In the 100s, Belgrade's Prosveta published 48 books for children, and I, barely able to reach the shelf where they stood, freely took them as soon as I learned the first letters. The titles themselves were magic formulas, keys to worlds I immediately wanted to enter. The gray-and-white books had a dark blue square with a white number in the upper left corner. "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London was numbered 88, "The Story of the Peasant Siman and Other Stories" by Ivo Andrić was 57, "Hajduk Stanko" by Janko Veselinović - XNUMX. There were books with catchy titles. "Letters to Indira". I struggled to pronounce the author's name: Jawaharlal Nehru.
UNDERWATER ROADS
I read everything I could get my hands on. It was time for a book with a strange title - "20 Leagues Under the Sea". The author's name - Jules Verne. In an environment where everyone was called Fahro, Meho, Drago or Zoki, a Jules would certainly be an exotic phenomenon. But at least the name would be easy to pronounce.
More than half a century after the first reading, I utter the first sentence in a low voice: "The year 1866 was notable for a strange event, an unexplained and inexplicable phenomenon, which no one has doubtless forgotten." The phenomenon was truly unforgettable because the original feeling instantly awoke in me - Jules Verne knew how to suck the reader into the vortex of his sentences.
The protagonist, a professor of natural sciences from Paris, sailed from New York on the ship Abraham Lincoln at the invitation of the American government, to investigate a series of encounters between ships and a "floating reef", a huge sea monster or whale. Accompanied by the servant Conseil and the Canadian whaler Ned, the main character found himself on the back of this "whale" - in fact the submarine Nautilus. The crew took them inland, where they were met by Captain Nemo. Underwater navigation through the seas and oceans could begin.
As I leaf through one of my favorite books from my childhood, I realize that even in us, veteran readers, that boy who swallows a string of letters with his eyes for the first time, creating Verne's underwater world in his imagination, remains alive.
At the end of the novel, I come across a sentence that reveals Jules Verne's deepest conviction: "It is a story about an incredible expedition, about an underwater path, inaccessible to man, which will one day open up progress for him."
Jules Verne was no ordinary writer. He was a kind of futurologist, with a high percentage of accurate predictions.
The next book signed by this French writer was also in my Prosveta library. It had numbers 70 and 71.
“On March 23, 1865, desperate voices were heard in the air, above the Pacific Ocean…” This date marked the beginning of the story of “The Mysterious Island”. By chance, Jules Verne chose the date for the beginning of the novel that we see as a round jubilee today, March 2025, exactly 160 years later. Jules Verne tells his “Robinsoniade”, but his castaways reached the island by air - by balloon.
What was important to me was the fact that in this book, Captain Nemo appeared on the Mysterious Island, alive and well, and that I learned more about this mysterious character - he was actually Prince Dakar.
Jules Verne borrowed many of his ideas from other writers and scientists. The name of the submarine "Nautilus" is a reminder of Robert Fulton, a scientist and engineer who constructed a manually powered submarine around 1800.
THE BOY WHO WANTED TO GET ON THE BOAT
Twenty-eight years after the launch of Fulton's submarine in Brest, some 300 kilometers southeast, in Nantes, a son, Jules Gabriel, was born to the family of lawyer Pierre Verne and his wife Sophie, who came from a ship-owning family. He had a brother and three sisters, attended Catholic school and then high school. His father prepared him with a classical education to follow in his footsteps. But little Jules was different. At the age of eleven, he secretly boarded a ship that was to sail to India. His father found him at the last minute and brought him home. Jules Verne had to solemnly promise his father that from then on he would travel only in his imagination. Admittedly, there is also a suspicion that the story was completely different, but the world sticks to this version that sounds good.
As a young man, he went to revolutionary Paris to study law. He began to write poems and plays, and his wealthy uncle introduced him to the circle of famous writers - father and son Dima. Jules' father realized that his son would not become a lawyer and stopped financing him. Jules Verne spent his last money on books and - starved. Nevertheless, he graduated from college and became a lawyer. He met Honorine, a twenty-six-year-old widow and mother of two children, and because of her he decided to take a job at the stock exchange. When he had earned enough, they got married. He was 29 years old. A little later, their son Michel was born, who would manage his father's manuscript legacy for the next century.
His first travels outside France took Jules Verne to Scotland and Norway. He wrote a novel about them that he did not publish during his lifetime. His fateful encounter with the writer and publisher Pierre-Gilles Etzel, who started the "Unusual Journeys" series, was a turning point.
The first book, "Five Weeks in a Balloon," published in 1863, quickly won over the French public. Time worked in his favor. Verne became one of the most widely read writers in the world. From 1850 to the present day, his novels have been translated into as many as 150 languages, making him the second most translated author of all time after Agatha Christie.
LESS KNOWN JULES VERN
Europe was more fair to Jules Verne's artistic achievements. America was happy to translate abridged versions of the novels, turning the drinkable into a shallow writer. However, the mark he left should not be underestimated. The surrealists would be unthinkable without his books. Hollywood adventure films owe him a lot. Science fiction as a literary genre sees its progenitor in him.
Decades after my first encounter with this book, I learned that Verne's publisher flatly refused to publish what was probably the most interesting manuscript the writer had ever written. It was the dystopian novel "Paris in the 20th Century." The publisher, Ecel, judged the book to be bad and unmarketable, because the world of tomorrow was painted in dark tones: "Publication would ruin your reputation as a writer," he wrote to Verne, suggesting that the publication be postponed for twenty years.
Jules Verne wrote this novel in 1863, and it was only published in Paris in 1994, one hundred and thirty-one years after the writer put a period to the last sentence. The novel's main character, the young Michel, lives in a world of glass skyscrapers, superfast trains, gas-powered cars, and a global communications network. Technology triumphantly shapes everyday life, while literature, music, and painting are held in contempt. Michel won the prize for literature in Latin. Need I say that this Verne hero is not happy in his world?
The novel features objects that seem to have been truly brought over from the technological civilization of the last century. Pocket computers, elevators, automatic sliding doors, the fax as a communication device, global fashion trends, global trade. Interestingly, Jules Verne predicted that compressed air energy storage (CAES) would be widely used in the last century. In short, electrical energy is converted into compressed air, and then the air is converted back into electrical energy when needed. The prediction was almost a century early. In the first half of the 21st century, there were only a few such facilities in the world. Verne also wrote that people would wear iron-based suits. This did not come true, but that does not mean that it will not.
VERN'S RELATIVES AND VERN'S CHILDREN
Jules Verne wrote a lot. But he wrote only one essay. The thematic center of this voluminous work was Edgar Allan Poe. In France, this American poet and prose writer became available based on the translation of Charles Baudelaire - a poet crucial to modern world poetry of the next century. Verne's openness to the new and different brought him closer to the American writer, whom he considered to be an authentic genius. There are numerous traces of Poe's influence on Verne's work, so the American writer could be called a kind of permanent source of inspiration.
Jules Verne experienced fame and recognition during his lifetime. But even that could not protect him from the whims of fate. When he was returning home to Amiens, the capital of the French province of Picardy, in March 1886, his nephew Gaston shot him twice with a pistol for no reason. He wounded him in the leg and the famous writer remained lame for the rest of his life. The nephew ended up in a madhouse.
It is worth mentioning that Jules Verne also accurately predicted technological developments in his lesser-known works. The story "A Day in the Life of an American Journalist in the Year 2889" predicted the emergence of megacities in which people communicate by visual telephones and use air vehicles. Energy is obtained from batteries that store solar energy.
And the novel, published in 1866 under the original title "Robir, the Conqueror," which was translated here as "The Conqueror of the Air," tells the story of the voyage of the "Albatross," an airship with propellers. In doing so, Jules Verne anticipated the helicopter.
The main figure, the constructor Robir, who resembles Captain Nemo, leaves a message at the end for the Americans and the world: "My opinion is that we should not rush into anything, not even progress. Science should not precede customs. In other words, what is needed will come in its own time." Robir concludes: "The peoples are not yet ripe for unity."
Before he disappears with his Albatross, Robir will say: "So I am leaving and I am taking my secret with me. But it will not be lost to humanity. It will be his on the day he is smart enough to never misuse it."
Now, exactly 120 years to the day after the writer succumbed to diabetes, we know that Jules Verne, speaking through Robir, was an overly optimistic man. From 1905 to the present, humanity has developed almost all the technologies that Jules Verne predicted. And these technologies have been very effective in carrying out a series of the most brutal genocides as well as in waging a devastating war against nature.
But writers have not stopped imagining future worlds. One of the greatest, whose literary quality transcended the science fiction genre, American writer Ray Bradbury, once said: "We are all, in one way or another, children of Jules Verne."
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