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Yugoslavia, its politics, energy and public practice was, from the point of view of the oppositional culture and subculture, an honor with exceptions, one cannot say a stuffed duck, called anti-dissident arrogance, but one can calmly say: not up to the big task of critical discourse. She showed a slight indifference towards the key intellectual movement in IE, in the second half of the 20th century, i.e. according to the dissident reform of ideas.
Yugoslavia renounced the services of dissidents, the gentle executioners of communism, as I called them in the novel Pseudo at the time I wrote it (1990-92) and maintained closer ties with Czech, Polish and Russian dissidents. I never severed these ties, but I felt them most strongly through the inspiration of the novel Ripe Hert (1989), the novel Pseudo and, in its own way, albeit a decade later, through the shiver of poisonous apostate inspiration in the novel Blizanci (2003).
Many writers and scholars publicly identified themselves as apostates from Yugoslav communism. None of them, however, had a hair missing from their head. Exceptions can almost be counted on the fingers, if one takes into account the relatively large country and the significant period in the history of censorship.
The British guide to censorship lists the names of censored Yugoslav authors 1945-2000. The list coincides with a loose list of potential dissidents, and it will be listed here, with the aim that the reader can judge for himself which of them could be called the honorable name of dissident and which not at all: Slobodan Jovanović; Momčilo Ninčić; Dimitrije Djordjevic; Ivo Omrčanin; Ludmil Hauptmann; Vladimir Dedijer; Ljubomir Momčilović; Velimir Terzic; Jovan Marjanović; Miladin Životić; Sima Ćirković; Trpimir Macan; Franjo Tudjman; Zvonimir Komarica; Latina Perović; Davor Aras; Đuro Đurović; Mihajlo Mihajlov; Bozo Kovačević; Franc Miklavčič; Viktor Blažić; Vladimir Marković; Nikodije Minic; Žarko Aleksić; Bogoljub Kočović; Jozo Zovko; Alija Izetbegović; Vojislav Koštunica; Kosta Cavoski; Miodrag Milić; Stipe Šuvar; Ivo Škrabalo; Hamza Asllani; Veselin Đuretić; Savo Skoko; Dragoljub Petrović; Radovan Samardzic; Vasilije Krestić; Ivan Đurić; (cf. more detailed Censorship of Historical Thought, London, 2002, 604-616.)
My minority is of the opinion that some among them do not even remotely deserve the aura of a dissident: what kind of Vladimir Dedijer, what kind of Stipe Šuvar (his name is better: Communist-Guardian), what kind of Kosta Čavoški, what kind of Vasilije Krestić, what kind of Vojislav Koštunica? - but, there, with the English, it stands as it stands.
Yugoslavia pretended that it did not need a dissident movement. She cultivated false dissidents out of straw and tinder. That lazy pride went to her head. A country without valid opposition resembles, as it is symbolically illustrated, a pig. A costly mistake sent the Yugoslav train back to the Balkan track, where the lights go out at midnight and the trains continue downhill.
The world turned upside down
No matter how free it seemed to be - a country desiring freedom - Yugoslavia was, in the maturity level of Europe, an immature and prematurely spoiled beauty. Why do I think that, from then until today, half a century ago, the Republic of Montenegro inherited and developed anti-dissident laziness, its stupid and insipid prejudice that state affairs and cultural development begin and end with patriotism?
The noisy patriotism of bulls and goats: there is room here, when you look at communist history, for only half of the citizenry - the other half is disenfranchised; hence the production of heroes and traitors, hence the hyperproduction of patriots and quislings.
A small country of rebellion and pride, suddenly, seemed to have turned the tables and rested on its laurels during Tito's era. What are the consequences? Only a quarter of a century later, behold miracles, her so-called the neo-communist elite will be slapped in the worst possible way one society at a time - with the loss of critical continuity.
Why did the anti-dissident mood - despite the fact that the father of the dissident movement was a Montenegrin - just change its form, from the Yugoslav federal steel it was expelled into the local teneje alloy and, finally, it rusted in the post-Yugoslav crisis like a gooey pear?
Why is it that countries and peoples with a tradition of fighting for freedom and an aura of heroism refuse the service of the opposition opinion of their friends, and succumb to the Skorojevic complex from their enemies?
Has the world turned upside down?
Map 77
What happens while Yugoslavia sleeps?
The appearance of a document called Charta 77 (Charta 77), signed by several dozen Czech writers and artists, in Prague, marked a new stage in European culture and politics. Dissidents raised their heads and defined their voice as a cosmopolitan rebellion. Among the spokesmen of Karta were the following writers and philosophers: Jan Patočka (1907 - 1977); Václav Benda (1946 - 99); Jiří Dienstbier (1937 - 2011); Martin Palouš (1950 -); Václav Havel (1936 - 2011); Eva Kanturkova (1930 -); Bohumír Janát (1949 - 98); Zdena Tominová (1941 - 2020) and others. Among the young generation, dissident writers had the saintly aura of literary gods of the time, such as JL Borges, Umberto Eco, John Updike, Günter Grass. Some I knew from the underground of Prague, others by fame.
Public attention in the West had a special significance for the signatories of Map 77, says Manfred Wilke, especially the year it was signed, adding that the center of that attention was in Germany, i.e. in Berlin was the weekly Spiegel, which continuously brought news about the Map.
What is most important to mention is Wilke's position that Spiegel took the Charta seriously from the very beginning, considered it a new political factor in IE and a symptom of the crisis of Soviet communism (cf. Manfred Wilke: Das Erste Jahr der Charta 77 in der Speigel, Berlin, 2007 , 105.)
The IE-dissidence was immediately accepted as a political step at the time of its creation. It was read in the current light as a political movement. Today, however, we read the dissidence as something more than a political breakthrough in the field of human rights and liberation from the communist dictatorship: as the approach of Eastern Europe to the Western cultural orbit.
The great slumber also affected Montenegro, precisely then, I state with sadness, when the slumber was interrupted in IE. They have been snoring for half a century. When I received the Thirteenth of July award, those gentlemen, who had fallen into a slumber three decades ago, were startled. They don't snore around anymore, a different song is being sung in the former communist IE - however, the budget-patriots have recovered from their hangover, what is it now? Therefore, I should have been immediately and unconditionally declared a traitor, an adversary of the people - a target should have been drawn and pointed at: a quisling, a yellow band around the arm!
Such things are not carried out without evidence, neither in the sober state of the individual, nor in the sober state of the public scene, but here, someone abused his official position and started to change the law with the aim of creating a smoke screen for the looting of public goods by the budget - a patriot and ready-made.
Existential identity
Be amazed now, you, reader, who among our poets was the first to touch world literature (he could neither read nor write)!
Two centuries have passed since the term world literature first appeared: Weltliteratur; he was sponsored by JW Goethe.
This turned a new page in the history of thought and, miraculously, the matter coincides with the years when the writer of Faust met our oral poetry (epic reformer: Old Man Milija Kolašinac, author of The Marriage of Maksim Crnojević). I am far from attributing Goethe's discovery to reading Millia's (and the people's) Maxim. Just as I am far from denying it, because, although Maxim was certainly at the bottom of Goethe's agenda, there is nothing to throw away with the great poet.
The educational optimism of German poets never sleeps.
The old rhapsode from Morača is proof that someone who never uttered the name of his language, let alone wrote it (neither did that name exist, nor was he literate), can still be a subject for world literature. Goethe wrote a short review for Millia's fiddle opera, published in Halle in 1824 by his friend Therese von Jakob, which sounds like a posthumous tribute.
Maxim is by no means a work that could determine things at such a great turning point in the history of ideas, things with such a great stake, given its unknown, even nameless language (the name Serbo-Croatian was given to it later by Goethe's collaborators: the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm ). But the epic of Old Man Milija is a drop in the ocean of accumulation of shades of the world spirit, which led the exalted Weimar poet to the discovery of worldliness in a cosmopolitan narrative.
What are we doing today and here - has the world turned upside down?
If the cry of the illiterate rhapsody was not foreign to the European spirit (German and Polish romantics admired Maxim), why today, here, are we closing ourselves in shepherd's huts and musafirhans, in caravanserais and nahias, in nepotistic cloisters of aunts and uncles, sorcerers and jetrvica - does the paradox of asymmetry have its limits, where are they?
Or the wonderful spark of existential identity - for which the David of our nation fought with Goliath! - to turn it into some provincial performance due to private interests, sycophants' pockets, frustrations of provincial partocrats and private unrest of the bourgeois neo-communist clique, which got rich by looting its country more than any other post-capitalist?
Gentlemen, it should be said that it is indecent to gossip about identity, because identity is not a distant history, a rumination on the heroes and battles of a forever distant and dead world, but the dynamic structure of living life, the consolation of modernity: life itself with its constant changes, which they carry in their course in addition to national identity.
Existential identity!
I know three of the Montenegrin dissidents: Milovan Đilas, Borislav Pekić and Slobodan Tomović. I occasionally give lectures about them abroad, and I apostrophize their work in magazines, at public forums, etc. - in the context of dissidence and reform of ideas in IE.
Đilas and Tomović, and Pekić belong to the moral and intellectual forces of the IE culture, its heritage from ideological times - they still belong there while other authors dream of a sweet dream of brotherhood-unity, which later turned into the rot of everything that those brotherhood-unities had achieved so far .
Wagon at the station
For Montenegro, as big as it is - and a man loves his homeland, whether it was one hundred times smaller or one hundred times larger - it is not small to have three dissident figures of that format in half a century. It is small and petty to have the thieving heart of a budget-patriot, to indulge in it without the cover of artistic and moral strength, without the control of civil decency; it is small, petty, petty and philistine to have the heart of a rabbit in such a dense forest as literature. The neo-communists, who rushed to rewrite the law in order to rob a novelist of an award, and thus of civil rights, addressed the wrong address. They slept through the ideological struggle and passively moved from station to station with their snorts. They had no idea that there is no passive sleep in literature, that literature, the real one, is an action even when you find it napping. That speech is, in fact, action. They were sleeping in the carriage that remained in the station and started at the wrong beep.
Criticism of political economy through the ideological plane (Jean Baudrillard: 1929 - 2007) began in the seventies, through the thesis about reality in itself, says Harrison (cf. The Critic of Originality, Blackwell, 2003, 1018) transformed into an information and media controlled world. It was a state of hyper-realism (the change of ideas that Baudrillard means when he talks about the change of epochs). My instigators, the neo-communists, who hide their robbery of public goods, the destruction of the state through the destruction of resources and its material portfolio, with ideological persecution and gossip about identity, snorted what could be snorted: a bear's dream in a critical age.
For the novelist, however, the change of ideas is the only real twist. The rest is the lizard's skin. The optimism of the European novel, to which I belong, has not yet said its last word.
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