Jof went to get coffee from the kiosk on the corner. On his desk is a stack of papers and manuscripts. I look at faceless facades through the window. I look down at a page. "The level and durability of an impressive, benevolent and great art is directly dependent on the degree of spiritual creative readiness of the creator-ascetic". The note sucked me in like a paper boat. A little further it said: "They are beings of expanded perceptions and are constantly at war, hunting, overcoming obstacles, setting traps, kneeling and begging for the descent of the rays of the Holy Spirit on their subjects, and forming a Mosaic of the inexpressible, elusive, collectors of dreams, mists and cobwebs, patient translators from the unspeakable to the sayable...".
Then Jof came. I shamelessly pointed my finger at the paper: "New manuscript?" He shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I've got a few kilos of that." I don't even know what I'm going to do with it." Some writers of Jof's generation would be happy to bite their ass if they only had a few hundred grams of this text. This sheet of paper explains his artistic endeavor better than any autopoetically conceived text. Because he is the one who hunts the elusive, is a collector of dreams, a literary ascetic and above all - a translator of the unspeakable into the expressible.
But that day I stopped by Osendorf, a quiet and boring district of Cologne, to Jovan Nikolić's apartment, with a special occasion. We celebrate the release of his book with coffee and conversation at the German "Hotel Nicaragua".
Since I was able to get along well with the author all these decades in Germany, I know that Hotel Nicaragua, before it became a literary artifact in Serbian and German, was for some time painfully real in the writer's life. Jovan Nikolić experienced the dramatic collapse of his second marriage in a single mansard in the center of Cologne, and the entire entrance was once the headquarters of the German branch of a revolutionary organization from Nicaragua. At night, Jovan would listen to the excellent West German Radio program, which broadcast modern ethno-music from all over the world. The notes flowed into grotesque dreams. And all of that condensed into a record after which two of his books are named - the one in Serbian and the one in German.
In German, the author included only 26 out of a total of 69 texts from the book in Serbian, and added 22 entries to them. This means that it is not a book that has been translated, but a new manuscript that was created by moving from one "hotel" to another, from one to another language.
SOLITUDE AS A STATE OF COVENANTS
The publisher from Novi Sad still had a genre dilemma on its website. The book was published in a prose edition with the note that it is a collection of "genre-synthesized texts, created as a result of immediate experiences, produced by the action of seemingly trivial circumstances, and then reflected on the 'inner' reality." Hence, they often have the properties of diary entries, documentary micro-essays, lyrical notes or dashes moved from the margins of perception to the center of analytical thinking. If we wish to find an integrative element for them, we will not hesitate to say that it is the author's tendency to constantly question and evaluate established truths and the possibility of their recontextualization".
And in the Austrian book, Jovan Nikolić questions almost everything that is self-evident to ordinary mortals - reality, perceptual habits, identities, his own writing. He's looking for a formula for salvation, he just doesn't tell us. It already tells us that there is nothing but delusion in who we are and how we are.
The writer Dejan Aleksić nevertheless detected the nucleus around which Nikolić's texts gather: "If we were to think about the question of the nucleus of Nikolić's writing thought, the starting point of his creative imagination, trying to define with one word the author's drive for spiritual adventure, it is possible that that word would was loneliness. For Nikolić, solitude is a sacred state of human existence. In a special way, it overshadows his otherwise melancholic portrait, at the same time defending the creative integrity of a man who introduces the totalitarianism of individuality as an order to his inner world, and proclaims solitude as an intimate ideological doctrine".
Of course, this kind of ascetic, melancholic literary hotel has not been visited before in Serbia, which is increasingly weaning itself from reading books in which one can experience something about solitude as a "covenant state of human existence". But the Austrian publisher didn't care. Nikolić's audience in the German-speaking world is more numerous than in Serbia, which the author left more than a quarter of a century ago.
THE AUTHOR WITH MYSELF IS PLAYING CHESS
Even in the new prose book in German, Jovan Nikolić remains unconventional. In the title story, he refers to himself as a man "who plays chess with himself". It does not make a serious effort to approach mass taste. At the same time, he could do it without any problems - he is the writer of some texts for musical numbers, among other things, for films by Emir Kusturica. In his previous life, in Belgrade, for his cabaret performances in the nineties, a higher ticket was required. He was on tours with his wife at the time, who sang in Ođila. He is the child of a Roma saxophonist and a Serbian singer. He has a Čačan sharpness in his jokes. So he knows a lot about charming an audience. But he usually doesn't care about that here. Writing remains an existential necessity for him. His writings are imbued with flashes of dark humor to such an extent that at the beginning of the book one could find the famous catchphrase of the Austrian writer Alfred Polgar on the eve of the Great War: "The situation is hopeless, but not serious".
His wit is not of the entertainer type. She was baked in the oven of silent despair. But it has a healing effect. For example, a hypochondriacally disturbed subject's cell phone buzzes in his pocket, and he screams in the woman's face: "Prostate." Or an episode from Belgrade life in which the author shared an apartment with the legendary guitarist Točka: "I remember that his first wife, seeing a huge hairy spider on the wall, screamed: Kill him! Kill! Take my slipper, kill the monster! The wheel calmly answered: It doesn't occur to me. I am not his death"
The introductory text is already a test of courage for the readers. The author claims: "Before all the causes, I first experienced the consequences of writing: that what I wrote later materialized and came true." That, since I knew nothing about all of this, pretty much scared me. Not a few times I got up from my sleep to write down entire lines, verses, not a few times I found, sometimes very interesting notes that I wasn't sure who wrote them down in my handwriting, on folded papers, pieces of paper, the margins of newspapers, on the inner paper of cigarettes. . Knowing my own capabilities, I was sure that I was not only unworthy of such a record, but that I would not be able to produce it from my rational part of the brain. I am not aware of many texts to this day. My manuscripts generally far exceeded some of my 'literary abilities', what I wrote surpassed me in many ways".
For the reader, this statement is a potential danger, because he has to ask himself: if I read these texts, will what seems somnabulic, absurd, grotesque and counterintuitive to me become part of my reality? If what he writes down happens to the writer, maybe it's the same with the readers when they read what Jovan writes down while his strange dream comes true?
The answer is - yes. When they nestle in someone's head, Jovan Nikolić and his literary world don't want to get out of it. Is it a special gift of the author with which he draws us into his sly orbits, or perhaps it is an unintentional magic that eats away at our rather sluggish perceptual habits? That is another question that each reader will have to answer for himself.
SNEVAČKO AND
In the prose world of Jovan Nikolić, nothing seems to be as it appears to the reader at first glance. The mastery of the author is shown before us in full splendor when he succeeds in questioning the boundaries between reality and dreams. Verses of cryptic meaning emerge from the dream, one cries in the dream like never before. Despite this, the author wonders: "What does my dreamy ME possibly know that this I, which tries in vain to record its experience, powerless to decode the reflections of hallucinations that momentarily pass by the poor senses, cannot know?"
The forty-eight entries that have been grouped into a book - I was almost tempted to say 48 rooms of different categories, square footage and atmosphere in the Hotel Nicaragua - are gathered in five units. The texts were not created at the same time, nor do they have the ambition to be formally unified. But they are connected by a thematic framework. Childhood and family mark the first obsessive circle to which the author returns from book to book. Then there is pain and loneliness of soul and body, everyday perceptual traps. In the end, in engaging texts, all this is joined by the loneliness of an entire nation, which, due to its musical talent in Europe, has the right to a tonal imprint, but is left without a representative image - A nation that has a tone but no image: "What music meant to the Roma, in their books and studies researchers of Roma culture, Romologists agree: for Roma throughout the centuries from Punjab and Rajasthan, music was a vault, a national library of the total cultural memory of this great European nation. The entire treasure of Romani oral traditional literature was mummified to the accompaniment of portable musical instruments. And in this way, it survived seven centuries of persecution and pogroms in the Europe of that time to be inherited by generations of descendants and enjoyers. Therefore, the music survived while its performers were left to survive".
ABSOLUTE HEARING
In his review of Novi Sad's "Hotel Nicaragua", Branislav Živanović recognized in Nikolić's prose "a voice that possesses a nomadic sensibility": "Since he is constantly on the move, the nomad crosses borders without looking back, which makes him different from emigrants and exiles who are constantly faced with by the torment of nostalgia and insurmountable internal borders". In addition, he theoretically connected Jovan Nikolić and the concept of "nomadism" by referring to the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Nevertheless, the most lucid remark of Živanović about Nikolić is the one when he says about the author "as if he is on the trail of Gaston Bašlar who emphasized that each of us has our own goal, the so-called oneiric house, your ideal house that actually represents the crypt of the birth house". After all, isn't that the intention of everyone who builds a house from sawn timber?
Unlike this critic, I am most inspired by Nikolić's miniatures that are created at the intersection of dreams and nightmares, everyday absurdities and oneriophrenia, poetry and banality, health and illness, body and spirit. The ironic sparks that fly in that collision illuminate the melancholic half-darkness from which the Roma lament is heard. There are few authors who have such a keen sense for the hidden, unconscious, incomprehensible aspects of human existence.
That day, I brought home from Ossendorf the knowledge that Jovan Nikolić has a large, neglected literary treasure and that he should somehow be encouraged to publish more often and more.
When I look back on the experience of ten years of association with Jovan, I guarantee that there are very few writers who have an absolute ear like him and who - if they wanted to - could have been exceptional musicians. So that loss for music – after the double Hotel Nicaragua it is quite clear – meant a significant gain for literature.
Bonus video:
