I said the name Daniel Defoe for the first time, spelling it out syllable by syllable. I didn't go to school yet, I just learned to read and write. I don't know when my mother ordered and received 100 books from Prosveta. They were gray, with a white Cyrillic letter "P" that I saw as a door through which one should enter. In the upper left corner of the cover in a blue square, like the number of the entrance to the building, was written the serial number of the book in the edition. Robinson Crusoe was number 20. In about a year, I outgrew the book - when I could get it off the shelf. Since I knew nothing about the writer, I read the book in the best possible way - as pure text without context. A shipwreck on a desert island, a fight for survival, cannibals and pirates - who could resist?
An ordinary year
The European year of 1660 proceeded as usual: the Second Northern War ended - the Scandinavians were also proverbially warlike at that time - but that's why one could rely on the ongoing Russian-Polish war. Turks conquer Erdelj. Elvija Celebija travels through Serbia, Bosnia and Dalmatia, about which she will leave a record. The Boers begin to settle in the south of Africa. In London, Charles II, returning from exile, becomes king, ending the island's brief republican episode. In the same year, the Royal Society of London for the Advancement of Natural Knowledge was founded, which would later become the most famous academy of sciences in the world. But across the Channel, in Paris, the young King of France, Louis XIV, and his thrice-senior head of finance, Cardinal Mazarin, order the book to be burned Letters from the province, which was written by Blaise Pascal, the most brilliant mind who was thinking in French at that time, from anti-clerical but Christian motives, with sharp irony.
So, an ordinary year: Europeans butcher themselves on the battlefields, burn the books of their greatest thinkers, found scientific societies and colonize the world. In the family of James Foe, a wealthy London butcher and tallow merchant, his wife Annie gave birth to a male child that year, whom she would name Daniel.
Ten years of terror
Already by the age of ten, Daniel was given to experience almost all kinds of troubles that a human being usually gets in diluted doses, in several decades of life. First, as a five-year-old, he saw a lot of death around him - in London, the plague killed a fifth of the population. A year later, a great fire ravaged central London, destroying four-fifths of the buildings. 100.000 inhabitants were left homeless. Already the following summer, the Dutch penetrate with their ships across the Thames to the River Medway and destroy a large number of ships of the Royal Navy. And when Daniel's mother dies, he is only ten years old.
This much misfortune breaks some people. And in some, it awakens a huge hunger for life and success. If we read the biography of Daniel Fo, we have to conclude that he belonged to this second type of people.
The boy was raised in the Presbyterian spirit. Father thought he would make a good priest. A solid education combined with vital energy took him to the other side. He wanted to become a merchant. His initial capital of £3.700 was brought to him by his marriage at the age of twenty-four. His wife Mary will give birth to eight children, six of whom will live to adulthood.
A real Englishman
In the English succession conflicts, he took the side of the Duke of Monmouth, an illegitimate royal son who wanted to become king. His rebellion was bloodily put down, and the duke was executed. Daniel Fo flees to France and returns to London as the situation calms down. He trades with the American colonies and travels around Europe - Italy, Spain, France, Holland.
In the war between England and France, he loses several cargoes, he has to declare bankruptcy. He accepted the civil service, opened a brick factory and again acquired property. From the moment of his bankruptcy in 1692, he spent five years dealing with the problems of society, reading and writing. He collects his ideas in a book Projects Essay, in which he suggests ways of improvement in various areas.
A satire in verse follows A true Englishman andz 1701. The book made him popular, and he mercilessly mocked the supposed aristocratic English virtues, the way the country's elite saw themselves and the world. The book will have 21 editions. Then Daniel Foe becomes Defoe - the literate inhabitants of the island liked the "de" because it sounded like a sign of a nobler family.
His next writing The shortest procedure with dissidents brings him bad luck. He dared to touch the Church of England, whose formal head is the monarch. In January 1703, he was arrested by order of the royal government. The entire circulation was confiscated and burned. As if not a moment had passed since the year Defoe was born, and Pascal's books were burning in Paris. Daniel Defoe was sentenced to three days of shame, imprisonment and a fine. For seven years, he had to be careful what he said, according to the judge's order. While serving his sentence, he wrote the satire "Hymn to the Pillar of Shame".
Prison ruined him financially again. Upon his release, he was allegedly both an opponent of the government and its spy. Published by the newspaper Revizija (The Review) which were published three times a week until 1713. Fame awaits him in 1719 - at the age of fifty-nine, when he publishes a novel about a shipwrecked man.
Robinson Crusoe
When it came out, the novel had a paragraph-long title: "The life and unusual and surprising experiences of Robinson Crusoe, a sailor from York, who lived for 28 years on a deserted island in America, near the mouth of the Orinoco River, on whose shore he was thrown after a shipwreck in which all the crew members died, except him, with a description how he was eventually rescued by pirates. Written by himself”.
At the time of the creation of the novel, it was common for the title to be a description of the content, but in the 20th century, when I really liked it, hardly anyone would read such a book. I swallowed it under the simple title Robinson Crusoe.
It was translated long before I was born by Vladeta Popović, the founder of Yugoslav and Serbian English, a Thessalonian and prisoner of war from Dachau. Back then, despite the exotic places and names, my mother tongue was the only universe in which Robinson existed. Now I know that when we read translated literature, we hear the distant intonation of the author as if through water, while at the same time the language of the translator bubbles and bubbles. It all depends on the melody of that murmur.
However, the translation I read was not the first. The novel was translated into Slavic-Serbian in Buda in 1799 - it was the first complete English novel among Serbs:The life and personal history of the famous Englishman ROBINSON CRUSH from York, written by his own hand. Honor pervaj. Translated from German by N. Lazarevic".
Now, over two centuries later, it amuses me to imagine Petko uttering Church Slavonic phrases.
The Robinsonades
Although the two Robinson sequels were not as successful as the first book, the "Robinsoniad" became a genre. Without this novel, it would hardly be imaginable Gulliver's Travels of Jonathan Swift or The mysterious island Jules Verne. The motif of travel and shipwreck inhabits countless works of literature and film - all the way to science fiction. That furrow that the writer plowed with his pen has left a visible mark to this day. Some say that it is not high-level literature, and others, like James Joyce, say that the qualities that Crusoe has are sublimated qualities of British colonialism. Joyce's phrase "unconscious cruelty" seems correct to me. Even Karl Marx in Capital called on Defoe, to clarify the real value of money and work - from the shipwreck Robinson takes tools, but not money - because on a desert island it is worthless.
Love and the plague
This writer from my childhood welcomed me in the 21st century in an unexpected way, when I was translating a poem by Heiner Müller. Daniel Defoe published his in 1722 Records from the plague era, and Heiner Müller, inspired by that reading in the second half of the 20th century, left his record: THE HUNDRED STEPS (after Defoe):
In the century of the plague / There lived a lonely man in Bo, north of London, Čamdžija, poor, unsightly but / Faithful to his own. And careful / In faithfulness. From below, from the cities, / Where there was a plague, He would aim at the dish and head towards / The rich cowards On their ships / Anchored in the middle of the river mother. That's how the infection fed him. But in the hut / With the woman and the four-year-old / There was also the plague. Every evening he carried / A bag of food, the fruit of the day's work, From the river, up the hill to a rock, / A hundred paces from the hut. Then, moving away, he would call his wife. Watching her lift the sack, carefully following / her every movement He would stand a while longer / At a safe distance Saying good-bye.
Some things change, some don't, Miller would say. Thanks to literature, "social distance" in plague years travels through the ages - from Defoe, through Miller, until this last Saturday in April, the second pandemic year.
Daniel Defoe died on April 24, 1731. He is one of the writers whose importance grew over time. Many of our contemporaries, including world-renowned writers, hope, but are not sure, that their books, like some of Daniel Defoe's writings, will live on 290 years after the author's death.
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