Jelena Luzhina, one of the most productive and thorough scholars of drama in Macedonia, always mentions Goran Stefanovski in all her overviews of contemporary Macedonian drama, pointing out that his poetics exists somewhere on the border between modernism and postmodernism. Luzhina underscores in many places that Stefanovski started to introduce, but never fully implemented, postmodernism in his work.
In her book Macedonian New Drama (1996), Jelena Luzhina for the first time in Macedonian literary science put in place the foundations for a theoretically precise typology of Macedonian drama and theatrology. Here, Jelena Luzhina provides a systematization and periodization of dramas published after 1945. She categorizes the dramatic works of Macedonian post-war playwrights in two large groups – folk domestic drama and modern drama. She concludes that all the plays created after Twig in the Wind (1957) can then be divided into two large corpuses: dramas with modernist or postmodernist features.
With regards to the dramatic opus of Goran Stefanovski, Jelena Luzhina provides uswith several various periodizations of his work. In Macedonian New Drama, she first places the play Jane Zadrogaz among the so-called dramas with a poetic style of articulation of dramatic speech, while she lists Wild Flesh, Flying in Place, Hi-Fi and the False Bottomin the so-called corpus with an intelectual-verbalistic character (part of a larger group of plays categorized under the heading Dramas with accumulative speech) (1996:193). In other words, Luzhina puts the aforementioned plays among the modernist core of Stefanovski’s opus. For The False Bottom, she claims that even though it is a cumulative text, it would be difficult to understand it without a theatrical performance. Tower of Babel is undoubtedly categorized as drama with reduced (fragmented) speech, which means that this play, together with The False Bottom is listed in the group of postmodern Macedonian drama.
Some years later, in 2000, Jelena Luzhina in her book Teatralikaclaims that Goran Stefanovski is an engaged and intense author who only has a few playful/frolicking works (Jane Zadrogaz, Long Play, Chernodrinski Comes Back Home), while all his other texts share the modernistic obsession with/of “expressing” or “revealing”/”staging” certain great and dreadful truths (2000:235). Luzhina determines here that Stefanovski’s authorial matrix is modernist, but claims that this is not a drawback, just that it places him out of the interest of the postmodern dramatic sphere.