subversive act of the reversal of the 
conventional virtues is shown in Ivan’s visionary thrill:
Well, what remains to us is to cherish the hatred, which is our spiritual need 
and which we will forever be calling for, to cherish it like a balm which heals a 
wound, and if you like to know it really is my only virtue and my hope … so 
that I came to the thought that it is the shadow of abstraction that makes ha-
tred a real process, and the more unapproachable it is for the simple soul, the 
more distant it is, inconceivable for the eye and the mind, it becomes stronger 
and it grows in ourselves, and it will become the blood of the people … be-
cause once it could have been a vice, but now, gentlemen, it is but a virtue … 
(Kovač, Malvina 42).
Vesna Vukićević Janković:     Mirko Kovač’s Narrative Alloy (Biography of Malvina Trifković)
129
The prevailing orality in the manuscripts of Ivan Pavčić is characterised 
by a diatribic speech which, in places that abound with affected states 
of nationalistic enthusiasm, is reflected as a parody of Christian epis-
tles. This is another example of complexity of this short novel’s narratve 
structure, in which different generic codes are concurrently constructed 
and deconstructed (cf. Juvan 182–183).
Conclusion
If we assume that models of space become organisational bases for de-
velopment of an image of the world—a complete ideological model 
characteristic for a particular type of culture (Lotman 289)—, we see 
that the ending of the text is, actually, coming back, or is a regression, 
to its very beginning: because in semantically determinant definition of 
the space, the meanings of the school (from which Malvina runs away 
at the beginning) and the monastery (in which she quietly waits the 
end of her life) are identified with the space of imprisonment. Apart 
from this, the epilogue space of the text (Final View) begins and ends 
with signals that activate the sacral Christian symbolism of Easter and 
Christmas, but which are contaminated with the signals of the priest’s 
homosexual affection towards the anonymous editor of Biography. We 
see that Final View, which demystifies the narrative procedure, also 
points out that the text “develops a specific form of narrartive sensitiv-
ity,” which Beganović understands as a resistance to the story’s con-
clusion (Beganović 39). Namely, Kovač remodels the linear space of 
stringing manuscripts into a structure that, by defying conclusiveness, 
gives a dimension of universality to the text.
The basis of all the manuscripts keeps the story about Malvina’s 
subordinted relation towards all the forms and possibilities of impris-
onment, that is, of institutionalisation, while the transgression, non-
observance, becomes a discourse generator. She exists in different forms 
of clearly defined social space, whose system she is incessantly subor-
dinating. It is exactly when we are given the information that Malvina 
is happy with nun Glikerija (whose name, just as the name of Father 
Justinijan, is another index sign) that the monastery becomes an ideal 
projection of perfect imprisonment, but also of the desired exile. The 
intensified arbitrary position of the narrator as the master of the story, 
who is “not subordinated to the model but who governs the model” 
(Jerkov 97), points to another fact: between society, as the creator of 
norms, and an individual, who trangresses the norm/Law, there is a 
PKn, letnik 40, št 3, Ljubljana, december 2017
130
discrepancy established in seeing things, so that crucial doubt in a pos-
sibility of bridging the space between fiction and fact is postulated, 
the space between the stories beyond the walls of the monastery and 
Malvina’s story, which remains imprisoned within the walls, wait “for 
that one manuscript that will be composed not in repentance but in a 
cognizance of onself, and which will bring about a fuller image of all 
the life and will hold onto the reader more” (77).
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Pripovedna zlitina Mirka Kovača (Življenjepis 
Malvine Trifković)
Ključne besede: srbska književnost / Kovač, Mirko: Životopis Malvine Trifković / 
pripovedna struktura / intertekstualnost / ideologija / represija
Kratki roman Mirka Kovača Malvina (Življenjepis Malvine Trifković, 1971) je 
sestavljen s posrednim, fragmentarnim nizanjem najrazličnejših form in vrst 
diskurzov. Prav princip tekstualne fragmentacije spodbudi bralčevo vpletenost 
v proces (re)konstitucije in (re)konstrukcije pomena. Kovačevi poetski prin-
cipi izvirajo iz njegove predanosti resničnosti, bralcu in literarnemu besedilu. 
Od svoje prve objave je Malvina pritegnila pozornost široke strokovne in ne-
profesionalne bralske javnosti predvsem kot pripoved o srbsko-hrvaškem so-
vraštvu in kot prvi lezbični roman v južnoslovanskem svetu. Ne le pripovedna 
forma, tudi tema Kovačev tekst odpira za tiste oblike družbenega življenja, ki 
so marginalizirane in izpostavljene zatiranju. Kovač ironično očrtuje kodekse 
socio-kulturnih okolij in oblik družbene moči in tako prinaša parodično sliko 
družbene moralnosti, utemeljeno na subverzivnih mehanizmih in parcialnih 
resnicah. Družbeni, politični, ideološki, religiozni, etični in estetski modeli 
sveta, skozi katere je mogoče opazovati realnost, se vzpostavljajo v pomanjka-
nju emancipirane akcije in izbire. Predmet posodobljenega opisa v pričujočem 
delu so prepovedi in omejitve, stereotipi in tabuji ter na drugi strani transgre-
sija (prehajanje meja) vseh prepovedi.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.163.41.09Kovač M.