New life in the white fortress

About half a century ago, student Vlasta Pilar sent a letter to Ivo Andrić, who was not yet a Nobel laureate at the time, in which she asked him, among other things, what prompted him to write Travnička chronicle. One sentence from Andrić's answer is worth quoting again and again: "Since the beginning of my literary work, I have been interested in the touch of East and West, in the form of cooperation as well as in the form of collision." Andrić is, of course, not the only artist with such an obsession, and since last Thursday the only such literary Nobel laureate. And Orhan Pamuk, namely, could summarize his own in a similar way ars poetics.

When a person reads a newspaper a day or two after the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature, it usually seems to him that it is actually some kind of prize for politics, and not for literature. Last year, for example, more was written about Pinter in the context of Slobodan Milošević and Saddam Hussein, and less in the much more adequate context of Beckett or Kafka. It's the same with Pamuk this year: his interviews, statements and journalistic texts are mentioned more than his novels, and yet the latter won him the Nobel Prize, as well as all previous awards. After all, his novels are also the reason for the enormous attention paid to his political views.

It is interesting, in fact, that Pamuk himself was criticized for his "apoliticalness" in Turkey for a long time. Almost all of his novels are devoid of the kind of transparent engagement in which superficial people often see the meaning of art.

TRI COLORS: As in the middle part of Osterova New York trilogy, colors also play a key role in Pamuk's oeuvre in a somewhat symbolic sense. In the titles of his three most famous novels, there are three colors: white, black and red. Novels are, of course, White fortress, Black book te I'm calling se red. A novel White fortress Pamuk actually "conquered" the Western readership. In it, East and West, Orient and Occident meet in an extremely fruitful way. This is the Andrić quality of Pamuk's oeuvre, which is also recognized by the Swedish Academy, because the explanation of the award also talks about the "conflict and intertwining of cultures". Pamuk himself declares in an interview: "My motto has always been: be brave, be Western as much as you can and try to be Eastern as much as possible, while being traditional." People often think that these two things are opposites, but the more you go in both directions, the more electricity will be found between the two poles. Many times in Turkey I have met people, especially among those who call themselves modern, pro-Western, that they are afraid to accept tradition. Postmodernism is such that it can make you more tolerant, show you a way in which you can be more open to traditional influences. As for the influence, things, in my opinion, are like this: Cervantes is a writer who was absolutely influenced by the East, after all, he was also a prisoner in Algeria. He certainly influenced Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe, and they influenced Kipling. And then comes Borges. It is impossible to present all of them exclusively through the codes of Western civilization. It is impossible to read my books exclusively in the "Eastern" key." In this statement by Pamuk, one can, of course, recognize the authorial sketch of his literary "family tree". It is worth adding Tomas Mann and Margerit Jursenar to the mentioned names. If we know that in Black books the motif of the double also appears, and Gogol, Dostoevsky and Saramago are happily included in this series. When it comes to the novel I'm calling se red, the diagram of Pamuk's literary genealogy includes, of course, Umberto Eco.

NOBEL LAUREATE ZA OUR WEATHER: After the name of this year's literary Nobel laureate was announced, comments came from fellow writers. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the text published in honor of Pamuk by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Namely, she has also belonged to the narrowest literary elite for years, and her name is mentioned every year in Nobel speculations. Atwood's Cotton is called a Nobel laureate za our vrijeme, and his own praise ends emphatically: "Cotton gives us the best that novelists at their peak can give us - the truth." Not the truth of statistics, but the truth of human experience in a specific place, in a specific time. And as always when it comes to great literature, the reader at times feels that the writer is actually talking about him, and not about himself." The phrase "Nobel winner for our time" can, however, be read in several ways. Pamuk received the Nobel Prize, therefore, as a fifty-four-year-old, at the height of his literary strength - one could say, and this award should not, as is often the case, be a recognition for a factually completed work. The Nobel Prize knew how to act on writers like Medusa's gaze: to petrify them in a certain way. We have to believe that Pamuk's oeuvre will continue to grow and that a new artistic life will emerge in the white fortress of literary immortality. In the same way, Pamuk's importance for today's Turkey can be compared with the importance of former Eastern European dissidents for their own cultures. "A great writer is another government," Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said. For a writer from the West, such a position is impossible and the very possibility seems ridiculous, but Pamuk today in Turkey realizes the famous proverb about the pen being mightier than the sword.

BALKAN: Last but not least: the Nobel Prize to Orhan Pamuk is the new Nobel for Balkan literature, a new recognition for a Balkan writer. The peninsula that has been used by the whole world for the last decade as a metaphor for primitivism, once again shows the world that the Balkans is something bigger than the mere verb "Balkanize", that, ultimately, the Balkans gave the world more than the world gave back to it. Cioran's well-known definition says that Europe is a "society of novels". So, what kind of Europe is it if it ostracizes the region with novelists like Pamuk? And that Sioran is a Balkan, someone will say, you shouldn't believe his definition. The problem with the Balkans is his fateful damn it, often exactly what "fitting" into other people's definitions is, subjection to what the poet described like this - always neko about nose comes pa nam threatens. Pamuk's Nobel, however, is more of a realization of the refrain: The Balkans, The Balkans, The Balkans moj, mind mi silane i double mi stop!