Where there was no samizdat, there was no opposition either

The Iron Curtain in the middle of Europe, what was it once?

The anti-ideological Postmodern Condition (Jean-François Lyotard: La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris, 1979), written at the request of the University Council of the Government of Quebec, is nothing more than a reserve position of Western thought. It is a platform for the reform of ideas and a platform for the record of the capitalist state in relation to the upcoming challenges with the left. Dissident work took place slowly in the Central European milieu, where I studied in the eighties, earned my bread (for summer vacations, in Paris, taking advantage of the exchange rate of the French franc, which for the Czech crown was the emperor of emperors, but even there I did not break ties with my intellectual mother, the Central European ). Information from the Western cultural sphere was arriving anyway, but reactions were delayed due to strong, ubiquitous censorship. You were caught between a rock and a hard place.

It is no wonder that the creative intelligentsia today binds Dostoevsky, the apostle of the underground in the prison, the underground in the psychological sense of the word, more strongly than any other writer to censorship and samizdat. If you have experience, you already have an idea; experience - isn't it already an idea? With Dostoyevsky, his whole life is an idea. Human destiny is an idea. He is the patriarch of self-publishing (author's press) known as samizdat.

"Dostoevsky served a full sentence and was isolated from Russian literature for nine years... This is an example from Russian history of something we now call samizdat, the distribution of uncensored writing" (see more details H. Gordon Skilling: Samizdat and Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe , Ohio, 1989).

In the critical orbit of Western consciousness, Lyiotard registered a state without a chance to reconcile immeasurable differences, in fact, he restored skepticism (institutionalization of modern scepticism) with a turn to the left. He established that the institutionalization of modern skepticism is not an experiment, that it does not lead to a consensus for a new (economic) order, that postmodernism is, in fact, critically revised modernity and that the dominant intellect of the West rests in a new form of social order.

Therein lies the greatest merit of Lyotard's work - a view towards the program of the left, attention focused on the advantages of leftist thinking, before it is too late. Finally, a post to the leftist legacy, not just that of IE, but that of the western radius.

This philosopher was read there, best and most precisely, by the dissidence in IE, in a timely manner; she even thought about this new form, wrote alongside Foucault's and Lyotard's skepticism.

Samizdat (illegal press) was an Eastern European form of skepticism. Not a single step, not even an hour was left behind for the responsibility of liberal thinking in the Western genre and cultural climate. We owe him a lot - both those of us who know what he meant, and those who know almost nothing about him.

That is why those who think that IE, on the world level, can be a new form of cultural existence, that it has the capacity and will not disappoint the new era, as a whole, when the hour strikes, including of course its Balkans under more advanced regimes than the existing ones, are right today. Of these everywhere thieves who stole everything, including their own politics.

Samizdat was the opposition to communism; where there was no samizdat, there was no opposition either (the Yugoslav case). Neocommunism, admittedly, allowed samizdat, which bought shameless exploitation of public state assets behind a smoke screen. Let's take a cursory look at the role of lies in a society that does not know oppositional political practice, nor the opposition as an institution, during the theft of the Thirteenth June Award that was presented to me by the President of the Assembly of Montenegro, Mr. Krivokapić R. with his ensemble of sinecures and the hunt for me: "Also, for the soul of the then minister Čelebić, Mr. Gojka is also accused of participation and an active role in the theft of art from the Dubrovnik battlefield."

I was dismayed when I read these insinuations, because at the time of the unfortunate Dubrovnik anabasis, I was working abroad.

"The same forces - I mean my minority - are preventing Montenegrins from learning the truth about their ten-century glorious past, about their state-legal continuity, about their extraordinary cultural-historical heritage, through a quasi-school system."

What was I doing on the Dubrovnik battlefield?

I had an active role in the art theft!

Where was the citizen of GČ during the unfortunate anabasis of the JNA around Dubrovnik? GČ was in the Czech Republic, Germany and France for all 366 days of the year of the Lord 1991, in the underground of Paris, Berlin and Prague, dedicated to stage, that is to say film and theater work, as evidenced by the rehearsals of theater pieces and the work, documented every liturgical day in my texts and books. How could the GČ simultaneously steal art in Dubrovnik and direct Shakespeare, Bott Strauss, Andrej Makarewitcz, Heiner Müller to the stage in these countries?

Samizdat was dealing with political and cultural truth. There are stages in the life of man and nation when there is no time to waste on an obvious lie. That was the age of samizdat. Samizdat suggested that the life of a creator in a political crisis is too short to be devoted to lies. This distinguishes it from neo-communism, an ideal climate for lying and plundering social goods. The price of the sad fact that Yugoslavia was the only country in the IE without its own samizdat came to be paid, ironically, not in communism but later in neo-communism. To us.

Polish wave

Poland was gripped by a strong rebellious spirit long before Solidarity, as Joanna Priebisz (Polish Dissent Publications, 1982) says. This great culture, loyal to Europe and the church, gave birth to an apostate letter immediately after Milovan Đilas opened a new page of the world rebel letter.

It happened with the Poles at the beginning of the fifties (Leszek Kołakowski).

Poland determined the intonation and profile of the dissident movement decades in advance, until the end of the century. In such a short space, there is, of course, only enough to point out the pale contours and outline of a huge gate of rebel writing, standing at the entrance to the vast literary underground of the dissident era.

Only a year later, in the midst of Solidarity, Tomas Mianowicz announces that there are practically no more samizdats in Poland. "An entire network of independent publications was created, an entire reading market, an entire system of literature distribution, journalistic and academic works - all this was swept away by censorship" (Index of Censorship, 1983, 24-25).

Polish Dissent had several different phases, in different circumstances with different intensity and, of course, several phases profiled differently compared to each other. Finally, these were phases with different literary relevance. There are three main ones, before Solidarity: the first, during this movement itself, the second and, finally, the third. In my opinion, the first one is the most relevant in literature, not because it is the longest, but because it is the most fruitful, because it is literary formative compared to the other two and, finally, because it formed authors, the greater number of whom we will meet later and some of whom are still active today .

The first two phases, the two waves, were arranged chronologically and subject-wise as early as 1984, with some vagueness about the second (then still incomplete) phase, first in samizdat, and then in the book by Helga Hirsch (Banned publications in Poland, 1976-1983) published, like so many sources from the resistance movement under the common sign of IE, in Cologne.

For the same stage, an insight into the serious work of Polisch Dissident Publications: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1982) can be useful. Earlier dissidents were written by Peter Raina (Independent Social Movements, London, 1981), and the role of free radio in the history of free-thinking ideas of that time is evidenced by the work of Uncensored Publications by Lidija Ciolkosz. At the time when I read my texts on Radio France Internationale, in Paris (1983/84), courtesy of Stanko Cerović, then editor at RFI, Polish Dissent was, after Russian, the strongest in IE and therefore in the world.

Radio Free Europe Research publishes works in the period 1978-80. About Solidarity can be found mostly at the address of Chris Pszenicki (Polish Publishing, Index of Censorship, 1980-81) and A. Sabbat-Swidlicka (Poland's Underground Press) and, further, in an abridged version by Wincent Wolski and Jacek Kalabinski (The Media War in Poland, 1984).

Finally, towards the end of the eighties, Jakub Karpinski published an extensive study Polish intellectuals in the opposition, problems of communism.

Yugoslavia was a sleepy country drugged with false freedoms, and its successors are the same (in most of the former SFRY, the air is drugged with political corruption), and something more and harder - harder to the extent that they slept through the next thirty years , without the fruits that real oppositional consciousness brings.

Am I not right - the following is written in black and white in the text published in Pobjeda: "To award the Thirteenth of July Award to some people who during the nineties kept silent or from an important state position supported the denial of the Montenegrin nation and culture, means mocking the essence of their own country" (D. Đuranović : Lying state and upright laureates, Pobjeda, June 21, 2013).

What did the novelist GČ do for so many years of his literary work?

He "kept silent and supported the denial of the Montenegrin nation and culture", says this regime cashier who, it seems, feeds in the pit, right next to the numerous pits in this budget-patriotic operetta.

And what was the traitorous traitor GČ really doing, let's say, Mr. 1995?

He created and published the Literature of Montenegro from the 23th to the 50th century in XNUMX volumes, which the communist leaders, proud censors and editors from Udba would not have thought of for another XNUMX years if they had ruled - all sitting on sacks of feathers, sipping brandy and smoking tobacco.

According to this courtier, what is the millennial synthesis of literature and literacy on the soil of Montenegro?

"Mocking with the essence of our own country"!

A heretical book

The heretical book from the underground channels was popularly called bibula, from the carbon paper on which it was made, while the circulation was followed by a second-hand term with clear indications of the origin and character of that talk about the world. Joanna Priebisz states that in the period before Solidarity, at least 22 bibula magazines were active and there were also uncensored publishers (e.g. NOWa - Niecenzurovana Oficyna Wydawnicza, edited by Miroslav Chojecki, Zapis, Robotnik, Krytyka, Res Publica, Spotkania, and so many others , many of which were printed in England and smuggled in).

As many as 350 illegal book titles, mostly fiction, were published, and Tygodnik Solidarnoszć was published in half a million copies. Solidarnoszć owned a network of over 1.000 bookstores (See T. Mianowicz: Unofficial Publishing Lives on, Index on Censorship, 1983).

It is almost impossible to describe the endless river of topics in those books, according to sources (the publisher Wezwanie, translated as Izazov, published 1985 titles in 600 alone). The publication of Polish authors in exile (Czesław Miłosz and so many others), church authorities began... About the enormous role of the Catholic Church in the spiritual life of this country, in such a small space, nothing can be said except that it is indeed enormous - as Cardinal Wyszinski , father Papiełuszko and others.

When I was writing the novel Ubistvo AGW i gonjenje, more precisely the chapters about the Polish lord Kiejstu Wasiłewski, his dark life in exile in Cetinje, at Bajova 9 (the house described in The Murder is none other than my parents' house opposite Zetski dom), friendship with To Bać Karanić, a legionnaire, who plowed a deep furrow in my first novel, with memories of the 'good old Poland', of the time of heroism under Josef Piłsudski, of his (their!) 'women and greyhounds', of the Polish melos, of the 'color of Poland' of fire', to the 'tone of the Polish tragedy' - it was in the fall of 1985 in Prague - I worked at night on those chapters, translating with my school friend, Krszystof Wajler, in his "samizdat" studio in Višehrad, under the church of St. Peter and Paul, in Visegrad's silence, which is not found anywhere else in Prague at night.

We talked for hours about samizdat, about the catacomb literature that strengthened the Polish nation for decades.

My friend had rebellion in his blood, he fed me Bratniak (an illegal student newspaper from his native Gdańsk) a couple of times a year. Later, our Kiejstut Wasiłewski (Krszystof christened him, like, after all, all the Polish characters in my early novel), came to us smoothly shaped, like a kind of heretical statue with a metallic blood stream, a lordly apostate with a pipe. Krszystof was proud to belong to the Polish left, an unyielding culture of opposition and rebellion. I am truly grateful to you, my friend, wherever you are, I was clueless - you instructed me, in poor conditions, but powerfully!

God bless your adventurous soul both in Poland and outside of Poland! (This text also includes the author's lectures on Eastern European literature at the National University of Mexico: Mexico City, semester 2013/14 and 2014/15)