(Nikola Nikolić: "Cut down tall trees", Nova knjiga, Podgorica; Kosmos izdavaštvo, Belgrade, 2023)
New story book "Cut down the tall trees" Nikola Nikolić it rightfully attracted the attention of both the reading public and literary critics. The subject that the author tackled this time is extremely centered: through the destinies of individuals, all the horrors of totalitarian regimes and other similar ideological molds and restrictions are presented.
It is, in fact, about a planetary phenomenon that, unfortunately, repeats its history, and for a simple reason: The human being can never overcome its dark side and, wrestling with it, often loses the battle, and with that loss, humanity falls into the most monstrous the jaws of evil, torture, loss, inhumanity... The historical course, by the way, whether it is in progress or in a momentary standstill, rests on man's suffering, on the one hand, and man's evil, on the other hand, and what the past (and the present) has shown so many times. The force of the stronger has always tended to unify man, whether on an ideological, socio-cultural, national or even material background, which, without exception, had tragic consequences.
If we dive deeper into the evaluations of this book by Nikolić, which they gave Faruk Sehic i Uroš Đurković, we will agree that both are correct. But not fully compatible. Šehić emphasizes the nobility of the idea that radiates from the very content of the book, while Đurković emphasizes reflection, the experience of the problem itself, after which, as he says, "it's hard to be an optimist."
In other words, it is pessimism that awaits us even with an authoritative attempt to analyze the deeply discouraging fates of life, which Nikolić dealt with as global points. Pessimism, if we look at it only from one, psychological side, is imposed in a wider context as a kind of phenomenon of destruction, which limits us and hinders our power of reflection, resistance, activity...
Lana Bastasic, it seems, connects these two views with an additional analytical insight that results in two, for humans, important, moral-cognitive components: a) the book initiates empathy towards humans; b) sacrifice for the good of man is not in vain. In truth, symbolically speaking, the suffering of an individual, in the spiritual and physical aspect, is the suffering of humanity. The category of martyrdom is, therefore, universal.
So, if evil, in itself, is a constant, then it is possible to start it at any time and in any place. To "perfect" it to immeasurable limits.
The horrors of violence, torture and death, which densely soaked almost every page of the book, were given with pure cinematic precision, without epic introductions and wide panoramic situations - in the dramatic spasm of the ghostly stage space, in the electrified atmosphere between the victim and the executioner, in the endless seconds that are separated life and death, in the deafening silence between two breaths...
The author's focus on the fateful moment of the characters was shown in all its stylistic brevity, in the reduced dynamics and expert dosage of dramatic accents, in the deep cuts of the psychological boils up to the culminating final images of Evil. And Evil, as is known, has always been voiced within the limits of more or less "monstrous creativity."
Nikolić confronts us directly with the drama. The minimalism of his sentence gives rise to the "spatial minimalism" of the events. Time has condensed. The story follows the logic of the river eddy - by circling, it reduces the distance between itself and the eddy, i.e. of its end, so that soon, with a flash of psychological flash, it would illuminate the last robber of the tragic end in the depths of the dark vortex.
The theme of each of the 17 stories, in its deep sub-pedestal, represents a cataclysm of epic proportions. With the fact that it is not shown in the foreground, but with its associativity, imaginative sifting, it can be sensed, almost physically touched.
With the vividness and vividness of his language and the precisely developed literary procedure, consistently applied in almost every story, the writer turned the well-known theorem - from the individual to the general, in the opposite direction - from the general to the individual. Hence the strength, effectiveness and believability of each scene through which the last, heavy, fateful beats of the first to the last victim echo.
Nikolić's book "Cut Tall Trees" is a kind of historical reminder. Such a repressive reality, which the author, on the other hand, discloses with an extremely nuanced poetic statement, represents a deep, dark gap between civilizational practice and the ideas he proclaims.
This is where we come to the well-known truth that history, as we forget it, will repeat itself in the same way, taking on an even more drastic variation: forgotten evil and suffering, from the point where they began, are now spreading with a flaming magnitude. Uroš Đurković, one of the reviewers, rightly emphasized that evil, "although it has different voices and expressions, its basis is the same, ineradicable..."
Although the book is far from a literal pedagogic nature study, with the power of its imaginative reach and creative reach, it promotes a basic ethical principle in its content-documentary invoice: through the culture of memory, reduce the power of evil to the smallest possible measure, if we cannot already end it and we eliminate forever.
This, again, leads us to the conclusion: if the basis of evil is ineradicable, its presence in man is, therefore, eternal. And again we come to the undeniable truth - that it depends only on man when evil will awaken in him, to what extent it will reach and with what horror it will break the vertical of civilizational achievements.
The phenomenon of evil is universal. Its "specific weight" can be equally read in Rwanda, Guatemala, Cambodia, Argentina, Chile, in the Great War of 1918, the siege of Shkodër, then in the 90's in outer space and other planetary points from which the heroes of Nikolić's stories come, who will with their testimony, or the testimony of others about them-victims, to symbolize human suffering and martyrdom, and on the other hand - the ever-present insatiable hunger for possession, for uniform ideological arrangement of man and his destiny, for the never-extinguishing theory of blood and soil - who knows how many times just to confirm that the consciousness of an individual or of certain social structures is not freed from the philosophy of man's Over-Ego even today.
Each of the stories is, in fact, a micro-drama, guided by a subtle psychological narrative through the dramatic life leaps and bounds of Nikolić's characters, whose struggle for life, as much as, and perhaps more than, the struggle for witnessing life itself, will immortalize the true picture in literature. what was happening.
And it happened, unfortunately, on an epic scale, which, in this case, if it had gone through a novelistic interpretation, would have required many more pages, which would not have been possible to fit into the framework of a short story.
The author manages to carry out each story through the so-called overall compositional order: the drama is voiced or sensed already in the first paragraphs, so that, after several effective stage variations, at the end, through flash-dialogue lines, it wraps its crescendo in a muffled bang of death, pain, absence, meaninglessness, nothingness...
Good literature, regardless of when and where it was created, in itself strengthens and enlightens.
It helps us find each other. And when we find ourselves, then we can fully discern, judge, expect, act, believe... This is what the reviewers tell us, in their own way, pointing out that "...the hope of this book lies in its call for empathy", that "Cut high trees" "a noble book", as well as that the basis of evil is "ineradicable, but precisely as such it is also deeply warning".
By all accounts, with this book, Nikolić has literary successfully "processed" the phenomenon of Evil, which, throughout history, constantly pulsates on the other side of Good. The code sign of the author's letter is based on in-depth sequences of the real - documentary, historical and geopolitical pedestal, which gives it a kind of research component.
With its drama, the book absorbs the reader's attention as much as possible, but also triggers his reason, the need to participate, evaluate, analyze... In other words, not leaving him on the sidelines.
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