1. After Josip Broz Tito's break with Iosif Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country situated outside the eastern bloc until I960, when Albania stepped out as well.

2. Štiks, Igor, “The Berlin Wall Fell on Our Heads,” Up and Underground 17/18 (2010): 58.Google Scholar

3. Taylor, Maureen and Kent, Michael L., “Media Transitions in Bosnia: From Propagandistic Past to Uncertain Future,” Gazette 62, no. 5 (2000): 357.Google Scholar

4. Volčic, Zala, “Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1 (2007): 27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Volcic, these are crucial differences between Yugonostalgia and other forms of nostalgia for socialism, such as Ostalgie and Soviet nostalgia.

5. Arsenijevic, Vladimir et al., Leksikon Yu Mitologije (Beigrade, 2005; hereafter LYM).Google Scholar

6. The corpus of critical literature on LYM is not insignificant. For the texts in English, see Lindstrom, Nicole, “Yugonostalgia: Restorative and Reflexive Nostalgia in Former Yugoslavia,” East Central Europe/ECE 32, nos. 1-2 (June 2005): 231–42;Google Scholar Pauker, Iva, “Reconciliation and Populär Culture: A Promising Development in Former Yugoslavia,“ Local-Global 2 (2006): 72–81;Google Scholar Volčić, “Yugo-Nostalgia,” 21-38; Labov, Jessie, “Leksikon Yu Mitologije: Reading Yugoslavia from Abramović to žmurke,” in Aleksić, Tatjana, ed., Mythistory and Narratives of the Nation in the Balkans (Newcastle, Eng., 2007), 22–48;Google Scholar Palmberger, Monika, “Nostalgia Matters: Nostalgia for Yugoslavia as Potential Vision for A Better Future,” Sociologija 50, no. 4 (2008): 355–70;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Velikonja, Mitja, Titostalgija: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz, trans. Vukovic, Olga (Ljubljana, 2008).Google Scholar For the texts in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, see Teofil Pančić, “Knjiga smeha i pamčenja,” Vreme, 27 May 2004, at www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=379992 (last accessed 5 December 2012); Rade Dragojević, “Depo Jugoslavenskih užitaka,” Glas Slavonije, 25 July 2004, at www. glas-slavonije.hr/24453/2/Depo-jugoslavenskih-uzitaka (last accessed 5 December 2012); Dean Duda, “U raljama nostalgije,” Feral Tribüne, 28 September 2004, at feral.audiolinux. com/tpl/weeklyl/section3.tpl?IdLanguage=7&NrIssue=997&NrSection=14 (last accessed 5 December 2012); Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: Etnografija otpora u Beogradu i 2agrebu (Beigrade, 2005); Mitja Velikonja, “Povratak Otpisanih: Emancipatorski potenciajali jugonostalgije,” Peščanik.net, 5 November 2009, at pescanik.net/2009/ll/povratakotpisanih/ (last accessed 5 December 2012); Tanja Petrović, Yuropa: Jugoslovensko naslede i politike budučnosti u postjugoslovenskim druÅ¡tvima (Beigrade, 2012).

7. “The lifestyle magazine of Yugoslavia. Ran from the late sixties to the early nineties.” Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 369; emphasis in the original. Dubravka Ugresic was an editor of the Pojmovnik ruske avangarde (Glossary of the Russian Avant-Garde), the renowned scholarly essay series covering various issues related to the Russian avant-garde. One of the important theoretical concepts that the publication addressed was the Russian notion of byt (everyday life) and bytology. See Hansen, Löve Aage A., “Bytologia,” in Flaker, Aleksandar et al., eds., Pojmovnik ruske avangarde (Zagreb, 1985), 4:9–27.Google Scholar For the importance of the notion of everyday life in nostalgia studies, see Boym, Svetlana, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994);Google Scholar Boym, , The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

8. The initial call for participation can also be found at haw.nsk.hr/arhiva/vol2/ 786/17710/www.leksikon-yu-mitologije.net/index.php.html (last accessed 5 December 2012).

9. Dubravka UgreÅ¡ić, “0 cemu se radi,” on the Lexicon of Yu Mythology Web site (old version, dated 23 July 1999), at haw.nsk.hr/arhiva/vol2/786/17710/www.leksikon-yumitologije.net/ocemu.php.html (last accessed 5 December 2012).

10. Labov, “Leksikon Yu Mitologije,” 24.

11. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 4. Emphasis in the original.

12. The “Partisan myth” was built on the concept of the “brotherhood and unity” of the communist resistance movement led by Tito. The Partisan movement forged Yugoslavia in the course of World War II as a revolutionär)/ creation, fighting not only against fascism but also against the monarchical construction of Yugoslavia. The war that the Partisans were waging was “not only aimed at defeating the fascist armies, but also at smashing all the political monstrosities that historical fascism has installed, supported, or provided with ideological references.” Pupovac, Ozren, “Against the Post-Socialist Reason,” Prelom: Journal for Images andPolitics 8 (2006): 14.Google Scholar The Ustasa was an anti-Yugoslav, Ultranationalist, and terrorist organization that came to power in the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet State established by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during World War II. The Ustaias assisted both the Italian and German occupation forces in Yugoslavia in fighting against Yugoslav Partisans and persecuted the Jews, Roma, and Serbs who were collectively declared enemies of the Croatian people. The Cetniks were officially the royalist Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland in World War II. Although initially a resistance movement, the Cetniks functioned as a Serb nationalist militia that collaborated with the Axis occupation and ended up primarily fighting the Partisans.

13. See UgreÅ¡ić, Dubravka, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, trans. Hawkesworth, Celia (University Park, 1998), 39–40,194. Emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

14. Debeljak, Aleš, Twilight ofthe Idols: Recollections ofa Lost Yugoslavia (New York, 1994), 35.Google Scholar

15. Ugrešic, Dubravka, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, trans. Hawkesworth, Celia (New York, 1999), 234.Google Scholar

16. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 5.

17. Dragojević, “Depo Jugoslavenskih užitaka.“

18. As Labov notes, the Lexicon was compiled in the same way as religious texts in medieval Europe and as “in the most famous incarnation of this genre, the French Encyclopedie.” Labov, “Leksikon Yu Mitologije,” 37. But while the authors of the encyclopedias in the Enlightenment period were intellectuals and proto-scientists, the authors of the Lexicon vary by profile and profession.

19. Perica, Vjekoslav, Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (Oxford, 2002), 100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. One can certainly Claim that the Lexicon has a precursor in Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957), the classic example of analyzing the “myths” circulating in everyday life. Both Mythologies and the Lexicon take great relish in exploring cultural artifacts and phenomena and enact a paradox in their imaginative and playful readings of culture in a heavily ideologized world that tries to abolish precisely such imaginative play. In addition, an informative and punchy journalistic style füll of improvisations on relevant cultural issues rather than carefully considered theoretical discourse is characteristic of both books. Further, both works express nostalgia and irony simultaneously. Just as Barthes demands that the intellectual distance himself from the mass and, accordingly, maintain a sarcastic or ironic detachment from “mass culture,” so the contributors to the Lexicon retain the ironic mode of writing. On that account, the Lexicon not only expresses skepticism about a perfect socialist past in former Yugoslavia but also undermines a faith in newly nationalist mythologies manufactured out of the same pieces as the demolished socialist System.

21. This abbreviation was used for the stickers that Yugoslav vehicles would have attached to their windshields when abroad, and also for the Internet domain that was populär among Yugonostalgia Web Sites until 2010, when it was phased out.

22. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, trans. Zohn, Harry (New York, 1968), 262.Google Scholar

23. See Caygill, Howard, “Walter Benjamin's Concept of Cultural History,” in Ferris, David, ed., Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 90.Google Scholar

24. Mali, Joseph, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago, 2003), 268.Google Scholar

25. The author of a seminal study on collective memory, Maurice Halbwach, argues that it is “in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present, a reconstruction prepared … by reconstructions of earlier periods wherein past images had already been altered.” For the cultural critic Svetlana Boym, collective memory is one of the “common landmarks of everyday life” that “constitute[s] shared social frameworks of individual recollections.” See Halbwach, Maurice, On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. Coser, Lewis A. (Chicago, 1992), 47;Google Scholar Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 53.

26. Hell, Julia and Schönle, Andreas, “Introduction,” in Hell, Julia and Schönle, Andreas, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham, 2010), 6–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Ibid.

28. Judging by the ränge of postings—by tone and subjective bias in the content of the entries—the entire project of the Lexicon is evaluated in radically different manners on the Web. There one can find entries and comments that are not included in the book— particularly those that are both extremely nationalist and highly negative toward the Yugoslav heritage.

29. Labov, “Leksikon Yu Mitologije,” 37.

30. Ibid.

31. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 461.

32. The Lexicon Web site has developed into a network (leksikon-yu-mitologije. net;postyu.info; www.youtube.com/leksikonyumitologije; twitter.com/#!/LeksikonYU; plus.google.com/110613281598295879013/posts) and editors are currently working on the third edition of the book, which differs from the original volume.

33. Arsenijević, et al., LYM, 154-55.

34. Ibid., 350.

35. Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation ofHistory in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, Eng., 1984).Google Scholar

36. Fehr, Michael, “A Museum and Its Memory—The Art of Recovering History,” in Crane, Susan A., ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford, 2000), 35.Google Scholar

37. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 143,236.

38. On advertising and marketing in socialist Yugoslavia, see Patterson, Patrick Hyder, “The Truth Half Told: Finding the Perfect Pitch for Advertising and Marketing in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950-1991,” Enterprise & Society 4, no. 2 (2003): 179–225.Google Scholar

39. Morreti, Franco, “Ulysses and the Twentieth Century,” in Lentricchia, Frank and DuBois, Andrew, eds., Close Reading: The Reader (Durham, 2003), 336.Google Scholar

40. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 427.

41. Ibid., 137.

42. For example, all visas were abolished by 1967, and ordinary Yugoslav Citizens could travel to the west with relative ease, as well as take loans based on western credit. During the 1960s, Yugoslavia also introduced a more liberal, open, and decentralized political System within which, according to Sabrina Ramet, the first liberal voices appeared, advocating greater decentralization. See Ramet, Sabrina, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (Bloomington, 1992), 84–85.Google Scholar About improved living Standards in 1960s, see Patterson, “The Truth Half Told,” 187.

43. Patterson defines it as “a Yugoslav Version of the Good Life, a modest and moderated but nonetheless satisfying approximation of the consumption-driven abundance that had remade the capitalist West in the years after the Second World War.” Patterson, Patrick Hyder, “Yugoslavia as It Once Was: What Tourism and Leisure Meant for the History of the Socialist Federation,” in Grandits, Hannes and Taylor, Karin, eds., Yugoslavia's Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s-1980s) (Budapest, 2010), 367.Google Scholar

44. Patterson, “Yugoslavia as It Once Was,” 393.

45. Labov, “Leksikon Yu Mitologije,” 28.

46. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 396.

47. Ibid., 398-99.

48. Tito's magnificent funeral was “attended by a vast number of renowned political and public figures from around the world. There were 206 foreign delegations from 123 countries…. Practically all world statesmen were there, save for President Carter. Over the 64 hours while he lay in State, 465,000 people filed past to pay their last respect.“ Velikonja, Titostalgija, 15.

49. Labov, “Leksikon Yu Mitologije,” 28.

50. Over thirty or so years, Tito enjoyed the privilege of living in the Brijuni archipelago, spending up to four months a year in the place that, both in reality and in the imagination of Yugoslav Citizens, embodied the “dream world” of luxury, escape, and exoticism that no one eise had a chance to nurture. Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic describes Tito's activities in Brijuni: “Tito not only relaxed. He spent his holidays working—as the head of State, chairman of the communist party and Commander of the military. At the same time he played host to political leaders from Fidel Castro to Queen Elisabeth, Indira Gandhi to Willy Brandt, Leonid Brezhnev to the Persian tsar Reza Pahlavi—and many, many others. Stars fascinated Tito, and many populär personalities, from opera singers like Mario del Monaco, to Valentina Tereskova, the first woman in space, were invited to Brijuni too.” After defending Tito's image from the revisionists’ attempts to represent the former leader as “a manipulator, liar, and traitor,” Drakulic concludes her article in the following way: “Tito is just one example of how, in the former Yugoslavia, we still have too many myths and too much ideology instead of facts, of history.” Drakulic, “Tito between Legend and Thriller,” Eurozine, 25 September 2009, at www.eurozine.com/articles/2009O9-25-drakulic-en.html (last accessed 5 December 2012).

51. Vlaisavljević, Ugo, “Tito's Greatest Gift: The Vacant Seat of Power,” in Leposavić, Radonja, ed., VlasTITO Iskustvo: PastPresent (Beigrade, 2004), 93.Google Scholar

52. Arsenijević et al., LYM, 396.

53. Technically Yugoslavia would have belonged to the Second World, in terms of its development, but because of its significance for Third World countries and its being afounder of the Non-Aligned Movement, it was considered an “honorary” member of the Third World. On the three-world Schema, see Sauvy, Alfred, “Trois Mondes, Une Planete,” L'Obsevateur, 14 August 1952,14.Google Scholar For an analysis of this Schema, see Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 333–34.Google Scholar See also Hoffman, George Walter and Neal, Fred Warner, Yugoslavia and the New Communism (New York, 1962);Google Scholar Woodward, Susan L., Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C., 1995).Google Scholar

54. Arsenijevic et al., LYM, 355.

55. Similar to the Soviet State, Yugoslavia was built on and reproduced a discourse of victory, introducing Soviet-style administrative socialism with its cult of physical work, collectivism, anticapitalism, and a five-year economic plan aiming to build a socialist country through massive voluntary work. In its early stage after World War II, Yugoslavia adopted the Soviet strategy of socialist modernization: the countryside received electricity, private property was nationalized, private entrepreneurship was reduced, and heavy industry was promoted at the expense of producing consumer goods. After Tito's break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia started capitalizing on the history of its own independent and authentic revolution. It opened up to the west and introduced workers’ self-management, “a form of conceptual syncretism leaning towards fusion of Marxist, Proudhonist, Blanquist, and other mutually often antagonistic socialist ideas.” Oto Luthar et al., eds., The Land Between: A History ofSlovenia (Frankfurt am Main, 2008), 459.

56. Patterson, “Yugoslavia as It Once Was,” 367.

57. Ibid., 367-68.

58. For more on the workings of consumerist abundance in Yugoslavia, see Patrick Hyder Patterson, “The New Class: Consumer Culture under Socialism and the Unmaking of the Yugoslav Dream, 1945-1991” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001). The entry “Seven Miracles of Communism” is not only an expression of nostalgia for Yugoslav socialism but also reflects a broader phenomenon—nostalgia for socialism more generally. Accordlng to sociologist Mitja Velikonja, there is a common/ee/ing that all different nostal-gias for socialism share: “Underneath its amorphous, amoeba-like appearance, it is pos-sible to detect its basic structure and characteristics, which are summed up in everyday Statements heard in practically all corners of postsocialist Europe: after all, it was not so bad, or, we were poor but we didn't lack anything, or, we had nothing but we were happy.” Velikonja, Titostalgija, 33. Emphasis in the original.

59. Vuletić, Dean, “European Sounds, Yugoslav Visions: Performing Yugoslavia at the Eurovision Song Contest,” in Luthar, Breda and Pusnik, Marusa, eds., Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Washington, D.C., 2010), 123.Google Scholar Vuletic discusses the importance of Yugoslavia's participation in Eurovision during the 1960s and 1970s for its Citizens, offering insights into what “Yugoslavia's Citizens thought about their relations with the rest of the world as well as their own cultural and political identities” (136).

60. Arsenijević et al., LYM, 155.

61. The same equation of war violence with an irrational, uncontrollable, and unstoppable madness can be found in Srdan Dragojevic's film Pretty Villages, Pretty Flame (1996), which depicts the destruction of Bosnia through scenes of violent looting and burning by soldiers. Representing the civil war in Yugoslavia “as some great arena of madness,“ the scenes are accompanied by the well-known pop-rock song, “All of Yugoslavia Dances Rock'n'Roll” (Elektricni orgazam) from the end of 1980s. The song successfully recalls the Yugoslav rock'n'roll cliches of 1980s rebellion and the “Balkan/Yu stereotype” of the wild, untamed, hedonistic, and irrational “rebel soul.” The song thus turns the scenes of destruction into celebration and fun, simultaneously perpetuating the existing stereo¬types of passionate and “dangerous” Southern Slavs. Moreover, during these scenes of destruction death remains invisible. As Pavle Levi argues in his analysis of the film, “no killing seems to take place, and no one seems to die.” According to Levi, Dragojevic's film “reflected the [Serbian] nation's dominant sociopolitical and cultural trends, which never allowed for the damaging effects of ethnic madness to be thoroughly addressed.” Levi, Pavle, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema (Stanford, 2007), 139–58.Google Scholar

62. Arsenijević et al., LYM, 152.

63. Williams, Raymond, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1965), 61–63;Google Scholar Williams, , Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 132.Google Scholar

64. Arsenijević et al., LYM, 151-52.

65. Martin Pogačar, “Yugoslav Past in Film and Music: Yugoslav Interfilmic Referentiality,” in Luthar and PuÅ¡nik, eds., Remembering Utopia, 211.

66. Ibid., 211-12.

67. Duda, “U raljama nostalgije.” The contributors to the Lexicon, Duda argues, are acting as “privileged witnesses and actors from the golden age of decadent socialism,“ who are shaping “the material mythological offer of commodities” from the period. Thus, Duda and Volčić position Yugonostalgia similarly: as another cultural side effect of postYugoslav transitional societies. According to Volcic, Yugonostalgia is “seized upon by the emerging commercial culture in the postsocialist era, which mobilized the sense of lost past as a means of promoting consumption.” See Volčić, “Yugo-Nostalgia,” 25. For the answer to these and similar charges against Yugonostalgic discourses, see Velikonja, Titostalgija, 129.

68. Interestingly, both critics avoid commenting on the concrete historical contexts in which those nostalgic projects came into existence. For example, Pogacar neglects the context of the 1970s, when the nostalgic gaze on the earlier decade was largely a consequence of the turbulence the Yugoslav political System was experiencing at the time. During the decade when the series was made and widely aired on television, ethnic tensions escalated for the first time, resulting in protests such as Maspok and the Croatian Spring in 1971 in Zagreb. In addition, in 1974, Yugoslavia's new, revised constitution claimed more rights and independence for the individual republics and provinces (this was regarded as a move against Serbia's hegemony in Yugoslavia) and the right to unilaterally secede from the Federal Republic. On the other hand, Duda avoids commenting on what the term Yugonostalgia meant in the public discourse of the new independent post-Yugoslav states.

69. See Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 49-50.

70. Pančić, “Knjiga smeha i pamcenja.” Emphasis added.

71. UgreÅ¡ić, Culture ofLies, 74,77-78.

72. UgreÅ¡ić ascribes the name “Yugoslaviana” to “the mythology of everyday life which the Citizens of former Yugoslavia built and shared for fifty years.” See Ugregic, Culture ofLies, 232.

73. Ibid., 68. Emphasis in the original.

74. Panttč, “Knjiga smeha i pamcenja.“

75. The social anthropologist Stef Jansen provides a very similar account of Yugonostalgia. See Jansen, Antinacionalizam, 254-58.

76. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 50.

77. Ibid., xiv. Janover, Michael, “Nostalgias,” Critical Horizons 1, no. 1 (2000): 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78. Ibid., 128.

79. Velikonja, Titostalgija, 128,123. Emphasis in the original. For more on the emancipating potentials of nostalgia, see Velikonja, “Povratak Otpisanih.“

80. Velikonja, Titostalgija, 122. Emphasis in the original.