"Kovač could place himself in the very cracks of our still fiercely active determinations: consciousness is reliant on myths created on various interwoven and contradictory traditions (religious, tribal, vengeful, patriarchal, national, etc.) mythical traditions that are tougher and more hardened than we are (utopian) thought that they are and will be to our literary field, his undertaking - should it be proved after all the recent and old trials - is necessary and, most importantly, liberating." (Predrag Matvejević)
During the previous weekend, a festival was held in Podgorica in honor of the writer who, back in the 60s, realistically described the false illusions of a "socialist inspiration" and who would defend the same humanist values of the SFRY in the early 90s. Moreover, in the period of the 70s, when the former Yugoslavia was in its "golden years" and when its functioning offered an answer to the systemic shortcomings of capitalism, which were reflected in racial unrest throughout the USA, student protests in Western Europe and growing political terrorism in the North In Ireland, Spain and Germany, Mirko Kovač was labeled as the "feather of the black wave" because of his "black image of reality".
His literary expression at the time was treated as a "turn in culture" because it combined the morbidity and loveliness of our existentialism in a recognizable way. He tried, and in this he definitely succeeded, to penetrate in his complicated way into our psyche, which often does not separate good from bad or tries to justify evil with some passions, urges, as well as with something fatal and threatening that happened somewhere or will happen. From the age of twenty-four, Kovač went from a person who was ripe for a psychiatric hospital, through the communist determination that he was a reactionary, a chauvinist who incites national hatred, to the previously mentioned epithet of a black wave during the 70s, at the beginning of the bloody disintegration of "our brotherhood and unity" by the "father of the Serbian nation" Dobrica Ćosić, as well as by some advisers of the "Balkan butcher" of the President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, was called the Serbian Ustasha. The path of the first (alleged) nationalist among ex-yu writers ended in the position of a permanent contributor to the Split weekly Feral Tribune, in which he passionately wrote against Croatian nationalism. Of course, not a single totalitarian regime was able to "simply kick him out of literature", as was said back in 1962, but in the meantime he won numerous literary awards and Mirko's "Doors of the Womb" was declared the best novel of the 20th century and after Meša Selimović's novel "Dervish and Death" and "Travnik Chronicle" by Ivo Andrić.
In the lost times and mourning for collective exaltations, we still do not accept the messages of spent ideologies! Co-tragically, we try to find a way out of the Balkan mud and fantasize over and over again what the "eternal place of longing and search" looks like. And, like unknown pagans, we shove under the rug the fragments of our conflicted and mythologized identity, which, right then and there, after another regime persecution and the coming political breakdown, we will proudly and aggressively, like a red rooster, present as another of our former, the original, suppressed and oppressed value! In the Balkans, misfortune does not always come from nowhere and always from outside, but it is often prepared in our communities, which become its biggest victims.
Mirko Kovač's postmodern prose has an archetypal hook! Even if he did not strive for the attention of the readers, Kovač, through his jumpy and factually fragmented statements, gave shape to the preaching that for more than half a century, he described to all those interested in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, through his intricate, but also close to everyone, i.e. recognizable personal, family and social relations suppressed and unrecognized flaws. They didn't ban him and take away his awards for no reason - he described the essence of our relationships in which we test humanity and suppress creativity! He described what today's chauvinists preach within their families and what they must not talk about publicly or at least try to push through the relativization of values and historical revisionism.
Kovač did not believe that the bearers of the ideology from the 90s were finally silenced and in March 2012 he stated that "maybe their ideas have somehow become ridiculous after everything that has passed. But, they are here! They speak the same way as then when their ideas had a great influence. But if tomorrow the circumstances were in their favor, they would be in the same places and in the same positions. They are simply people in the service of evil changes".
Kovač's Mediterranean space, in which the intertwining of past and present is "obliquely" described, will always be tempting for the few members of our Balkan groups, because in them "power belongs to those who can seize it themselves" and in which the majority of members of those robbed and disenfranchised communities live in "European the illusion" that everything will suddenly change for the better, as if by the stroke of a magic wand. Of course, Mirko's "blackening, but blackening for pleasure" will also have readers among the few who have not become serfs of communication technologies, because he noticed a long time ago "that the reader is most often manipulated by all this obfuscation through the means of information".
Of course, for this occasion we have to remind ourselves of Miljenko Jergović's review in which he pointed out that today's writers "avoid this kind of big and dark topics" that Kovač wrote about, and that is "because they lack Kovač's talent, but also because they wouldn't blame the scum. Although they are probably aware that the scum doesn't read anything".
Bonus video:
