In the life and death of Bože Koprivica, the facts were (and remain) only authoritative landmarks: playwright, football player, Partizan fan, writer, poet who did not write poems but lied according to his own hearing, from Nikšić, from Belgrade, Yugoslavian, anti-fascist... Each of these facts is just a signpost in a complex, rich, sometimes difficult, sometimes magnificent life.
In 1992, he published a book Volley and hearing, 1996. Quis, Borges and Maradona, Only the Gods can promise (2010. Zagreb, 2014. Belgrade), Dream of the street 2013 Exercise bank Danilo Kiš 2019 A madman is an eternal child. 2020 Blues of two friends (at 54 weeks), 2022. And he was a loyal friend who seemed to live for his dead friends, primarily Danilo Kish and Mirko Kovač. He wrote obsessively about both of them. He wrote the episode in which he cries together with the sick Kiš over and over again, and in each new version he would insert a detail that was not there in the previous one.
After all, let's imagine a scene in which two men with rough voices and rough demeanor, two Montenegrins (which, in this case, could be important) on a bed in a room in Dubrovnik, with their backs turned to each other - are crying. One because he is leaving, the other because his friend is leaving. And there is no consolation. That's it.
A heart as open as a psalm
Signs above the surface
And precisely because of this, because of such details, the facts in the life and death of Bože Koprivica are nothing more than signs, just as the tips of icebergs are only signs that tell us that the main thing, the big, deadly and magnificent, is below the surface. And that, that under, he doesn't see, until we hit him.
Therefore, it is necessary to interpret the signs. With his life and his death, Božo Koprivica left us a task: interpret, people, life is only valuable to the extent that it provides us with material for self-renewal, and writing is nothing more than just that - constant rebirth from one's own ashes and self-forgetfulness.
Bozo KoprivicaBožo Koprivica: "The ball has a perfect, divine shape. It has been known since Cicero and Shakespeare, to Pascal and Maljdenstamm. Homer also sang about the ball in the Odyssey. The king's daughter Nausicaa with a ball in her hand."
Life recorder
Bozo wrote it by hand. He always carried, mostly in his pockets, some kind of folded, torn-up notebooks (bought in a nice bookstore not far from Kalenić's market), notepads, papers, on fine days he sat in Last chance and in his impossible handwriting he wrote down what - if he managed to interpret it later - would become his unusual books of jumpy sentences and impatient poetics.
He cared more about nouns than verbs, because he tried to find names for things and events that corresponded to them, and verbs were the connective tissue, or the flywheel that carried the nouns to the fulfillment of their purpose.
Death to fascism, long live Partizan
And yet, when he wrote about football - nobody wrote about football like him (he wrote together with Sinan Gudžević, Miljenko Jergović, Gorčin Stojanović) - everything was a swirling plot driven by names like Zlatko Tchaikovsky, a great master who, in sandals, on a field in Nikšić, years ago, played small goals with a bunch of kids, among whom was Božo.
That football passion was much more than a fan's zeal ("If you support Partizan", was Boza's message on the answering machine, "leave a message. If you support the others, then nothing"): football was... eh... now we would need those Boza nouns... football was for him a special galaxy, a parallel world to which - at times one got the impression - he cared more about the world that remained after and outside of football.
Our sixty years
When he spoke or wrote about football, what in the non-football world would be understood as a metaphor, in his football galaxy was pure reality. If he wrote about a football player that he was a tern, it did not mean that he was agile kao tern (for example), but he was a tern, he, that football player, moved, spun with the stability and speed that made him a tern.
His stories about Yugoslav, Russian, English football players, about Pele and Maradona, about Lev Jashin, Cruyff or Beara, would capture the reader's attention, and it became irrelevant whether you like football or not, whether you know the game or are indifferent to it. Bozo saw in football the pattern by which the world functions.
Aristocratic inaccessibility
There were few writers, poets, theater people he did not know. He moved in worlds that could be difficult, but Bozo was not easy either. It was necessary to break through to him. His inaccessibility can be understood in many ways, but it is hard to dispute that Bože Koprivica's demeanor had an aristocratic streak.
It had nothing to do with his social background (his parents were workers) - just as his partisan background was not imposed on him: he once said that being a partisan was his aesthetic choice - that it has nothing to do with any class conditions, but simply that a person chose with whom he would sit at the table. But if you somehow got to that table, he would share, whole worlds with you, without hesitation.
The scowling good spirit of a land that no longer exists
And long before, one day, he would meet at that table, the signer of these lines met Boža Koprivica, without having any idea who he was. Promotion Heavenly bridegrooms Mirka Kovača, in the audience a world that takes your breath away, two rows in front of the amazed student sits Žika Pavlović with a full mustache, in a striped shirt and suspenders, and a man with a deep voice on the right, in the same row where the student is sitting, points his finger at Žika Pavlović and the lady sitting next to him, dead serious, explains that he knows him ("the one with the mustache, madam, yes, yes, that one"), he has seen him several times at the Kalenić market, he steals flour. "And who knows what else," he adds.
At that moment, Žika Pavlović realizes that someone is talking about him, he turns around (a little annoyed, it seems for a student), but when he sees that burly man who accuses him of stealing flour and medlars in Kalenić's market, he starts to laugh.
It was Božo Koprivica. A football player, a partisan and a partisan, a poet who did not write poems, a writer of jumpy sentences, a frowning good spirit of Belgrade and a country that no longer exists.
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