Who and how, with what reason and right, merged Večernje Novosti and Meša Selimović in the long-ago, but already sinister, 1988, few people know: either we forgot, or we didn't even know, and ignorance and oblivion thrive on ignorance and oblivion, so why not this one?
Why the fact that her own literary award Belgrade's proto-tabloid called the name of a great writer and an honorable man a "pig? Because it was a wrong combination from the beginning, an undeserved appropriation of a "strong" name that the award was supposed to artificially increase legitimacy and specific cultural and social weight at the start. It mixes like a supplement or a steroid of an amateur populist venture... Moreover, by the way, it is hard for me to imagine that in Selimović's house Novosti was even regular reading, because that printed matter - even in much better times for her and all of us - mostly read by those who tire of reading longer and more complex content, and it is unlikely that the author of "Tvrđava" was one of those.
Of course, what a hump was born, time did not correct, on the contrary. The idea that, instead of a classic jury of several members, the winner is chosen by the "broadest and most democratic jury" of dozens of literary connoisseurs probably sounded good to those who have a very superficial relationship with literature, let alone with criticism; the others had to recognize the potential pitfalls of such an approach, and by God, a wide field for some kind of matchmaking tricks, which only multiplied with the passage of time.
Namely, in the so-called the jury has always had important and respectable critics, or at least present and recognizable critics on the literary scene, but the arithmetic majority was made up of complete anonymous people, characters without deeds, people whom even the most attentive followers of our literary scene have literally never heard of, so one can rest in peace to say that they might as well have been invented. No, they are not really invented, but even worse: they exist as persons, but not in literature, let alone in literary criticism. Thus, the ever-shrinking minority of "real" critics served as a cover for systematic engineering, and the so-called the cultural public has long since normalized and legitimized this confusion by consistently avoiding problematizing and questioning both the concept of the award itself and its "performance".
In the meantime, Večernje Novosti in several important periods of our recent history was a standard for shame and for the depth of the decline of the journalistic profession: from the time of the "anti-bureaucratic revolution" until the entire wartime nineties. The most bizarre cases of this fall below the level of nothingness were, for example, the "doubling" of a photo of a rally of Milošević's supporters or the legendary retouching and signing of an old art picture of Uroš Predić as a photo of a Serbian orphan from the latest wars.
After a very superficial and superficial "reconciliation" after October 5, with the return of disguised radicals and undisguised socialists to power, and Novosti opened their souls and stepped on the gas in their famous and unique style, and this was only brought to the extreme, to paroxysm, to the bottom below the bottom, where VN still happily resides today with the arrival of the unsurpassed producer and distributor of media toxins Milorad Vučelić at the head of the paper. Svetislav Basara is absolutely right, who (the only one) occasionally reminded that - no matter how unimaginably nasty - "Informer" is still not a jack-of-all-trades: no one, not even a product of the mental digestion of DJV, can even shoot at veteran journalists in this part of the world. .
After the latest Udba-thug-chauvinistic abomination of the VN with the publication of the pogrom warrant and copies of the personal documents of those two students whose only fault is that - as at least half of the veterans of the radical and progressive party! - they also own Croatian papers, art historian and writer Nebojša Milenković launched an initiative to boycott the so-called "Meša Selimović" award, which means first of all an appeal to even respected critics to finally renounce participation in that freakish and filthy circus. It's true that so far they've missed countless good reasons to do it, but they could at least settle for that much now, right?
And after that, it would really be useful to see what legal possibilities there are to finally "divorce" the name of the abused Meša Selimović from Twilight News and clean it from the context to which it by no means belonged, neither by life nor by work. Selimović's family could also play an important role here - and it has already sent the first signals of that kind - so it should be encouraged and assured that it is not and will not be alone. It is the least that can be done to wrest this country and its cultural and moral values from the clutches of the worst among us.
