The writer Goran Petrović presented his novels "Papir" and "Ikonostas" last night at Poets' Square in Budva as part of the literary program of the 37th Grad Teatar festival.
The moderator of the evening was prof. Dr. Aleksandar Jerkov, theoretician and historian of literature, who at the very beginning thanked the men and women of Budva, friends and old comrades-in-arms in his long effort to be important to everyone, everywhere and always.
Petrović, instead of a classical presentation, read a passage from the novel "Papir" so that the audience could enter the literature and the aura of real literature and literary expression.
"Regardless of the dozen or so titles, regardless of over 130 editions, I list only what is important to me. I am still a beginner and you are always a beginner when you are in front of a new white sheet of paper, in front of a new novel or in front of what is a story, and even in front of what is a literary evening", said Petrović, for which the audience on Poets' Square rewarded him with applause .
Jerkov continued by pointing out that in front of the audience in Budva is a beginner who is a living classic of Serbian literature.
"I don't know how happy he is when I say that to his face, but I don't say it to him as a friend, but as a temporary professor of Serbian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries who is about to retire. I am no longer the boy you met here more than 30 years ago at the early programs of the City Theater when the festival was just starting. I want to tell you that you have a unique opportunity to meet a real living classic who wrote works that someone might see and discuss differently, but according to this axis along which we are contemporaries, those works had the status of literary classics. Goran Petrović is not a classic by chance or because someone wanted it that way, but because there must be a kind of coincidence in the position of the writer, his imagination and what the readers see. He is more of a classic in the way you read him than in the way we interpreted him," Jerkov emphasized, adding that Petrović received all the awards he could receive.
"And one after the other and the last in that series is the "Vladan Desnica" award, which is an award from writers and speaks of the inner understanding of people who have dedicated their lives to writing. They recognized literature and the biggest dilemma of that jury was whether to award "Paper" or "Ikonostas". It is one type of reaction that does not occur by chance. First of all, she deserves her tremendous work on expanding expression and imagination. From the novel "Atlas written in the sky" to "The Siege of the Church of the Savior" there was no more imagination and power of expression in Serbian literature, and no one began to write a more beautiful, rounded, and convincing sentence than Goran Petrović. Wherever you open his book, you will find something that seems like a lyrical pearl, a poetic expression, something that awakens an instinctive reaction of approval in you," Jerkov pointed out.
Petrović said that the books "Papir" and "Ikonostas" were deliberately published on the same day last year and emphasized that they were deliberately juxtaposed, forming independent novels of the cycle he called "Roman Delta", playing with the novel-river genre.
"In "Roman Delta", what is more important is not the water itself, but what the water threw out and what it applied. I've been working on those books for 23 years, that's when I made my first notes. I didn't think it would be that big or so branched out, but the manuscript, the text and the idea itself actually started to behave like water. You can't get hold of it at all, something keeps leaking through your fingers. You put down the other hand, it digs into the other hand, the third hand. It seemed to me that literature and human stories behave like water, it ultimately takes a separate form for each of us. It requires not only a literary work and the one who wrote and compiled it, but also the one into whose hands it went", said Petrović and revealed that the fact that he decided that the novel has a broad time span of 500 years was a particular difficulty. and that it has a territorial breadth.
"Mostly it will take place in Serbia, but "Paper" takes place almost entirely in Italy, while "Ikonostas" takes place in Greece and Serbia for the most part. Some others will take place in unnamed cities at sea, some will even take place across the continent. I also wanted all of these books to be read independently and in the order in which they come into the hands of the reader. Then when someone reads a book that comes before or after the one he read, it casts a new shadow and light on the book he read before. It can be seen as a kind of cycle of a painter who in one breath, which can take several years, creates something that is a cycle and then exhibits it in a large space at an exhibition. Then those pictures form that cycle, they go to homes and galleries and there they are individual. They can be seen that way.”
Petrović also said that the first four books belong to the medieval cycle, then come two or three that take place in the 18th century, and all the others will take place in the 20th and 21st centuries.
"Or as it is written on the back of these books, until those days that we consider ours because I think that these days that we live in, I mean the entire civilization, are not really ours. But we consider them ours, we have no other description for it," Petrović said.
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