World

Bozo Koprivica lived by the rules of the Western. That's how he died: without unnecessary words. Just one long Leonese shot of the eyes.

That's how he walked. And wrote. Sharply and always on target.

With him, a sentence could be as deadly as a rattlesnake from hiding. But also as sweet and just. He wrote sentences like verses. That music would follow you for a while after reading, as the main character drifted off into the prairie twilight...

The notebooks in which his essays were born were thinned by torn pages, often folded from being carried in pockets, tattooed with large and barely legible Bož's letters... Here, on such pages, lucid ideas were born after or alongside dramatic intersections.

His texts seek a special reader. That world is not accessible to everyone, but the reward is worth it.

Bota Koprivica is a writer who first created his own world so he could write about it. It is a world in which the perfect double pass is exchanged You're shooting i Change Adi (u Kišov masterful translation).

His way of speaking about poetry was distinctive and, simply, spectacular: each text turned into a poetry festival that boldly connected poets from different eras and geographies. Always with some higher reason that emerged in Božo's interpretations.

There are few writers who had such a refined sense of friendship. He never made a mistake about a fellow writer. He was loyal to his friend Danilo Kiš, in an old-fashioned and chivalrous way, to the end.

I am sure that no one has ever written with such understanding and respect about theater actors, artists tragically condemned solely to the memory and story of works that once were...

His texts on theater, from an angle that is usually overlooked, with a focus on the actor, testify to this essential understanding, but also a deep feeling for the performing arts, for its nature, power, and destiny.

He was the best possible interpreter of those moments that always escape, that leave you alone with the memory. That's when you are closest to the actor, the tragic hero of an art...

His circles of writers, and always in the background, his city of N. With the breath of the Mediterranean, the scent of the South, with a civic substance that takes up no more than two streets, but in his memories they, those two streets, seem like an entire city.

And football above all. The whole world according to the rules and in the spirit of one game.

Football as cosmogony. And ontology. Football as gnosis and Bota as the supreme gnostic...

But also the stage, the theater, to the end. That's why the greatest football players resemble great actors. And their tragedy is similar.

Once in Bijelo Polje, in a trusted circle of partisans, I had the privilege of listening to him and Sinan Gudžević how they discuss Partizan teams in the twilight of the SFRY. Then you realize that for the masters of storytelling, the topic really doesn't matter. It's other knowledge in action...

Koprivica Bota said it well/the whole universe is just one ball.

He was the last cowboy of Yugoslav literature.

Another unforgettable shot with eyes in the foreground: on the set of a film, he met the infamous Jovica Stanišić, the all-powerful policeman and war criminal, at the time of his greatest power. Of course, Bota didn't want to look away, as the others did if the supreme UDBAS stared at them. That's a Leonese frame, too. Stanišić got annoyed, he was disturbed by the staring man with the steely gaze, but when he heard that it was some guy from Nikšić, he just smiled. A knowledgeable man.

There is something Garikuper-esque in his Montenegrinness, as well as in his anti-fascism - when something is under pressure and attack, Božo always chooses that side. Like any true Western hero.

And he was the last partisan. Always ready to die.

If he had chosen, he would have died in Spain in 1939.

Finally, Božo's version of the legendary greeting:

Death to fascism, long live Yugoslavia...