The results of the Competition for co-financing capital editions in the Serbian language, announced by the Ministry of Culture on August 4, will be remembered for the fact that since they have been in existence, the Commission has never rejected all the books from the Blue Circle of the Serbian Literary Cooperative (SKZ).
The Commission refused, and the Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković signed their proposal, that the Serbian Literary Cooperative should not be allocated money from the state budget for the co-financing of six books from regular publishing activities.
Representative works were rejected
According to the current Law on Culture, the Serbian Literary Association is an institution of special importance. In 1997, the state passed the Law on the SKZ, which states that the SKZ, among other things, provides funds from the budgets of the Republic of Serbia, provinces and local self-government units.
Photo: PromoSKZ Bookstore in Belgrade
In the statement by which SKZ reacted to the mentioned results of the Ministry of Culture, it is written that they received the decision "with great devastation and surprise, all the more so, as we are talking about representative works by authors known to our cultural public, among which are works on the place of Dubrovnik writers in Serbian culture written by Irene Arsić, then a book on the relationship of Pope Pius XII to Yugoslavia, written by Vojislav Pavlović based on the Vatican archives, as well as a work by Miloš Ković on the relationship of Great Britain to Serbian unification."
Commission's explanation
As it always happens, the Commission's explanation was written with each rejected project.
Thus, for example, for Vojislav Pavlović's book "Pius XII and totalitarianism in Yugoslavia 1941-1958" they assessed that "it is a narrowly specialized scientific work intended for a narrow readership". They gave the same rating to Irene Grickat's book "The Development of Serbian Literacy: Selected Writings. They rated Irene Arsić's book "Literature of Dubrovnik Serbs" as "not one of the capital and especially valuable works".
Fairer distribution
Nikola Marinković, editor-in-chief of the Serbian Literary Cooperative, tells "Vreme" that he does not want to speculate on the reasons for rejection beyond those stated by the Ministry. He points out that Professor Pavlović's book is the pinnacle of his research on this topic, as well as that, given that it talks about the relationship of Pope Pius to Yugoslavia, it concerns national topics and is certainly of interest to a wide readership.
He notes that apart from theirs, there are many more rejected books that at first glance seem worth supporting.
"Of course we know that the budget for culture has been reduced and that we don't expect the state to support us, but we expect that money to be distributed more fairly," says Nikola Marinković and adds:
"It happened that out of six of our books from the Blue Round, they rejected two, at most three books, but it has never happened that they rejected the whole Round."
He expects that, apart from the Serbian Literary Cooperative, other publishers will also react to the published decision of the Ministry of Culture on how to distribute the 27.370.000,00 dinars that the state has earmarked this year for capital issues of the publishing industry.
Perhaps, in the search for the reason why the Ministry of Culture rejected the Serbian Literary Cooperative, attention should be drawn to the fact that the president of SKZ Professor Milo Lompar, one of the speakers at the student meeting in Belgrade at Slavija for Vidovdan last year.
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