The man of the modern age rules the powerful, apocalyptic forces of self-destruction, which has become a reality of life on the threshold of the 21st century, and there is no longer a need to associate the concept of miracle with the unnatural, otherworldly and extraterrestrial, which the medieval monk believed to be the everyday form of his spiritual world. To today's man, what is still unreached and unexplained is amazing. The space that was previously marked as fantastic was reduced to the smallest measure: many unnatural phenomena were explained as natural and lawful, many secret forces were restrained, and many mysteries were not only revealed but put to the service of man. What was a miracle yesterday, today has become a challenge, from which the terrifying mask of taboo has fallen. Once exclusively spiritual and mystical, today's fantasy is secular, allegorical and ironic. This is precisely why some modern theorists of literature resolutely reduce fantasy exclusively to pure fantastic genres, from which they have completely excluded science fiction, adventure novels, thrillers and pornography, all that is realized in the content, and not in any literary structure of the fantastic text, and which speaks of possible worlds that science and technology (pseudo-science and pseudo-technology) have not yet reached; science fiction rests on the possible, pure fiction on the impossible.
Changes in the concept of fantasy and changes in the structure of the genre - which could be traced both in the statement, position and role of the storyteller, as well as in the nature of the story and its meaning - went hand in hand with the changes in the model of the ruling culture, always keeping, like the myth itself, unchanging core (invariant, paradigm). In Serbian fiction, every change in attitude towards what was considered supernatural, miraculous and unreal was related to changes in consciousness and knowledge, to changes in spiritual needs, morals, beliefs, aspirations and the language of the culture of the given time. That cultural ideology did not have to be ruling; on the contrary, when she broke habits, she was most often in opposition and conflict with the official ideology of the ruling classes - she offered an alternative, some other possibility for getting out of the spiritual strait. This is the only way to explain the creative sediments of ancient cultures in the spiritual heritage and language of those peoples who throughout history grew and prospered despite unfavorable life circumstances, historical adversities and a turbulent climate.
The roots of Serbian fiction go deep into the past, with one branch in old Slavic mythology, and the other - perhaps even stronger - in the unknown prehistoric spiritual heritage of the Balkans. All pre-Asian myths from the "cradle of religions" have always easily reached him, mixing with the original cultures and traditions of the settlers. The invisible layers of the old spirituality had to remain somewhere in the subconscious of younger, later arriving and shaped cultures, at least as traces of ceremonial magic rituals and animistic consciousness, which could be preserved in the later folklore heritage as basic paradigms of the fantastic. There may be hidden many keys for distinguishing mystical signs of good and evil, secret symbols, protective spells and fears, which, as suppressed and apparently overcome superstitions, have remained to this day not only among the people but also among more educated people. Literary fiction and artistic imagination draw from that inexhaustible well all the inexhaustible power of conjuring up different, alternative worlds, where different rules of life are established - rules peculiar to fantastic literary genres. In such stories, as well as in ancient legends and fairy tales, the usual boundaries of time and space are easily moved, the differences between the possible and the impossible, between the upper and lower world, between one's own and someone else's law are exceeded. Relationships that have been established in the real world are lost or turned upside down, and this further expands the possibility of endlessly varying fantastic motifs. The mimetic properties of the short story are maintained predominantly in detail, while the didactic properties are relegated to the background. This is how the well-known "defamiliarization" effect is achieved, i.e. penetration of the fantastic into the realm of the real, on which, for the most part, all the poetics of the fantastic story is based.
Thanks to those protean properties, and almost inexhaustible springs in the spiritual tradition and cultural subconscious of the people, folklore fiction remains the main source of material for modern Serbian fiction.
Serbian fantastic literature rather and more easily changes the iconography, decor and external form of an unusual story than its internal structure, core and creative motivation of the genre itself.
In medieval Serbian literature, as in the entire Christian world, the concept of fantasy depended above all on biblical mythology and church teachings. Regardless of what it originated from, what it relied on, and what it processed within itself, Christian dogma built its eschatological philosophy of this world and the next on faith in miracles, which alone can maintain the connection and harmony between the visible and the invisible. The experience of the supernatural and the miraculous in the hagiographical writings and the lives of the saints was the basis of a motive structure built on unique foundations - on the general belief in miracles. It was equally shared by educated and uneducated layers of society, united by a common Christian ideology and a general vision of the world. The intrusion of the unreal and the supernatural into the structure of the story about the life, experiences and posthumous miracle-working of Serbian saints - such as, for example, St. Simeon (Stefan Nemanja), whose biography, written by his sons, Archbishop Sava and King Stefan the First Crowned, stands at the foundation of Serbian written literature - it was, undoubtedly, an expression of belief in miracles and, in that sense, a confirmation of faith, but by no means a form of the so-called . of pure fantasy, in which the miraculous is an end in itself. Miracles of St. The miracles of Simeon, as well as the miracles of many other Serbian saints, were often in the service of profane, mundane, and even practical state and war needs, which indicates that already at the very beginning of Serbian fantastic literature, two types of fiction can be distinguished: intentional and unintentional fantasy. The miraculous also has two properties: pure mystical rapture, vision and revelation, which leads to the knowledge of God, and secularized miracle, which directs the fantastic story in a certain direction, gives it moral meaning and didactic purpose. Old Testament apocryphal stories and parables about miracles, about the ascension to heaven (Book of Varuh, The Vision of Isaiah) or about the descent into hell (Circumstance of the Virgin Mary during her sufferings), about the terrible judgment, about resurrection and the apocalypse had a more strongly emphasized educational feature in Serbian medieval literature. (Secret Book or Ivanov's Inquiry), with which both the canonical and heretical churches, with the severity of eerie warnings, won the flock for his teachings.
This focused fear of temptation, punishment, impure forces, hell and eternal punishment - which was marked in bright colors and vivid images as the opposite of the radiant idea of bliss - was mixed in the popular imagination with the pagan spiritual heritage. The strength of the penetration of medieval fiction into the spiritual culture and folkloric heritage of the people can be witnessed by the movement of one motif, which in itself was far less striking than the terrifying representations of evil demons in church writings and sermons. Taken from ancient literature (from Pseudocalisthenes) - which, as a secular reading, undoubtedly had a smaller circle of recipients than church and religious literature, which was part of mission and ritual - the motif of the "dark vilayet" entered the Serbian folk tradition through the medieval novel about Alexander the Great
(Serbian Alexandrides), but it was only in folklore that it acquired that depth of thought, symbolism and super-historical effect, that concentration of meaning and the pregnancy of an all-important archetypal paradigm, which in the Serbian spiritual tradition that motif has as a symbol of all fateful curses. The dark province is the fate and paradigm of all border and marginal cultures that waver between two choices, between two worlds and two possibilities, between the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth: "If you take, you will repent; if you don't take it, you will regret it."
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Excerpt from the book Predrag Palavestre Critical features of Serbian fiction
