It sometimes happens that a single digital innovation in an unusual way, almost literally, realizes the fantasy of a writer. I'm not even thinking here of the more famous examples of Jules Verne or Isaac Asimov, of Verne's submarine and the mighty miracles that Asimov dreamed up before they materialized in reality, but more of some small things. Krleลพa once compared the position of one book among the millions and tens and hundreds of millions of books that exist parallel to it to the position of a single drop in the Amazon River. Decades later, the biggest online the book store in the world is called Amazon. In one of his most famous fragments, Borges speculated that all the steps a man takes in his life, including the last one, before his death, from some heavenly (divine) perspective, actually draw the image of his face. Those among us, and there are more and more of them, who constantly carry a mobile phone connected to the Internet in their pocket and who are constantly logged in to Google services can today very simply get a map of their movement in a certain time interval.
MY BALKANS: I was thinking in that key about the picture drawn by all the steps that Branislav Nuลกiฤ made in this world. He lived for less than seventy-four years, and he was born and died in the same city, in Belgrade. He was born on October 1864, 1938 in Cara Lazar Street. He died on the nineteenth of January XNUMX in Shakespeare Street. He was born and died, therefore, in two streets of the same city, two streets whose names ring symbolic for us in the context of his life and work. However, Nuลกiฤ did not spend his entire life in his hometown. He also lived elsewhere, but again always within the boundaries of one world, his own world, a world that we could call Balkan. Let's take a brief look at the geographical ones stations on the path of life Nuลกiฤev. After Belgrade, first downstream down the Danube, to Smederevo, where he attends elementary school and is introduced to the magic of the theater for the first time. Then again Belgrade (realka), then study law in Graz. Some puritans would declare the studies in Graz to be Nuลกiฤ's short-term departure from the Balkans. From our perspective, however, Graz is one of those peripheral cities that have one foot in Central Europe and the other in the Balkans. After all, the river Mura flows through Graz, and a later poet, actually singing about Nuลกiฤ's world, will describe (and encircle) that world with a verse from Mura to Morava. Later Belgrade again, then the prison in Poลพarevac, then Bitola, Serez, Skopje, Pristina (this enumeration seems like a line from a poem about the Balkans). Nuลกiฤ got married in Bitola. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, he lived in Belgrade, with an interval in Novi Sad. The Balkan wars lead him again to Bitola and Skopje, and the First World War through Albania and to Corfu. Finally, Nuลกiฤ's two non-Balkan years follow, two years during which he stays in Italy, France and Switzerland. After the war and the creation of Yugoslavia, he returned to Belgrade where he would live until his death, with the exception of a four-year term as director of the National Theater in Sarajevo (1925โ1929).
BRฤA CONNECTION: Nuลกiฤ's Cincar origin is well known, the fact that he was born Alkibijad Nuลa (Alchiviadi al Nuลa). Less is known about Nuลกiฤ's relationship with Brฤan. His mother Ljubica (maiden name Kasnar) was from Brฤko, and the girl Branislav Nuลกiฤ would marry, Darinka, was also from Brฤko, the daughter of the Brc merchant Boลพidar ฤorฤeviฤ and the mother of Nuลกiฤ's three children. This information calls for a long digression for which there is absolutely no space here, a digression in which the history of Brฤko and its several symbolic highlights would be encyclopedically summarized. This city, the largest Bosnian port on the Sava, during the SFRY was known to most Yugoslavs exclusively as the birthplace of Fahreta Jahiฤ, known as Lepa Brena ("I was in eternal Rome/ I saw the Greek sea/ But there is no more beautiful land/ Than my Brcko" ), and the war itself will be the site of some of the worst war crimes. The Dayton peace talks were on the brink of failure because of Brฤko, so this city was given the status of a district by a compromise solution that does not belong to any of the Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. entities, neither the Federation, nor the Republic of Srpska, therefore. This status, which some foreign publicists have already compared with the status of free cities that Gdansk or Trieste had in certain historical periods, made Brฤko the city where present-day Bosnia most resembles pre-war Bosnia. One of the rare BiH. cultural manifestations that have achieved continuity that bridges the war and Dayton is also the Brc festival Theater Encounters, at which, two years ago, it was Nuลกiฤ who triumphed Madam Minister directed by Oliver Frljiฤ. In that Brcko, which reminds post-Yugoslav generations of Eda Maajka more than Lepa Brena, Osman ฤikiฤ met his actress Zorka Topaloviฤ, the one he would sing to Beautiful girl. This connection from Brc is convenient for me as a key word for the key dimension of Nuลกiฤ's identity, which is described in a wonderful and precious book. Nuลกiฤ himself Bora Gliลกiฤ convincingly and suggestively wrote: "Nuลกiฤ transcended the literary direction of a certain era." It is a creative synthesis of Mediterranean creativity and the Mediterranean climate. In his childhood, he saw a land that - romantically - exuded the darkness of that Lamartine ocean of Serbian forests; and hajduk and uprisings. But the landscapes that reminded him of Arabia were also engraved in his memory: minarets, stone houses, palaces, khans, gardens, fields..."
A NAIVE AND SENTIMENTAL LOVER: Both by origin and destiny, Nuลกiฤ is a paradigmatic writer of the Balkans. Bora Gliลกiฤ gives us the answer again to the question "what Balkans?": "During Nuลกiฤ's childhood, and especially before the uprising, Serbia was completely identical to Bosnia in terms of 'external circumstances', ethnic composition, and landscape. Even before the liberation, its western nahijas were under the Bosnian vizier. After the surrender of the cities, our Muslim brothers moved to Sandลพak, then to Bosnia. (...) Let the Muslims - our tragic brothers - move out. But that emigration, that leaving home, and this sky, and these dear landscapes... is accepted as a necessity - but also with deep sadness. Peฤal. And sorry. However, that sorrow is the same as theirs, Eastern Mediterranean, deep, as in Persian poetry; Iphigenian as in Greek tragedy. Then it was felt that (if we leave wars and exterminations aside, and stick to what is human) the arrival of the Turks, and the fact that a part of our people converted to Islam, and living together for centuries, expanded our Mediterraneanization to integral measures. (...) Bosnia and Serbia, on these bases, could become the soil of a new, spontaneous, deeply original, psychological and artistic renaissance of ours, as a synthesis of an integral Mediterranean culture." This is the world that Nuลกiฤ deeply feels, the world of which he is a poet. . Gliลกiฤ also says: "In Nuลกiฤ's oeuvre - as in the case of very few of our writers - that missed possibility of our unsuspecting renaissance is reflected." If we were to look for a counterpart to Nuลกiฤ in this sense, the first thing that comes to mind is an illogical association at first glance: Ivo Andriฤ. The two are actually writers from the same world. And also the following contrast is paradoxical only on the right view: when the Bosniak national-romantic intellectual elite declared Andriฤ an Islamophobe and hater of Muslims, they found a counterpoint to him in Nuลกiฤ and his Ramadan evenings. From that perspective, of course, it could not be noted that both of them write with love about the same world, only that one of them - in Schiller's and Doctor's terms - naive, while the other sentimental lover. Despite all the poetic differences between Andriฤ and Nuลกiฤ, they are - at least since the annexation crisis - politically like-minded. Andriฤ's metaphysical pessimism contrasts with Nuลกiฤ's vitality and cheerfulness, but in both cases we are talking about their dominant characteristics. Vitality and cheerfulness persist in the shadow of Andriฤ's metaphysical pessimism, just as metaphysical pessimism exists in the shadow of Nuลกiฤ's vitality and cheerfulness. When Nuลกiฤ autopoetically escapes the label of a satirist because "satire very often dips its pen into mischief", he is actually guided by the same principle that led Andriฤ to write that "mockers are rarely right".
MY PRIVATE NUล Iฤ: In all that was said, there was almost no mention of all that Nuลกiฤ is remembered for today, about the classic textbook Nuลกiฤ, Nuลกiฤ who is a living part of our culture. In this sense he is somewhat similar to Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle is remembered for the Sherlock Holmes stories, not for the works he wrote with more ambitious intentions. That's how Nuลกiฤ - without comedic ambitions - is best known today as a comedy writer. My first entry into Nuลกiฤ's world was a series of television films that were shown in 1989 and 1990: The World, Mister Dollar, Madam Minister, Suspicious face, The deceased, A grieving family, People's representative. I was twelve years old, until then I knew about Nuลกiฤ through some passages from reading books and articles from Politika zabavnik. The films were broadcast on Sunday evenings, behind the TV news. I remember responding to the humor and I remember being struck by the psychological truth. I also recognized the actors: Petar Kralj, Olivera Markoviฤ, Milena Draviฤ, Milan Strljiฤ, Predrag Ejdus, Miลกa Janketiฤ, Aleksandar Berฤek... I will read after Nuลกiฤ's play and watch different theater productions, but first impressions and first impressions, the rapture of discovery because of the awareness of the stupidity of people work to please others ("for the sake of the world"), the recognition of relative hypocrisies or the tangential consequences of the government's insanity, will remain with me forever tied to those television movies. Those films were shot around the fiftieth anniversary of Nuลกiฤ's death. A great country paid a fitting tribute to its great writer. It was not too different from when the BBC, for example, makes a series of films based on the works of Dickens. And Nuลกiฤ's world has narrowed today. In Zagreb, it is played almost as a form of provocation, in Sarajevo, the street that bore his name on Mejtaลก is no longer named after him. (Truth be told, another street in suburban Nedลพariฤi bears his name, and Nuลกiฤ's street in Mejtaลก has apparently been given back its old name from pre-Yugoslav times; there is no awareness that tradition can only exist in continuity.) On the other hand, it cannot be said that Nuลกiฤ has been forgotten in Serbia, nor that this anniversary passes on deaf ears. He is mentioned mostly casually and mostly without awareness of the context that is entirely his, the Balkan context, a context that aspires to the Mediterranean, just as the Herzegovinian peasants aspire to Dubrovnik. Just as Runde's (and Saher's) continental city got a port one night, so Serbian literature got a sea through Nuลกiฤ, along with vitality, laughter and cheerfulness.
