: 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.