Lectures by prof. dr Dear Lompara about one of the most prominent and most translated writers from this area Branimir Šćepanović (1937-2020) the night before last, the program of the eighth "Ćirilica" festival continued in the area below the Citadel in Budva's Old Town.
Professor Lompar pointed out that Šćepanović as a writer and artistic phenomenon is a representative figure of the second half of the 20th century in Serbian literature. Šćepanović himself, as Lompar pointed out, could be viewed in three different registers: as a personality, as a writer and as a figure of cultural life.
Šćepanović himself as a writer was determined by his biography. He is from Podgorica who comes from a family of teachers, he came to the big city, first to Novi Sad, then to Belgrade, guided by an impulse that belonged to his time", explained Lompar and added that Šćepanović belonged to a generation of Serbian writers that was very significant and influential in the period between the seventies and sometime until the end of the last century.
Branimir Šćepanović published and created in the period from 1961 to the mid-eighties, and is considered a relevant author of the generation whose protagonists were Danilo Kish, Borislav Pekić, Mirko Kovač, Bora Cosic... Šćepanović, as the professor assesses, was specific in that his personality did not have a distinct erudite character.
"Let's say, Pekić was a self-taught writer, he didn't finish university. And as it happens with such writers, whose representative pattern Thomas Mann who was also self-taught, and with us in the then Yugoslav framework The tick, there is a tremendous need to accumulate different intellectual content - from philosophical to psychological and from historical to political. A different kind of erudition is found in Kiš, who is the first graduate student of world literature and who, in a way, had a kind of intellectual lyricism characteristic of a dimension that was more connected to the traditions of world literature with, again, visible influences of significant writers. Mirko Kovač had a shadow in his works Miodrag Bulatović, a certain diabolic structure of storytelling, with a strong black note in the dark part of the human soul. And in relation to those contents, Branimir Šćepanović had a narrower range. He simply wasn't a writer of intellectual provenance, he didn't have that kind of artistic disposition," explained Lompar, and pointed out that Šćepanović's social success was great.
"He was in a representative house, in "Avala film". They were all there: Slobodan Selenic, Bora Ćosić, Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz. Šćepanović stayed there and very early on it was evident in his narration that the film moment plays a significant role. That with him, the motifs of a film cut or a change of plan have their own narrative function. So that his artistic imagination is set in such a way that it corresponds to both prose and film narration. That is a rather unique talent of his. And although Kovač and Pekić wrote scripts for films, Šćepanović made this technique representative of his art in a prose, narrative sense," pointed out Lompar.
The specificity of Branimir Šćepanović's biography is, as Lompar noted, that we have a writer who stopped writing.
"It is a rather unusual biography. There are such examples in the literature, but here it is shown that his sensitive core was affected in some way. I met him much later, a few years before his death. He had a fine, restrained lordship in his conversation. And what I really liked, he never asked you if you had read anything he wrote. We talked about other things, about different anecdotes from literary life. He was one of those dignified people with whom you can always have a nice conversation, and I had that opportunity more than once. Towards the end of his life, there was a gradual shift in attention, he was first published in the Circle of the Serbian Literary Association, and he also received the "Bora Stanković" award for life's work. With that, the awareness of its importance began to grow", concluded Lompar.
Bonus video:
