[LANGUAGE – MIĆUNOVIĆ (Veljko)]
What was Yugoslav communism, what was diplomacy, and why did it end and it remained, despite everything, one of the most successful memories? Why did the communists create a dazzling image of themselves, an image that no one remained indifferent to, a boy in pants, a cook in the kitchen, a soldier in a barracks, a factory worker - and why the rulers based their power on an image, on a photograph, on the dominance of the color red , on billboards, slogans and the terror of optics, while running away from the critical text like the devil from the cross and hiding the slightest trace of a critical idea like a snake's legs?
I remember Cetinje from the early seventies - I lost some part of my life in the dictatorship of the image, in the terror of portraits, and I know what a risk the people expose themselves to when they underestimate the language. It was the time of plastic - visual messages sent by the government to the population. Everyone was happy, she because she perfected the picture, just because it's easier to be happy with a picture than with text. The text is a critical discourse, it tests, it opens with language, it closes the soul with language. - It is superfluous to say about me, a novelist, that I am on the side of language (where else?) - and that I wrestle with forces that underestimate language (with whom else should I wrestle?).
I lived in Bajova 9, "door to door with Zetski Dom", as my father said, already an old man at the time, anchored in the first half of the century, but despite his fame for a distant, once-and-for-all history, I, like all the boys in that valley, were delighted by the new pictures - long-legged, low-breasted girls in folk costumes, from KUD Njegoš, capable of outgrowing our history, even the aura of an old poet from our region, if that doesn't sound like the world outrageous. Twice a week they practiced in the Zetski Dom, which served only them - it was a museum of female beauty, open only to the privileged eye, and I was the one - for a thousand hours I kicked football, and frolicked, occasionally, through the window.
Those who haven't seen them, won't believe what the women of Cetinje were like in the seventies: strong and proud girls, wearing the costumes of our people, or rather our peoples, blue and white, red and green, yellow and so on - a young woman stronger than the costume, the earth shakes under her. Living bread and living wine - the regime supported that image, and ethnographic exhilaration filled the small town, which, after all, is more than a small town, but the seventies found it sleeping. Everyone was excited by the picture, and the old power from Cetinje - word and text - seemed to have taken a nap, fell asleep. It was the same on Čevo, which shone through my childhood like a copper shield of Cetinje - the language is silent, the picture speaks. It was like that everywhere, with the mild exceptions of Belgrade and Zagreb - the image of the master, the language of the servant who needs to be beaten on the head and around the neck.
Busts of Soviet leadersThe regime had a language complex. What Jocasta was for the emperor Oedipus, his own mother with whom he wallows in sin, that for them was textual criticism; they arrested because of the text, shot because of the text. They treated their Oedipus complex in one philosophy, which itself moves away from criticism as Oedipus moves away from the matrimonial bed with his mother - in Marxism. The language complex erodes the regime as long as it is in power (unbroken communism) - the rulers while they are alive.
Yugoslavia was a country that invests everything in its image - it plays the image card, it has an image ace up its sleeve. Image is everything and critical speech is a disease. And hers Tito was a picture, a portrait, he hung everywhere, decorated hills, pastures, with his manly face in hard material, decorated offices, barracks, schools, drug store-like basements - the chief of police sits, under the picture in the frame, beech logs crackling in the furnace, and for him, just sitting under the picture is enough to fulfill his destiny, that minor officialdom: uniform, moustache, gun, rump, in a word - a man whose being is satisfied with the picture, with the portrait above him - hasn't life given him enough? When I went where my feet took me, in the early eighties, I, in fact, escaped from the land of paintings and portraits. - I believe, I will be honest, that communism collapsed because it underestimated linguistic public creativity. Those who underestimate language are digging a pit for themselves. To reject creative and critical language means, in short, to reject the last guarantee of a human being.
Diplomatic light
In this light, I see the work of the best Yugoslav diplomats, among whom he belongs Veljko Mićunović (1916-1982), ambassador of the SFRY in the USSR (1956-58/1969-71) - and in the USA (1962-1967). He left behind the best diplomatic memoirs in the Montenegrin, perhaps also Yugoslav, modern tradition - Moscow years 1956-58, To Moscow years 1969-71, with a solid diplomat's portfolio: vision, information and intelligence skills, style and, finally, cold reason - in a profession that requires a cool head.
Such a profile has attracted me since the beginning of the service I entered as an ambassador 22 years ago: I see him handing over his credentials Voroshilov (“Just a day after the visit Molotov I was received by the nominal head of the Soviet state, KJ Voroshilov, for the purpose of presenting credentials", cf. Moscow years 1956/58, Yugoslav Review, Belgrade, 1984, 43); "When I told Vorošilov that there are only about four hundred thousand Montenegrins, he was very disappointed. I 'made a concession' and said that there are up to half a million of us, but we are scattered throughout Yugoslavia, so Belgrade, in Serbia, is the largest Montenegrin city." (Ibid., 45); I see him hovering over a private dispatch: "This afternoon I received a telegram from Belgrade that my son was born. (...) I blame myself for this kind of mood, in which at times it seems as if the whole world suddenly became gilded, and that only because a son was born to me" (May 4, 1956, MG, 63) - does he blame himself for making a state duty subject to the joy of the birth of a son? - it is that Spartan experience of the state, worthy of respect, for those who know what we are talking about here; "During the formal receptions on the occasion of Tito's visit, a thousand and more people attended, both in the Kremlin at the Soviet reception, and here at the reception in the Soviet Inn" - for today's diplomatic practice, that is not possible even in a dream; "A frenzied campaign in support of the 'Hungarian uprising' has begun in the West (MG, Oct. 31, 1956)" - the author puts the Hungarian uprising in quotation marks, but keeps silent about the bloodthirsty Soviet intervention; it is important for a diplomat, I should add, how he positions himself at the moment when things happen, not how he interprets after the train has passed; “He invited me Andropov, a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, to visit him" (Ibid, Oct. 2, 1957) - this testifies that Mićunović is part of a wide diplomatic history, because he is invited to a conversation by a world player who, thirty years later, will bring to power Gorbachev. I see him in delicate situations: "In yesterday's conversation I noticed Khrushchev that I was surprised by the long delay of the marshal Zhukova in Albania, where he spent almost more time than in Yugoslavia. The allusion was clear: they kept Žukov for ten days in Albania, and even more in Yugoslavia, while here during that time they did not prepare what was necessary for his political liquidation" (Ibid., 359) - and here Mićunović excels, because at a sensitive moment he has as an interlocutor one of the heads of the bipolar world, and the real interlocutor is momentum, which is valued in diplomacy; he is well informed, when he talks about the Chinese mentality, on the occasion of his reception at Mao Zedong (Nov. 20, 1957): “Ours have been trying for a long time to inform Mao Zedong as correctly as possible. They got the impression that Mao had no idea about basic matters, as far as the internal situation in Yugoslavia is concerned. Maybe that impression was wrong, it's hard to guess what a Chinese person knows or doesn't know about something while you're talking to him”; I see him receiving the news about the early withdrawal from Moscow, reading it, or rather, hearing it (June 7, 1958) - "Just a few days ago, Radio-Belgrade announced the news that I had been appointed a member of the SKJ commission for international relations. After this, it was clear to everyone, both in Moscow and Belgrade, that I would soon be withdrawn to the country". I see Mićunović reading a statement in the Soviet press about the end Imre Nagya, the Hungarian prime minister who, two years earlier, led a people's revolution against the Soviet suppression of freedom and was executed, although, as a skilled diplomat, he leaves room for a different view: "There are also assumptions that Nagy was executed earlier or that he succumbed during the investigation, and that the news of the execution was announced only now"; I see him on a farewell visit to the head of the Soviet state, Khrushchev, in an environment incomprehensible by today's standards of courtesy visits, the formality of which cannot be softened even by a warm Spanish word farewell (farewell): "I stayed with Khrushchev on a 'farewell visit' for almost a whole day. During that time, we had three private meetings, not counting the lunch with the Khrushchev family. The first conversation with Khrushchev was in the garden of his villa. Then Khrushchev suggested that we bathe in the sea before lunch;” I see him keeping his distance from Khrushchev in the water, as the latter had told him, two years earlier, while Zhukov was still in power (Khrushchev replaced him at the height of his power), how during the swim the marshal kept getting closer to him, and Khrushchev admits that, looking at Zhukov sideways, he asked himself: "Why is he coming so close to me?"
Moscow years, the most significant text of this type in our country, later Đilasov political literature, which inspired the dissident movement in the USSR, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, appeared in English in New York and London in translation David Floyd, and they had success in other languages as well, in addition to Chinese. The book was published in a slightly more liberal Croatian climate, but it was received with a changeable mood ("Living in the Igalo health resort, I met one day in Poljeće, in 1978, on a footpath, three of my war comrades, Montenegrin partisans. When I asked where they were going, they answered that they were going to Dubrovnik to buy my book there, because, unfortunately, it is not available in Montenegro").
Escape from language
Communist iconolatry, fleeing from language, was oriented towards the profane and superficial image of deception. They created a working class, and deceived it, by not allowing it access to the language but diverting it into censorship. They didn't know, or didn't want to know, that man, even in private life, let alone public, lives by means of words and thanks to dialogue; that speech, and honest speech, and not lying, is the only justification for government repression, and running away from speech, or false speech, is actually a mockery of the citizenry; they had no idea that language is "the most dangerous of all goods", as the young German poets said, who called it property because it is a condition of history, a condition of the existence of man and people in a historical way; they arrested their best friends who announced that the public field is nothing but a big conversation, and politics nothing but a linguistic event at the level of the people; - they imprisoned Đilas (it is no coincidence that his tongue, the estate that punishes, dealt them the fatal blow), Edvard Kotsbek ("Thucydides attributed the appearance of the plague in Athens/to a change in the meaning of words"), so many others, that their number, even their graves, is unknown. They did not want to know that referring to history is a lie, if we do not refer honestly, using the language that is the guarantor of history. Etc. etc. - I could go on and on until tomorrow.
In short, European linguistic creativity considers it its honor to fight against autocracy: it dismantled the torture of portraits Jaroslav Hasek, world-famous satirist, d To the good soldier Švejk, a novel that destroyed the phallic pathos of a monarchy (Svejk asks the innkeeper where the portrait is Emperor Franz Joseph disappeared from the wall, the latter replies: "I put it in the attic so that the flies don't screw it up!")
Satire, that pagan language!
Speech creativity - the only art that makes war!
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