The Trauma of the “Erased” and Its Empathic Representation in the Contemporary Slovenian Novel

: The article examines the reflection of Slovenian prose writers on the pressing problem of modern Slovenian society — the collective trauma associated with the fate of the “erased”, people with Yugoslav passports, who at the time of the declaration of sovereignty lived and worked in Slovenia and, due to political and bureaucratic reasons, were excluded from the register of its permanent residents. In 1992 the newly declared democratic state of the Republic of Slovenia deprived over 25,000 of these people of their citizenship status. The truth about this “inconvenient” episode was suppressed or falsified by the authorities and the media for years. Prose writers Polona Glavan and Dino Bauk in their debut novels Kakorkoli (No Matter How, 2014) and Konec. Znova (The End. Again, 2015), dedicated to the consequences of the collapse of the SFRY and fundamental political and sociocultural changes in the post-Yugoslav space, use the ethical potential of the literary word to convey the empathic experience. Both works are united not only by the subject — the fate of the “erased” and the attitude of indigenous Slovenians towards them — but also by the very sympathetic modality of the narrative, a mimetic way of coping with collective trauma through artistic expression. Through the artistic verbalization of empathy, the authors strive to convey the consequences of the traumatic experience both sides of the conflict went through and to destroy the stereotypes of its perception existing in the public consciousness. Drawing the attention of the readers to the current ethical discourse, they base their interpretations of the images of the “erased” on a sincere understanding of the trauma of outcasts, and resort to the chronotope of a multicultural space, which determines the views and actions of the characters.