Why should the English interest us more than we interest them?
It was neither in 1941 that they needed us, nor in 1948 that they needed us.
And exactly that, introducing Yugoslav BBC listeners to England and the English, had to be the meaning, content and goal of my broadcasts.
This is how Borislav Pekić describes the beginning of work on British public service radio in 1985.
At that time, the already award-winning writer from the Balkans, with an address in London, was given the task of reading comments every other week for six minutes on topics for which there was no room in his many books.
However, not everything went smoothly and with a dose of fine humor.
"Since Pekić had never spoken on the radio before the BBC, he was nervous.
"First there was the problem of the length of the text because he had to shorten it to be exactly six minutes and then he tried several times at home with the clock to see that he did not exceed the set time.
"He was quite traumatized about it and, when he finally went to the BBC and finally read his first story on that Radio London show, he thought he deserved a whisky," describes his daughter Aleksandra Pekić.
There was a buffet on the floor below, but no alcohol was allowed in the work areas.
"Since he was, after all, our famous writer, they informed him that they would make an exception, with the story that he is the second man who asked for such a thing in the BBC, and the first was - Churchill", states Pekić in a written response to the BBC in Serbian.
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Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, was famous for his radio speeches during the Second World War during which he raised morale of British and Allied soldiers, and besides, it is also known that this one is controversial the leader liked to drink alcohol.
With Pekić, we would always "drink well, but also smoke," testifies his long-time acquaintance Vladeta Janković for the BBC in Serbian.
"In many ways he was unique, polite and extremely correct, but fearless and brave.
"Not only in ideological matters, but also physically," describes Janković.
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Letters from abroad
Working at the BBC is just one of the interweaving of Pekić's life with Britain.
Janković lived in London even before Pekić, he worked in the Yugoslav section of the BBC from 1968 to 1971.
He was an announcer and translator, and later wrote theater reviews and reports.
When Pekić moved to Highgate, a suburb in the north of London, in the seventies, they often saw each other, because they had known each other since Belgrade.
Janković remembers how the editors of the Yugoslav section at the time, Zdenka Krizman and Krešimir Sidor, decided to offer Pekić to read comments at their place.
Pekić, he says, accepted it without hesitation.
"He was incredibly easy on the pen, he could write when you wanted, about what you wanted, without any problems," says Janković.
This lightness was accompanied by "incredible seriousness", he adds.
He devoted himself almost ascetically to the research of every topic he touched.
He agreed to the arrangement at the BBC also because of the fees, and so a few years later the book "Letters from Abroad" was created.
In the Letter to the Reader, the introduction to the book Letters from abroad, notes that he had no experience, and that he was particularly bothered by the fact that there was no man in front of him with whom he could conduct a dialogue, but only "the cold, metal, dead face of an indifferent receiver", which he got used to over time.
In Bush House, the former headquarters of the BBC, there were Yugoslav, Slovenian and Russian sections on the same floor, Janković recalls.
He had the opportunity to meet in the canteen Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian dissident, as well as the ballerina Makarova, among the Soviet emigrants of that era.
Pekić easily fit in there.
The studio had a manager and an assistant, and the one who read the news or recorded, sat alone in the studio.
"There was a button then, it was called coughkey, which you could press to cough without the listeners hearing it.
"It arose from the time of the Second World War, when a censor sat opposite the announcer and watched to make sure that the one in front of the microphone did not accidentally say something that the enemy should not hear," describes the university professor of literature.
It was in such studios that Pekić was recorded, and Janković used to be with him.
He also attended the whiskey scene, where the studio manager showed "true English humor" with a quip about Churchill.
"Pekić had that privilege," he says with a laugh.
After filming, the two close acquaintances would go to the nearby Covent Garden and the "Ispushena Lula" pub.
"By God, we would drink a lot there, with Pekić we would always drink a lot and smoke an awful lot.
"The ashtrays were full like this," he says, pointing to an imaginary hill above the pixel.
For Pekić, he says that he was chain smoker, he lit one after another, and is a smoker himself.
They hung out for decades, and they stayed "at Vi", because Pekić says he was very "conventional", but unique.
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Radio London from a blaupunkt device
It was not Pekić's first meeting with the BBC.
A full 40 years earlier, during the Second World War, as a boy in the Banat village of Bavanište, he listened to Radio London and BBC news on an old Blaupunkt machine together with his father and a neighbor, a German commander.
Pekić is considered one of the most important writers of Serbian literature 20th century.
In addition to novels and plays, which were often his source of income, especially those for Radio Cologne, he also wrote film scripts.
This prolific author was born on February 4, 1930 in Podgorica, to a Montenegrin father and a Banan mother.
He spent his boyhood days in Podgorica, and then in Novi Bečej, Mrkonjić-Grad, Knin, Cetinje and Bavanište in Banat, where he spent his occupation days.
After the war, at the age of 15, he came to Belgrade, where he attended the Third Male High School.
In the same year that he passed his high school graduation, in 1948, he was sentenced to fifteen years of rigorous imprisonment with forced labor and loss of civil rights for ten years as a member of the then illegal Union of Democratic Youth of Yugoslavia.
Robbie served in the penitentiary in Sremska Mitrovica and Niš.
He was pardoned in 1953, after spending five years in prison.
After his release, he enrolled in experimental psychology studies at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade.
In 1958, he married the architect Ljiljana Glišić, and then won the first prize in an anonymous competition for the original screenplay, which was announced by "Hunted Film".
The very next year, he got a job as a dramatist and screenwriter for this film company, and in the same year he had a daughter, Aleksandra, with Ljiljana.
According to his text "The Fourteenth Day", a film was shot that represented Yugoslavia at the Cannes Film Festival in 1961.
He published his first novel "Time of Miracles" in 1965, and since then he has been fully devoted to writing.
For his second novel, "The Pilgrimage of Arsenija Njegovan" (1970), he received the prestigious Nino Award for the novel of the year.
Then his wife and daughter moved to London, but the communist authorities in Yugoslavia confiscated his passport.
A year would pass until he joined them in London, which would be his refuge from the displeasure of the communist authorities.
He stayed there, with regular visits to Yugoslavia, for the next three decades.
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In one of those visits, around 1983, at the invitation of editor Nikola Mirkov, Pekić visited Radio Belgrade.
It was there that the then young journalist Nenad Šebek met him for the first time.
"I saw how people treated him with great respect, at that moment I was a kid, I had not yet read anything by Pekić.
"I remembered a tall, very thin man with thick glasses and an unsteady gait," Šebek described for the BBC in Serbian.
Only after that did he start reading his works and for him Pekić is one of the "greats of Serbian-Croatian literature".
He calls him his "Zeus of literary Olympus", who seemed a bit confused.
Their paths crossed later in London, in the BBC radio studio in 1986, where he later got a job.
When Pekić would come to their newsroom to record comments, Šebek, as he says for the only time in his career, struggled to get a shift when he was there.
"Because it's so tall, I had the impression as I was leading it down the hall that it was made of crystal and that if it tripped, it would shatter into pieces.
"I wanted to be around, if that happened, to hold him," Šebek describes.
He was "honored to film him" because he admired him so much.
He would sit at a small mixer, and Pekić at the microphone.
"That's one of the most beautiful things for me - that I had the opportunity to film him, see him and be close to him," says Šebek.
Garden and tape recorders
When he was not writing, he devoted his time to the garden and the flowers he grew next to his house in the suburbs of London.
There he would water plants, pull weeds, but he regularly carried a tape recorder so that he could dictate every idea immediately, his wife Ljiljana Pekić said in one of the interviews.
"It also happened that an idea would come to him in a dream, he would start, and he always had a notebook and a pen by the bed to write down what he dreamed about.
"He was constantly racing against time because he knew he was not ahead, and his plans were big," Pekić told Express.
In order to write any work, he was able to read dozens of books and study in detail history, mythology, epidemiology, architecture or any field that his heroes dealt with.
Pekić deviated from historical themes with an apocalyptic thriller Rabies (1983), which takes place at one of the world's largest airports - London's Heathrow, and talks about a pandemic.
The novel gained new popularity four decades later during the corona virus.
Because of her, Pekić also attended an informative interview with the British police officers.
"For days, he came to the airport with a notebook, made drawings, notes and had to familiarize himself with the airport.
"The police officers noticed that and were afraid that he was a terrorist, but everything was resolved quickly," Šebek says.
The Golden Fleece
They are above his desk, next to the picture Petar Petrović Njegoš, there were cork panels on which the figures and dialogues from the "Golden Fleece" were pinned with pins in order to have a clear overview of all the connections and relationships of the characters whose destinies are intertwined throughout the centuries, wrote Dušan Puvačić, his long-time friend in the book Drugi about Pekić.
It was for this capital work, the saga-phantasmagoria "The Golden Fleece", which was published in seven volumes (1978-1986), that Pekić received the "Njegošev Award" in 1987.
According to the jury of the Television of Serbia, this novel was included in the selection of the ten best novels written in the Serbian language from 1982 to 1992.
Šebek read this "capital work of Serbian literature" a total of five times and his edition was underlined, and he often wrote down quotations, especially about Serbs and the Serbian nation.
"He was a true patriot because he has a critical attitude towards his own nation, I am very against what the Americans say, 'I am on the side of my nation, no matter what.'
"For me, patriotism is something else, what is wrong and what can I do," says former journalist Šebek, now employed in the non-governmental sector.
Not only is there the entire history of Serbia, but also of the Cincar nation to which Pekić belonged, he adds.
In The Golden Fleece, he says, he predicted and completely laid the foundations for what would happen in the Balkans, so it was especially interesting for Šebek to read that book during the war in Yugoslavia.
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Years eaten by locusts
In the same year 1987, the book "The Years Eaten by Locusts" was published, chronicling the time Pekić spent in prison, revealing the cruel nature of the communist regime, especially in the years immediately after the war.
This autobiographical prose was declared the best book of that year.
Despite all those headlines, he remained very tolerant, says Janković.
"You could make any remark to him, he was operated on out of vanity, he would generally accept it with humor at his own expense," says the professor.
He shared such humor with the English, about whom he spoke on the BBC, through the fictional characters of the Serb Živorad and the Englishman Jones.
"That's where they are from." Letters from London so meaningful and stimulating, they illuminate the relationship between civilizations and a way of understanding life," says Janković.
A book followed A sentimental confession of the British Empire, made up of comments on English history, which Pekić, as an amateur and erudite historian, read on the British public service.
"That was even more awesome.
"As harsh as he was in his criticism of his own country and nation, he was as harsh towards Great Britain, which was his refuge," describes Šebek, who lived in London for years.
He continues to write tirelessly and many books are published, but he does not manage to finish many of them.
Pekić loved the English way of life, he followed the politics there, but he didn't socialize much with foreigners, says Janković.
"If you asked if he fit into the middle, I would say that he didn't, if I can say that, I think it's good, because he had more time to do his work," says Janković.
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Borislav Pekić is the author of about thirty dramatic works for theater, radio and television, broadcast and played on Yugoslav and foreign radio and television stations and theater stages.
The theater play "Correspondence" records 300 performances in 24 years in the repertoire of Atelje 212.
His works have been translated into various foreign languages, but he is still relatively unknown around the world.
The American critic and poet Barry Schwabsky wrote the foreword for the translation of the book Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan, which is called in English in different editions Houses of Belgrade or Houses.
"I have read only a relatively small number of his books that have been translated into English.
"On the basis of them, I am convinced that he was a great writer, among the few of his generation, where I mean Alexander Tishma, but he is not very well known to English-speaking readers," Švabski told the BBC.
Edwin Frank, one of the founders and editors of the New York Review of Literary Classics website, has a similar attitude.
"It would be good if his genius was better known around the world," he says in a written reply to the BBC in Serbian.
Finished play 'just to write it'
After one of Pekić's commentary recordings for the BBC, which was usually on Thursdays, another anecdote happened that Vladeta Janković remembered forever.
He was supposed to fly to Belgrade on Saturday, and Pekić asked him to take his drama with him, which he wrote as one of the seven prominent authors at the Television Belgrade competition about the seven deadly sins.
"He tells me to take it to the editor Vesna Janković, I say, it's valid and I ask: 'Have you finished it?'
"He says, I haven't started writing yet, but it's done," he says with a smile.
And he kept his word.
On Saturday morning, Janković had a drama in his hands, along with Pekić's note and a request to check the spelling mistakes on the plane.
In 1984, the two of them made a bet in London's "Exhausted Pipe" - on Pekić's business card, they wrote down which capital works he should complete by 1991.
Much of what was recorded, the writer filled in.
"And I never stop wondering why Pekić chose 1990, the last year of his artistic life, for the time limit of the bet that autumn evening - instead of 1995, 1991 or any other," Janković wrote in the monograph Ocean Pekić.
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A political episode
Pekić returned to Yugoslavia in 1990 and became one of the founders of the Democratic Party, vice president and member of the Main Board.
"England saved his life, he was a victim of persecution here, and he was fearless: there is no petition that he did not sign, or some opposition initiative that he did not support.
"It's not that he didn't hide, he was politically extremely aware and deeply opposed to the communist regime, he never hid that," says Janković.
However, he did not achieve success in the first multi-party elections in Yugoslavia in 1990.
In the by-elections in the Belgrade municipality of Rakovica, he competed with radical leader Vojislav Šešelj and lost.
And through membership cards, you can see the intertwining of politics and literature in the writer's life.
Pekić was a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1985, a member of the Crown Council, vice-president of the Serbian PEN Center, and a member of the English PEN Center.
Borislav Pekić died on July 2, 1992 in London.
He was buried in the Alley of meritorious citizens in Belgrade.
"He wasn't for this world, but for another time, in which he would be on his own.
"The premature and tragic death and the tragic loss in the elections show that he was not a man for that bad time, but for someone much better," Šebek concludes.
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