German picture
Who were the dissidents, the strongest opposition to communism?* Novels by the best German novelists were published, precisely, on dissident themes not so long ago: Josef Hilsenrath, Jossel Wassermanns Heimkehr (1993); Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Der Verlorene (1998); Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang (2002).
Anna Mitgutsch's novel Haus der Kindheit examines the relations between neighbors, but not from the point of view of borders, as sovereign states, even less from the linguistic and ethnic positions, typical of border areas and common customs, but from the position of international relations between states.
Elisabeth Reichart (1995): the legacy of sin, the legacy of Nazism, the title itself, Nachtmar, projects its discourse on the world into the post-war generation with the point of how it deals with this legacy.
Winfried Sebald, aka Max, is a German writer oriented towards the Austrian literary heritage, another one who, according to Pound, felt that his country was too narrow a frame for his poetics, and even for his life (he lived in Switzerland and in England until his death in 2001), and Wittgensteinian, yes, Wittgensteinian felt things: his field was narrow for the omnipresence and omnipresence of language.
He deals with the question of identity in the essay Austerlitz. It is identity on the broadest possible plane, the identity of a being and not of its particular phenomena, the identity of a process and not the identity of excess. Finally, he deals with the intention of transferring the center of gravity of the problem - from the regional zone (the Danube metaphor) to the extended field of battle. What is the situation with us?
Here, in the Balkans, the reverse process is taking place: the reduction of a wider experience to a local (dialectal) space, which I consider an original contribution to the history of contemporary stupidity.
I felt it on my skin. Neo-communist pest, president of the Assembly of Montenegro, Mr. Krivokapić R., stuck from heel veins in 2013. that the Thirteenth of July Award be taken away from me. A new language, new courses of history and the church had already been invented. The neo-communists hawked him with a mace in hand and a fist full of nails. This mega-reform, supported by the entire DANU, whose academics threatened to return their orders out of shame for being in the same club with a terrible traitor, ended with the terror of stenographers and the oppression of the state administration to speak a new language and write in a new script with 32 letters. I still maintain: communism, and neo-communism, without dissidents and public criticism were a terrible disaster. Sweet Swamp.
Danube
The Danube, in its entire length, some 680 km, symbolizes the dissident movement in a clear way - Dissent surrounded all areas of this "most European" river, left its mark in a radius much wider than the regional (Danube) one. The Danube, as I experienced it, traveling upstream several times a year, from Vojvodina, well, by God, to somewhere high in Germany, was the greatest excitement because I associated it in my mind with several countries, languages, peoples, tastes, sources of food and customs, music, girls, fish and animals, stories and legends. In a word - with a whole one inflated Bible.
"The prize went to those who fight against Montenegro, and those who fight for Montenegro - they were dropped," cried one of the mob.
"The greater collapse and destabilization of Montenegro, according to the interpretation of the DPS media and thinkers," says journalist P. Nikolić about my diluvial betrayal of the country and people, "has not happened since the referendum" (Monitor, June 28, 2013, 21).
What is the novelist GČ fighting against?
He fights against CG.
Who caused the greatest breakdown and destabilization of Montenegro?
Answer: novelist GČ.
How far does the gaze of the chasers reach, hot on the trail of the poor novelist, each individually and all together?
To the border of their atar, fields, buildings fenced with stakes, ravines, hunting grounds where they would drive him and whip him with thorn stakes. A shirt in the flesh to force him!
For me, the Danube has become a defense against regionalism and provincialism. I think that anyone who travels for a long time along the banks of such a large river, or sails, sooner or later realizes that all the provinces are gray and narrow. That every province (and nationalism as a province) is sick with the virus of dialectal affects. Consequently, on the plan of expanding the pacifist dissident spirit, the flow of dissident ideas took place in parallel with the flow of ideas about the crisis of Western consciousness and was conjunctural in the Lyotard sense of the word. The Danube, to repeat, brought me no less imagination, no less experience, life and art, than all the individual countries through which it flows: Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany.
I am interested in what can be expanded as a field of struggle and literary interest. I am not interested in what cannot be expanded. I'm only interested in the expansion. Step forward. Without the extension of being through experience I am nothing.
Universities
Old European universities - Bologna: founded in 1088, Alma mater studiorum; Oxford, founded in 1096; Cambridge, 1209; Salamanca, 1134; Sorbonne, 1253; Charles University (Prague), 1348; Jagiellonian University (Krakow), 1364; Heidelberg, 1385; all the way to Moscow (Lomonosov), 1755. Mr. they determined the cultural direction of Western civilization, as long as it is recognizable under that name, legible to oneself and others, usable and worthy.
On them - this should be repeated in all the literary ravines of this world (and one should not bypass the chairs in the cornfield, which specialize in tailoring new languages and new speech, so that the wonderful Serbo-Croatian language is disgusted with the Udba aids) - studied various points of view and opinions, reason , society, politics, ideas, literature and, of course, language, with arguments grounded in the works of classical authors.
Successor chairs, all over the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, adopted classical truths for their own. Chairs-successors of these said, which were not lucky with the continuity of learning, accepted the accumulation of classical knowledge from these two centuries. The intellectual attribute only goes with a classical education. Let no one think he is an intellectual if he does not have access to the classical tradition of Greek and Latin.
The share of humanities chairs in this respect is huge, certainly more than half, compared to the exact ones, for the simple reason that old European scholarship started with language and its phenomenologies (grammar, theology, philosophy, etc.)
About the heretical opinion, the thesis that exact knowledge originates from the humanities, see Mihailo Bakhtin in more detail: 1) Response to the Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff; 2) The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism; 3) The Problem of Speech Genres; 4) The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis. The late Bakhtin surprised the modern scientific world with this thesis. Bakhtin is a literal heresy until no one dreams of putting language before mathematics.
Language, which draws rivers and meanders in contact with other languages, animals and fish, food and girls who smile and dress differently - that language draws rivers like the Danube. Language is the father of disciplines that move the boundaries, that is, the writers it gives birth to, like Euripides, the first great revolutionary of the European spirit, who managed to move the boundaries set by the gods. In one of his last works, Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences, Mihail Bakhtin develops the thesis that the roots of human knowledge lie primarily in the humanistic disciplines.
When I got hold of this booklet (I was already familiar with his work The Creation of François Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), and I was preparing for the press my first book (Lyra in purgatory, Obod, Cetinje, 1982), it became clear to me that the man it truly travels only through language, to move dynamically only in language.
Which means - let's be specific - through languages, and in languages. It is enough to glance only at the notorious facts to come to the conclusion about the indisputable connection between the old European cathedrals (read the cities: Krakow, Warsaw, Moscow, Petersburg, Prague, etc.) with the dissident movement, which traveled from one to the other and so circled his profile. To be clear at the very beginning: not all dissident authors, supporters, workers, creators of that dissident format of thought, which changed IE, were necessarily attendees of these famous chairs (although many of the leading dissidents were).
Nevertheless, the birth of a second opinion or a second opinion (inomislenja) in IE is inconceivable, in a word, without the ideological status that the second opinion acquired in these cities.
Such a massive movement cannot be recruited with ten departments, hundreds of "universities" would be needed for such a thing. But despite everything, the spirit of the professor - I like the Spanish expression: el espiritu catedratico - constantly hung, and hangs over what Bakhtin defines as: to concern himself with the problems of method and the nature of culture.
Travels
You'll find the method in travel, young writer, if you ask me, because she's the same as you - and she travels. Methods do not stand still, methods travel. From idea to idea, from star to star, from chair to chair, from city to city.
Creative potential in those chairs, philosophers, linguists, historians - so many writers, after all, lost their jobs at the university and went underground or became tram drivers, stokers, traveling salesmen, etc.
Efforts to conceptualize the fastest possible expansion of the framework of knowledge, accumulated over centuries, with more or less luck and in completely different conditions, from the watchful eyes of the Inquisition to communist censorship, and neo-communist looting, have become a habit in the avant-garde. Since that time, when this habit took hold in some parts of the IE, we can talk about a new page of European thought as a whole and democratic transformation in the European East. The old universities and the new Dissent have another strong, unbreakable link: the bridge of emigration. This will be a guarantee that the energy of emigration is not dispersed, wherever it was born and nurtured, at home or in the dispersion, but that it accumulates in one place that the European spirit has forever called studia humanitatis. Linguistic science is founded and practiced in linguistic practice as one of the basic theoretical "knowledge of the heavens and the whole world".
The same thing that Western countries offered to expelled and threatened scholars from IE, they did not invent, but inherited from their university experience. Intellectual emigration either finds shelter or dies out. The luck that the IE dissidents had, that their children, brought up in emigration, in the newly adopted countries, study at Western universities is nothing new, but an old story that saved the European spirit.
And I, a half-refugee, after thirty-seven years, hungry for bread, threw my backpack on my back, tied my shoes on my sandals, crossed the Yugoslav border at the foot of the Alps and headed to the Department of Ancient Greek at the Charles University (founded in 1348). I know this story well:
"Faith, various Protestant churches and the Catholic offensive after the Council of Trent produced many refugees in Europe. The children of these immigrants studied in the universities of their new countries" (Cf. more details on how disenfranchised schoolchildren and future scholars were recruited, in the excellent work of Hilde de Ridder-Symoens: The Universities as Places of Refuge, Cambridge, 1996, 428)
On this occasion, let's remember the Greek and Jewish intellectual exile in the old world, which with its cultural example opened the door for our Bokeljes (although they were not refugees) for their studies in their second "home", Italy, i.e. in Padua, Loreto, Venice, Rome. So many gifted Byzantines, Bolice, Beskuće, Zagurovići, Pima, Buće studied there and built, for centuries, our largest and most cultured diaspora ever - the Venetian diaspora.
*(This text consists of the author's lectures on Eastern European literature at the National University of Mexico: Mexico City, semester 2013/14 and 2014/15)
Bonus video:
