One of the most interesting and important figures of post-Yugoslav literature was Teofil Pančić, writer, journalist, traveler, critic, editor, hedonist, columnist of the highest order, gourmet, perfect listener and even better storyteller... A truly Renaissance personality - it would be difficult to list everything in which he was unsurpassed or at least brilliant. Certainly - it was a privilege to have him as a friend.
Always with a clear political stance - against dullness and force, against stupidity and darkness. Never - a lover of God.
He knew how to articulate, in the manner of a spiritual aristocracy, despite the fact that that world had sunk, his irresistible Yugoslav story and Vojvodina's choice precisely at a time when Slobini (without Vučkovi, but it's the same team) the commissioners tried their best to destroy any Vojvodina spirit in anything...
Let's clarify something, today's, especially younger readers, easily lose sight of this - this is actually the only real "lost generation" in the Yugoslav political and cultural context. People born in the mid-sixties, formed for Yugoslavia, for a large and serious European state, and spent their lives in the puppet states that remained after the collapse of the SFRY. And that's why nothing was ever hidden from them. That's why they so naturally refused to agree to the offered reality...
Teofil managed to have a brilliant polemic with artificial intelligence about his own life status, which he "left to the little ones", as they used to say in Podgorica. His text was sumptuously witty, and artificial intelligence will never be able to do that.
In his columns, he unmasked national myths and their impact on the public and literary scene.
However, his most important work was as a critic, primarily literary... Although he wrote brilliantly about theatre, but also about film. Even that type of writing was a kind of literary criticism. Ultimately, the same could be said for his political writings. Literary-based mockery of dilettantes. Because the whole world is literature, and there is nothing outside. It was as if this insight gave him the strength to be alone, in the face of the winds, and in the face of bursts of misunderstanding. When you know that, in fact, everything else is just tiring vicissitudes...
By the way, he was one of the rare literary critics whose texts you simply enjoyed, as a reader. To understand this properly, one should recall the essential difference between newspaper and university criticism, and Teofil Pančić acted as the best possible representative of the former. So, there were no strategies to “overshadow the simplicity”, no boasting of this or that theoretical approach, but a kind of reader’s confession. That manner of a true reader in his case was layered, unpretentious and naturally erudite. Writing about one book, he managed to remind you of several more, and it all functioned like an endless dance of books. Which never stops.
He had, and it was evident from every written line, an enormous love for literature and knowledge, a vast reading experience.
It is possible that all this is not easy to understand for someone living in a country where literary criticism hardly exists. In Montenegro, critics often act as party gunmen or clan-based executives. That is why the few authors, actually several authors, who write seriously about books are precious.
Teofil supported New Montenegrin Literature, explicitly and precisely: he wrote excellent texts about the novels of Montenegrin writers, and the fact that his perspective came from Belgrade and from the pages of Vreme was important in order, if nothing else, to nullify the "traditional" resistance that followed from those areas to anything distinctive and Montenegrin.
In short: the good spirit of post-Yugoslav literature.
Bonus video:
