IS IT POSSIBLE to read, understand, and interpret John Updike's works without making reference to the religious themes within them? Would such a reading inevitably shed one dimension of his fiction and make it flat, deprived of some of its essence, significance, and beauty?

The answers to these questions are both yes and no. The reception of Updike's works in Serbia from the mid-1960s until the 1990s, when the country was still a part of the former Yugoslavia, was certainly marked by avoidance of any discussion of their religious content and meaning. However, this critical limitation did not prevent Yugoslav readers from hailing Updike as a writer of great style who had much to tell them about the world he was describing. Whether Updike gained a good reputation in spite of these reductive readings, or thanks to them, is moot because, either way, his work allowed for literary merit to prevail over ideological import.

John Updike was introduced to Serbian readers in 1966 when a selection of his stories from The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers was translated into the language then called Serbo-Croatian (Apdajk 1966). Vera Ilić, the translator, wrote the afterword, which she began by observing that “John Updike, the American writer who is still unknown in our country, has been warmly received by American readers” (Ilić 1966, 257).

To understand how and why Updike's reputation grew in Serbia and the ways his works were read, it is necessary to understand what “our country” meant at the time. Ilić was referring to the country officially named the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, which had been founded in 1943 and which disintegrated during the wars in the 1990s. The republics of Yugoslavia were Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia.