INTRODUCTION
The book should start thunderously, so that the first sentences flash like lightning, intrigue the reader. How can I succeed, at the age of ninety-four I am much older than them, and I am writing about my youth seventy or more years ago. I don't know how to thunder for them, I wonder if I even need to go on that adventure. I answer to myself that I think it is, I have to offer my view of events that have been forgotten, misrepresented, confused for a long time, and should be attached to the understanding of how it once was in Yugoslavia. It is necessary, it is necessary, it is desirable. Isn't it?
......
I am not the subject, but the country where I lived and was young, where I grew old and experienced all its changes, sorrows and joys. I live and write in it, that's why I can't exclude myself when I talk about how it used to be in Yugoslavia. I can't, I can't and I won't.
It amuses me to recall memories by writing, to air the archives of memory, to smile at pleasant memories starting with early conversations with my father by the big, brick stove in our living room. It is often said: "So self-educated." My education began near that furnace, but I was continued to be educated by the SS, then SKOJ.
I experienced the peak of happiness much later, the most beautiful moment of my life with a view from the dark green hill of ลฝarkovica at the sunset over the silhouette of Dubrovnik with a glass of cold wine and homemade cheese, of course in love. Then Mephisto would take my soul because I would say to Moment: "Stay, you are so beautiful..."
Everyone should have one such joy in their life.
And Dubrovnik is no longer "mine"? Today, such a view would be the experience of a foreign tourist who came to Croatia from abroad.
What I would like to describe is not and must not be just a part of my life as an unimportant individual, a straw among whirlwinds. It starts from the moment the cannons fall silent. I remember. It goes without saying that I read Hemingway about the end of the previous world war: Goodbye weapons, Remark: Nothing new in the West, by Arnold Zweig: The case of sergeant Grisha. It's just that it's not about reading, it's not a fairy tale, it's life, I state, confirm, write down everything I really saw, what I may have imagined, but above all what existed around me: Belgrade with bullet marks on the facades and inscriptions in Russian Cyrillic: Checked, min net.
That message of the sooty fighters, who did their dangerous work so that there would be no more mines, could also be understood metaphorically, there are no more mines on my life path either. Calmly, with a firm step forward into a bright future...
photo: inge werthCONTEMPORARIES: Ivan Ivanji with Vasko Pop;โฆ
Stop! What kind of nonsense is it to call the future bright, and not, for example, happy, beneficial, healthy? Better without any forced adjectives. Let it remain as I wrote in the first moment because I want to warn about our phrases, the language we used, because our words represent us naked. Yes, our slogans were common, exclamation points emphasized a bright future, but we cheered it sincerely, an honorable word. At least as far as I'm concerned. I can't speak for the losers whose great-grandchildren are still whining. Eternal peace will reign now, won't it? We have the United Nations instead of the League of Nations, which did not have a Security Council. I thought, I was convinced and many others like me. But what would the Germans say when they calm down their optimism: Peace, Freedom, pancake - Peace, freedom, pancakes! Of course I didn't think like this at the time, I got excited too easily, but I have an excuse, I wasn't even twenty years old, and I passed the death camps and was alive, alive, alive.
Yes, yes, I remember a lot, but it's a big responsibility to use your memories for something like this. There were not enough opportunities to support my truth with documents, and I tried. A lot of things are hidden in various archives, defunct newspapers, maybe thrown away, cancelled, I'll say something about that too. I will again quote Goethe's Faust to whom Mephisto says: "I am a spirit that always denies everything", but for myself, an old man, I immodestly claim: I am a spirit that always doubts everything. Especially in yourself.
What are these documents anyway, so that we can believe that they tell us the truth? A document is something written by someone at someone's behest or request, possibly for a fee or salary. All students in the world who study Latin start from the beginning De Bello Gallico, so they think that it is a document about the battles that Mr. Julius Caesar led in Gaul, where Obelix and Asterix fought, only that the reading is not a cartoon or a movie, but a historical testimony. What things. It's not. The author immeasurably magnified and beautified everything he managed to do on the battlefield because at that time he was recommending himself for political service, he wanted Rome to elect him as consul. Admittedly, this is really about a guy whose last name became synonymous with the workplace of emperor, kaiser, emperor, he was a rock, who really - but really - performed all kinds of things in history, for history, and beyond what he wrote.
The writer of the novel can invent the characters he needs for the development of the plot, if he has modeled himself on someone alive, he can cautiously warn at the beginning of the book that any resemblance to a real personality is accidental and unintentional. In numerous large media outlets in the West, which we in our "Skoev days" called rotten whenever we were forced to mention him, lawyers would sit next to the editors-in-chief who would monitor whether the mention of a real person's name could lead to a lawsuit for violations of the private sphere. It was not the case with us, and it is not now, but even if it was, I really intend to tell about the people I met, whom I loved or hated, admired or despised, stating their names and surnames, dates of birth and death, because it is important to know when and with what kind of experience they could act, and many of them are known to the general public, they wrote autobiographies or other biographies and studies about them. Maybe their children are alive, close friends. It's dangerous. They can correct me, even sue me. I can't say that there are no mines. I can't even think that any resemblance between Iks Iksiloviฤ and Ipsilon Ipsilonoviฤ, whom I describe with his underpants down, is accidental. I can research what is known about them. I'm often disappointed that I can't find information about people who were important and ubiquitous a few decades ago. I must honestly state that I testify about my sighting of a certain person or a specific event. If it's wrong, it's my fault. Whoever disagrees, forgive me.
They sometimes say, according to Branko Radiฤeviฤ, that "the body started a lot", but, well, "they died in an hour because it was interrupted". Here, I want a lot, I start a lot in a hurry so that the hour of death does not disturb me until I say everything that is on my soul.
On the soul? The great German surgeon Professor Rudolf Virchow (1821โ1902) told his fellow theology professor:
"I have dissected thousands of corpses, but I have not come across a single soul."
I would like to condense everything that comes to my mind into a story about the youth of a country, a society. My fatherland, homeland, homeland. Let's try, although I have no guarantees for even a small chance of success.
photo: time archive...Miroslav Krleลพa and Ivo Andriฤ;...
BEGINNER JOURNALIST
Bihalji - Oto Bihalji Merin (1904-1993) - often helped me in my life, I can say that he influenced my life more than once, which without him would have been different, poorer, more unsuccessful. First of all, he saved me from the lessons I hated at school and I happened to get a job in the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia as the secretary of ฤedomir Minderoviฤ (1912-1966) with the sound title "assistant general secretary", I occasionally also secretary to the president of the Union, Ivo Andriฤ, and quite well met other literary gorostas, such as Krleลพa and Milan Bogdanoviฤ. Minderoviฤ was appointed to a high political position for those times as a first-time fighter and a meritorious old communist, as a writer he was, let's say politely, minor. It is known who "chosen" it, i.e. placed it, the head of the octopus. I claim that he was a good man, absolutely aware of who he was, what he was, what he was like, he did not see his role as an ideologue, it did not occur to him to pay tribute to writers better than himself, but he thought about how to help writers, get medicine from abroad, a scholarship or a better fee, calmed quarrels, extinguished intrigues.
Minderoviฤ asked me if I had read Balzac Lost illusions. I timidly lied that I had, although I hadn't then, but he didn't insist, but just said:
"That will happen to you now, you will lose all your illusions."
In a way I did.
Before the war, Krleลพ criticized the "three rams" (he was referring to Radovan Zogoviฤ (1907โ1968), Milovan ฤilas (1911โ1995), Jovan Popoviฤ (1905โ1952)) and "ฤedomir", in his attack on the rigid Belgrade communist writers. but then he added "Minderoviฤ" in parentheses, thereby belittling him because he assumed that everyone would know who "the three ram", but he will have no idea who Cedomira could be targeting. After the war, that discussion was called the "conflict on the left". The new general secretary of the KPJ, Josip Broz, who just changed his pen name Walter to a new one, Tito, did not want to interfere, even though it was expected of him, he should have judged what the "Party's position" was. Krleลพa had been his personal friend for a long time, and I think that due to his intimate attitude, he was inclined to the other side.
My new job brought many privileges.
photo: milovan milenkoviฤ...Club of Writers in Belgrade
I got a small room in the attic of the famous France 7. It worked Club of writers, opened for guests only in the evening, but we, employees of the Association, received lunch in a small room next to the kitchen without clipping coupons from the grocery card. Veal, steak, goose, duck, cakes, until today the famous krempita, oranges and bananas, tomatoes, chocolate... There was none of that for "ordinary citizens". I admit, I wasn't ashamed, I thought I deserved it. More on that later.
A good sociologist today could write a study about the gradual changes in society according to how the so-called clubs changed, they were in a way indicators of how after the forty-eighth year our society began to move away from its model of the USSR.
The man who felt that he could change something in France 7 was the then president of the Association of Writers, Milan Bogdanoviฤ (1892โ1964). He first managed to remove plainclothes policemen as wardrobe and doormen and replaced them with a nice, older man from Vojvodina, uncle ฤura Plemiฤ, a former churchman. He managed to get rid of the head of the Nemanje club, whose last name I have forgotten, the honest Partisan intendant, who had no idea about catering, and to bring in the legendary Ivo Kuลกaliฤ (I have not found the date of his birth, he died in 1959) in his place, from Dubrovnik, who began his career as a lackey of the papal nuncio in Belgrade. Milan said that people who worked for pops know how to serve. I wrote about it in the novel Ballerina and war.
The "Writers' Club" was gladly visited by some representatives of our "top" who wanted to "socialize a bit with the people", because for them we were "the people". "Lower" I guess they couldn't or didn't want to. Moลกa Pijade (1890โ1957) often came, also Peko Dapฤeviฤ (1913โ1999) and some other generals. I remember how the still unmarried Peko once, in the company of several of us young writers, somewhat drunkenly lamented that no one loved him, they only loved his rank, his car, his position... He also added that only his dog, a German shepherd, truly loved him. whom Tito gave him. In this way, he somehow brought Tito into the sphere of sympathy around him, and I was surprised because Peko Dapฤeviฤ was such a handsome and masculine man that even as a lumberjack or day laborer in his own Montenegro, or anywhere in the world, he would never be in the company of women. would have a bad time. There will be more to say about how Peko got married anyway, I happened to watch the beginning of his great love with my acquaintance from Novi Sad "live". In retrospect, it seems strange to me that Koฤa Popoviฤ (1908โ1992), who, as a former surrealist, had the most reason to be with writers among "those at the top", never came.
I translated Letters from prison Rose Luxemburg (1871โ1919) for a publishing company Culture. I had trouble with the names of plants - Luxemburg was a passionate botanist, she described every herb, every leaf in the sad prison yard - I simply went to Dean Stevan Jakovljeviฤ (1890โ1962) and asked for help. I don't know if I was particularly cheeky, but I think it was possible back then. I could, kid, simply go to the door of one Bihalji or one Dean Jakovljeviฤ from the street and ask them for help. And they helped me without saying a word. Certainly not only to me, but to everyone.
Jakovljeviฤ lent me a special dictionary with the names of all those herbs, flowers, and leaves in German, English and Latin, so I found their names in Serbian through Latin. At the time, I did not know that this professor was actually an author Serbian trilogies, and that his own sister Mir-Jam, actually Milica Jakovljeviฤ (1887โ1952), is also a writer, namely romance novels circulated between the two wars, which were not reprinted for a long time after the war because they were "petty-bourgeois" for our octopus head. . Evil tongues whispered that she was the real author, at least the editor-in-chief Serbian trilogies. I am not claiming, I am conveying what was said. Uncle Steva was a wonderful man, later I sometimes had the opportunity to talk with him about literature, not about botany.
photo: milovan milenkoviฤ...
Recently, I have studied Luxemburg more seriously. Since she had ideological conflicts with Lenin, I hoped to find something that would lead in the direction of self-government. I didn't. She did not make it that far, she was killed on January 15, 1919 in Berlin.
And now, I guess, I'm finally going to the newsroom of some kind of newspaper! At that time - it's terrible that I keep saying "at that time", but it's the simplest way - that is, at that time there was no unemployment, someone, who knows where, in the head of the octopus or maybe in Kafka's "castle", decided on everyone's career, destiny, happiness or unhappiness. I didn't know that for some people the phones work, the connections work, you know who decides where and what "daddy's sons" will do. I didn't know much.
I had already published several articles in the newspaper "Mladi borac", the organ of the National Youth of Serbia, several poems in various magazines and an essay about Sandor Petefi, and even a book of poems with the title I will always live in spring. It was signed by Oskar Daviฤo (1909โ1989) and Duลกan Kostiฤ (1917โ1997) as editors. After they received the manuscript, Daviฤo invited me to lunch, told me that the poems were not good, told me what to correct, that they would remain bad, that they would be printed anyway and that one day I would regret that it was my first book. And with that I point to something in that very young Yugoslavia where a great poet invites an unknown kid to his house for lunch to discuss poetry with him. It turned out that he was mostly right, that poetry of mine is not good, but I don't think it's a bad poem that gave the title to the collection - I will always live in spring:
Century after century will blow by,
but our life will not be dull,
our target is permanent.
I will always live in spring.
If even centuries pass until death,
I will die at the age of nineteen.
Well, the first century has almost passed. Today I seem to have lived for centuries, but when I sit in a comfortable armchair and write, I am still full of ideas as if I were really nineteen years old.
Elsewhere in that collection:
There is still no sign of my hands anywhere, but I will press them into the world!
When I look at the shelves and see what I have published, I guess I have left a mark with my books and performances. If I add that I have two children, four grandchildren, and for now three great-grandchildren, I can calmly step aside. The trace has been printed, I don't know when it will be erased, I will never know.
Laguna, 2024
