History, Fiction, and the Logic of Evil in Feđa Šehović’s Novel Oslobađanje đavola

Abstract

Oslobađanje đavola (1987), together with Gorak okus duše (1983) and Uvod u tvrđavu (1989), constitutes a trilogy by Feđa Šehović (1930–2025), published under the pseudonym Raul Mitrovich, and is regarded as representative of the Croatian neo-historical novel. Starting from the insight into the characteristic poetic “duality” of this genre–its tendency towards contemporary postmodernist poetics (intertextuality, questioning the boundaries of fiction and reality, relationship between history and literature), while simultaneously relying on traditional elements of the historical novel (moral structure and didacticism)–Šehović’s novel is analysed from two perspectives. The first concerns intertextual strategies and ironic dialogue with historiographic discourse, which subvert the dominant narrative of the 1667 Dubrovnik earthquake and produce a counter-narrative that deconstructs the cultural myth of the Dubrovnik Republic. The second, moralistic aspect, associated with the eponymous motif of “releasing the devil”, involves an examination of evil as an anthropological constant and a driving force of history. History, as portrayed in the novel, appears as a cyclical repetition of violent patterns and is interpreted through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory, with particular attention to the manifestations of the scapegoat mechanism across different narrative levels. The double analytical approach highlights the ambivalent meanings of the relationship between literature and history: the novel uses intertextual procedures to relativise and erase the boundaries between history and fiction, but it also re-establishes them with its moral structure, making literature a privileged medium of moral knowledge.