One hundred years ago, on February 26, 1926, the Serbian PEN Center was founded in the "Srpski Kralj" hotel, which was located at the end of Uzun Mirkova street, opposite the current Pedagogical Museum. Hotel "Srpski kralj" was completely destroyed in the bombing on April 6, 1941. Traditionally, it gathered "a classy and select audience", as recorded by Branislav Nušić, stating that the atmosphere was more like "some kind of club, but a tavern".
Isidora Sekulić brought the idea of founding the PEN Center to Belgrade from one of her European trips, where she recognized that the idea was received among European writers as an expression of the new, post-war era and the spiritual ferment that those circumstances caused. The idea was first accepted in the circle around Bogdan Popović, who was elected as the first president. That remained the constant of the Serbian PEN Center. Literary critics have always played an important role in it, much more than in other professional associations. Three literary critics were the presidents of the Serbian PEN Center: Bogdan Popović, Predrag Palavestra and Miodrag Perišić, and we can also add Milan Grol and Jovan Hristić, theater critics who also wrote about literature no less significantly and excitingly.
The founding legacy was confirmed in another example. The idea of founding the International PEN Center came from the English writer Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott in 1921. She was joined by John Goldsworthy, the first president of the International PEN Center, who bequeathed a monetary part of his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932 to PEN, which organizationally and structurally established this association, which today operates on five continents in 100 countries, with 145 independent centers. Goldsworthy was followed by George Bernard Shaw, Anatole France, Gerhard Hauptmann, Romain Rolland, Rebecca West, Guy Chesterton, Rabindranath Tagore, Benedetto Croce, Maurice Maeterlinck, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Paul Valeri, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence, H.J. Wells, Robert Frost, Stefan Zweig, Georges Diamel and many others...
One writer started the International PEN, another writer encouraged the establishment of the Serbian PEN Center. Isidora Sekulić is said to have been a persistent force that moved the cogs of the organization until the Second World War. Before the war itself, she was for a time (1939–1940) the informal but active president of the Serbian PEN Center. Women have always been an irreplaceable part of both the International and Serbian PEN Centers. In addition to Isidore Sekulić, the president of the Serbian PEN Center, there will be Jara Ribnikar and Vida Ognjenović.
INCOMPATIBLE INTO AUTHORITARIAN SYSTEMS
Beginning as a European organization, PEN in its early years spread to the United States of America, and by modern times to all other inhabited continents. PEN easily and naturally crossed cultural and linguistic, state and social borders, while often dramatically clashing with political realities and ideological borders. That has never changed in the history of PEN. His authority was not questioned, nor was his idea of world literature, which is created in different languages, conveying universal ideas and values, doubt and hope, wonder and cheerfulness. But the very authority of PEN and its presence in different cultures and societies, which allows each individual literature greater international visibility, were the most common source of his suspicion and challenge. PEN was respected and accepted in democracies, while in the authoritarian societies of the 20th century and our time, it was on the fringes of the public and was suppressed, and sometimes even completely disabled. In the Soviet Union, PEN was not possible until the fall of the Berlin Wall, while the only congress attended by Soviet writers, as observers, was held in Bled in 1965. In communist Yugoslavia, PEN did not exist until 1962, because it was perceived as a civil organization and an expression of liberal values and Western society, while the positions of the PEN Charter, especially those related to freedom of expression and the autonomy of literature, remained incompatible with the rigid worldviews of the ideological state.
PEN is one of the responses of the European literary and intellectual public to the horrors of the First World War. "Yesterday's world" returned to the fronts and to the slaughterhouses of a war from which Europe never recovered. While Europe encountered left- and right-wing totalitarianisms and intolerances took on new faces and momentum, European writers and intellectuals tried to establish an international organization in the circumstances of political and social turmoil, through literature, culture and the protection of artistic freedoms, to establish ties that would be deeper than political proclamations, as well as more permanent and binding to a greater extent than fragile interest alliances. Playwrights, literary critics and literary historians, translators, editors and publishers, as well as philosophers, sociologists and legal thinkers met poets, essayists and novelists (novelists) from the acronym PEN at the same job. In the second half of the 1930s, while the Nazi camps were being created and the dramatic threats of a new war appeared, prominent members of the International PEN Center reminded themselves and others of the original principles of the organization and the possible meaning of the name PEN is "Peace among us" ("Paix Entre Nous"). There was no peace, nor was there an end to history: PEN witnessed it and participated in it.
IDEOLOGICAL NON-EXCLUSIVITY
The founders of the Serbian PEN Center were: Ivo Andrić, Miloš Crnjanski, Jovan Dučić, Isidora Sekulić, Rastko Petrović, Bogdan Popović, Pavle Popović, Slobodan Jovanović, Dragiša Vasić, Gustav Krklec, Milan Kašanin, Milan Ćurčin, Svetislav Stefanović, Sibe Miličić, Veljko Milićević, Todor Manojlović, Veljko Petrović, Miodrag Ibrovac, Vladeta Popović, Milan Bogdanović, Marko Maletin, Miloš Trivunac, Ivo Vojnović, Svetislav Petrović, Vojislav Jovanović Marambo, Stojan Živadinović, Aleksandar Vidaković. Among the founders was the poet Oton Župančič, who a few months later would be the founder and president of the Slovenian PEN Center. The founders were soon joined by Milan Rakić, Branislav Nušić, Mileta Jakšić, Božidar Kovačević, Hamza Humo, Milan Grol, Grigorije Božović, Desanka Maksimović, Nikola Mirković, Vasa Stajić, Borivoje Jevtić, Anica Savić Rebac, Branko Lazarević, Miloš Đurić, Branimir Ćosić, Pero Slijepčević, Nikola Banašević, Momčilo Nastasijević, Ranko Mladenović, Stanislav Vinaver, Vladimir Ćorović, Rade Drainac, Stanislav Krakow, Jelena Dimitrijević, Milica Janković, Vladimir Velmar Janković and many other writers. These are people of different generations and literary poetics, different life experiences and life destinies, different views on literature and the place that literature should have in their society and among their contemporaries. Some were PEN's companions, some had an important role at one point, and then moved away from the organization, some inextricably connected their literary and life credo with the PEN Center and its history. At one point, PEN connected them perhaps even more than their affiliation to literature, indicating the need to establish an organization in our midst that will have a recognizable voice in society and which, in turbulent times that have not even passed, will be at least a fragile roof for belonging to a literary community founded on the values of literature and artistic freedom. Since its founding, PEN has embraced and embodied voices of difference, believing that differences are necessary and natural in literature and society. As elsewhere, neither extreme left nor extreme right writers approached him, seeing precisely that literary and ideological non-exclusivity as a flaw and an unacceptable attitude in the "time of the intolerant". It marked the entire history of PEN, and in the case of the Serbian PEN Center, it had tragic dimensions at the end of the Second World War and in the slow, long-delayed and ultimately barely possible renewed work since the beginning of the sixties.
The name of the organization changed in accordance with the spirit of the times and the character of the country in which it operated. The center was first called "PEN Club. Yugoslav Group", then "PEN Yugoslav Center Belgrade", "Belgrade PEN Center" and "PEN Club Center Belgrade". In the 1960s, his work was renewed under the name "Belgrade PEN Club", and in the mid-1980s, the name Serbian PEN Center, which was mentioned before, was established.
photo: private archive15 YEARS AGO: International PEN Congress in Belgrade
TO ACT DESPITE BORDERS
There have been better and worse times for the work of the PEN Center. Writers tried to survive in the gust of history and to preserve an organization that did not deal only with the narrowest questions of literature, with which it would be easier to survive in merciless ideological conditions, but also to point out the need for literature to be an incorruptible chronicler and witness of its time, a voice of doubt and critical thinking, an expression of deep questioning of things in society and in the world.
The Serbian PEN Center is an institution with history. That history was acquired by the members and officers of PEN from the founding to the present day, along the axis of a turbulent century. Literary historian Predrag Palavestra described the first eighty years of that history in detail in his book History of Serbian PEN-a. One hundred years is a whole history. Not many countries last that long, not even the most prestigious institutions in many countries. In irregular circumstances and in confused historical circumstances, it is most difficult to maintain continuity of action and the overall meaning of one's work. In that hundred-year history, the guest appearances of great world writers for whom PEN is known, from Rabindranath Tagore, Ernst Toler, Jan Parandowski or Gilles Romain, to Djordje Konrad, Ronald Harwood, Adam Zagajevski or Charles Simic, are especially bright, as points where the sum of the work of an organization was expressed.
The Serbian PEN center, both in interwar Yugoslavia and in the last decades of socialist Yugoslavia, tried to bring more understanding and dialogue to the relations between the South Slavic peoples. Together with the Croatian and Slovenian PEN Centers, the Serbian PEN Center organized the International PEN Congress in Dubrovnik in 1933, where the first significant international resolution against fascism was adopted. Less than fifty years later, in 1982, another congress of the International PEN could not be held in Belgrade, due to the wave of increased reauthorization in Yugoslavia in the first years after Tito's death, as a result of which several writers and intellectuals were imprisoned in various republics, among them the poet Gojko Đogo. The Congress of the International PEN in Belgrade was held only in 2011. At that congress, the Belgrade Declaration on Language Rights and the Protection of Endangered Languages was adopted and the Balkan PEN Network was founded. The congress in Belgrade is considered, in the circles of the International PEN, to be the best organized PEN congress in the 21st century.
For the same reasons, PEN was both the most appreciated and the most attacked: because it did not compromise on what (nor) literature is and because it considered the issue of freedom of expression to be its basic duty. If it worked like this for a hundred years, the Serbian PEN Center cannot work differently even today. It remains for him to be the voice of reason both in reasonable times and in unreasonable times. The old experience has power even in new times: culture and literature are suppressed precisely because they are important. Although critical thinking is undesirable in the current political order, PEN remains committed to the founding charter according to which "literature knows no borders" and acts in spite of them. No matter how irregular times are, accompanied by ups and downs of crisis, literature is needed as a landing point of experience and as a view that transcends temporal, spatial and political boundaries.
One hundred years of the Serbian PEN Center testifies that everything changes, that things come and go, but that the need for superior literary art, even when it is waning, has no worthy replacement, as well as the need for people in their time to oppose all intolerance, censorship and hostility towards culture and art.
The author is a writer, publisher and vice president of the Serbian PEN Center
