Roman O London Analysis

A Narrative of Exile: Milos Crnjanski’s Roman o Londonu (A Novel about London) Abstract
Milos Crnjanski, one of the most prominent Serbian authors of the 20th century, was forced to leave Yugoslavia after the Second World War, owing to his connections with the pre-Communist regime. In Roman o Londonu, Crnjanski reflects on the two decades he spent exiled in post-war London. In his pivotal work, Crnjanski centres Russian rather than Serbian immigrants: the protagonists, Nikolaj and Nadja Rjepnin, an exiled Russian couple, live on the breadline, similarly to Crnjanski himself at the time. Although the novel covers only their time in London, it is through the hero’s countless disorderly reminiscences that the reader becomes acquainted with their
In London, the only connection with Rjepnin’s long lost home in St Petersburg is the Russian language, which appears constantly throughout the book, but not, as one would expect, in the conversation between the spouses, but solely in Nikolaj’s thoughts. His often-heard yet unarticulated cries in Russian signal us his vehement denial of the host culture. Crnjanski transfers the identity issue to the lingual sphere as well: while Russian familiarity stands in stark contrast to the ‘otherness’ of the English language, Serbian serves as a metalanguage. What is more, the use of both Cyrillic and Latin scripts throughout this multilingual text graphically represents the sense of alienation that the hero feels in London, but it also implies a cultural conflict between the East and the West. Rather than regarding Roman o Londonu as a mere linguistic experiment, the paper shows that it is a story about two souls caught, as Crnjanski puts it, in ‘this excessively rich city, which has a heart of stone, cruel to those miserable and poor’. Nikolaj dwells in the past and his only comfort lies in bittersweet memories of a happier life, back in Russia. Devoid of any hope, Nikolaj’s struggle to maintain his identity in the hostility