Adoleszente Grenzgängerfiguren und die imaginierte Gemeinschaft in Uroš Petrovićs phantastischen Jugendromanen

Summary The adolescent heroes in the popular fantasy novels by Serbian author Uroš Petrović are often conceived as loners whose individual search for identity involves crossing the border into a fantastic world and confronting mythical enemies. In Petrović’s young adult novels The Fifth Butterfly (2007) and The Children of No Man’s Land (2013) the motifs of identity and initiation are linked with a mysterious collective, the Zlodolci (Inhabitants of the Evil Valley), who support the protagonists in their fight against their adversaries. This mysterious group, which operates on the social periphery and on the border between fantasy and reality, is conceived as an imagined community and as an alternative collective in the context of the adolescents’ search for identity. This becomes clear, for example, in the community’s ambivalent relationship to Serbian orthodoxy, but also through the characters’ actions in the Balkan wilderness, which reflect the romantic notion of a return to nature in order to find oneself.