Mirko Kovač - a writer who did not surrender to the nationalists

"With us, each fraternity is a church unto itself, and among the fraternities there is always at least one priest. We are not afraid of God because we have replaced him with a master. We don't read the Bible because we are illiterate. And when others read it to us, we don't listen, because we think that we would write it better."

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Mirko Kovač 2008, Photo: Luka Zeković
Mirko Kovač 2008, Photo: Luka Zeković
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

He experienced Rovinj as his home. After constantly moving on the route Montenegro-Belgrade-Zagreb, he only found peace in that small town, located between Pula and Trieste. That's what the academic painter says, Mirkova wife Slobodana Matić Kovač. If we believe her, and who should we believe if not the one who was by his head even when he left, it is clear why he wanted to be buried in that place. Kovac's best works were created in Rovinj. With some exceptions, like novels A wasteland, which in the writer's 24th year announced a completely new era of Yugoslav literature. Such "literary dinosaurs", he said Philip David, no more. And there is no such literature either.

Mirko was born in Petrovići in 1938, on, broadly speaking, a kind of triple border of the cultures of Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, in a place that is still rich in stones, but from which there is a view of the blue pastel sky over the Adriatic and to which the smell of sea salt occasionally wafts through, driven by the southerly winds. The squares of Bileća, Trebinje, Dubrovnik, glowing to the point of a mirage, were the stage of Kovač's poetics, and on that stage unforgettable (anti)heroes took turns, carrying the tragedy of space and time, set by traditional signals and signs. But there is also Montenegro in those pictures. And Nikšić. He says and writes Bozo Koprivica (and his Games to book which still smells like printing presses, you have to believe especially) how Mirko had a father as a paradigm for that chest-paining literary hero. And that Mirko's father was in Brezovik with Božov, and that he a boy who reads to them - God personally. "Kovač says that I am in the novel The city in the mirror that boy reading a book to his father on the terrace. I don't remember which one, maybe Letters from Italy Ljuba Nenadović.” Perhaps…

Kovač left "Tromedja" early. "With one goal, to become a writer". His biographers highlight the fact that he did not finish dramaturgy at the Belgrade Academy of Theater and Film, because he actually became one during his studies. Thus, the first novel brought him the status of a persecuted writer. In the bazaar, and outside it, he was tried because in 1962 he did not paint a potent socialist society after the revolution, and that was sacrilege, because, as he writes Milovan Djilas u To a new class, if he is to be believed, in those days communism was "reminiscent of the exclusivity of medieval religious sects". He's a blacksmith, I guess I'm losing spoiled the plan of the leaders to come true absolute happiness i ideal society.

"I observe everything from here: above and below is a dungeon... Viewed from here, from the dungeon, we can only think that our landscape, that angry stone, and everything around us, is a miracle. And that it is nowhere to be found. We only agree on one thing: when the sun stops at its zenith, when nothing has its shadow and measure anymore, the hour comes. Evil! Then everything becomes wicked and gets longer in time".

Mirko Kovač after being injured in Belgrade in 1991.
Mirko Kovač after being injured in Belgrade in 1991.photo: Archive of Boba Matić Kovač

And, fortunately, it lasted.

So they came My sister Elida, Biography of Malvina Trifković, Mocking with a soul, Door from the womb, An introduction to a long life, Crystal lattices, Luka Meštrevic's wounds, Heavenly Spouses, European rot, A dagger in the heart... And the scenario: Little soldiers, Foxes, Occupation in 26 pictures, The fall of Italy, Tattooing... (By broadcasting the film Foxes, "the best Croatian film of all time", will be closed tonight in Podgorica Days of Mirko Kovač.)

Like Kovačev Petrović, his poetics is also at the triple border: literature-film-theatre. And just as the media from time to time make a mistake naming the broader area to which Kovač's native Petrovići belong, so it is very difficult to conclude which of the characters that flowed from his pen are more credible indicators of unsurpassed lucidity and talent. Is he who, running away from the snake, ends up in the burning square, or the Montenegrin dynast-reformer, or the false dynast, or is he the dilapidated boxer who doesn't hit anything outside the ring?

"You flatter me. That's the first sign that something was wrong... Or you were visited by some sinful thoughts". He says Prince Danilo, in the play of the same name, performed by a master The heart of Grahovac (direction Radmile Vojvodic), which would probably be equally adequate for the performance of the character of heavyweight Tripo Đapić... "Each fraternity is a church unto itself, and among the fraternities there is always at least one priest. We are not afraid of God because we have replaced him with a master. We don't read the Bible because we are illiterate. And when others read it to us, we don't listen, because we think we would write it better ourselves."

Mirko Kovač
photo: Boris Pejović

That replica of the tired Montenegrin prince, who lives the last days after the assassination in Kotor, defying the efforts of the priests to subjugate Montenegro, does not correspond to the traditional views of the bearers of the monarchist social order. In this sense, Danilo is not too different from the father of the protagonist of Kovac's first novel - the "false prophet", the "madman", the "hangman", who says: "If you have considered everything well and discerned with your eye, if you know how to read the signs, then it will be clear to you that prayers and prayers do not help."

These characters are similar, as are their enemies. With whom, again, the enemies of Mirko Kovač are related.

The similarity between the "energy" with which Kovač was judged from the communist milieu in the early sixties and the "energy" of nationalism and chauvinism from the beginning of the nineties, which was then thrown at Mirko with a camera in Belgrade, is astonishing. There is that photo-portrait of Kovac after the attack Šešeljevs fighters at a rally in 1991. Mirko is calm, he crossed his arms. His head is wrapped in a bandage, under which the tips of his hair escape. And the eyes? The eyes emit not only fatigue, but also a grain of restlessness and defiance. I saw such a view for the first time in the grandfather's picture from Udba's file, which the ANB officials selflessly gave to the family during the permitted inspection of the Golodotok documents (the portrait was created in 1950 in Cetinje, after the "hearing"). He says Dr. Aleksa Đilas, speaking on one occasion about the disappointment and hopelessness of his father at the moment when the Party rejected him: "Imagine that someone tells you that the Morača river does not flow through Podgorica, but some other river, and that you are forced to believe that nonsense. Gidu the whole world he fought for collapsed. I can only guess how he felt.”

Boba, Mirko and Danilo
Boba, Mirko and Danilophoto: Archive of Boba Matić Kovač

A picture of Kovač's heavyweight can help us to assume: "In the second round, Tripo stood in the ring, swayed and received blows almost indifferently, as if he wanted to prove his endurance. And indeed, he won the support of the audience, they cheered him not so much to fight back, but to not give up. He was declared a champion in taking the beating, an unyielding mule in the ring. On his swollen lips, a disdainful smile quivered, which spoke an inner silent message: just hit it, you bastard! Beat the solid rock with your fists."

Petrovići. Petrus, Blacksmith.

He left Belgrade never to return. And he won the support of the audience, a small number of them, who cheered him not so much to fight back, but to not give up. And Kovač remained at that time one of the few, or one of the few among the greatest, who did not surrender to fascism, nationalism, chauvinism. Can the same, for example, be concluded about Pekić?

And yes, there is that footage, it surfaced a few years ago. The camera "caught" the crowd: Kovač, Đilas, Bećković (da li i Raickovic). "Chroniclers" claim - the year is 1977 - and then deliver a "historically valuable contribution" (sic!). And what is historical in the attachment? The video shows Kovač taking the fiddle and starting to play. The conclusion of the "chronicler" follows: here is an ideologue of breaking the fiddler's and mythomaniac mentality with a fiddle in his hands...

Kovač in the newsroom of Vijesti in 2009
Kovač in the newsroom of Vijesti in 2009photo: Boris Pejović

But is Kovač's reckoning with traditional codes such that even ill-intentioned semi-intelligent "chroniclers" can understand it? In one text about Kovač's work, Radoman Kordic asked himself: "are not, in terms of structure and content, both Kovač's prose and Kovač's myth about the prodigal son the product of a personal, phantasmatic, unconscious myth?" Answering that question, this author concludes, among other things, that Kovač's story about the prodigal son is proof of the functioning of a special system of relationships. That myth stands in contrast rumors, opposite choir. This is why many of Kovač's figures are carved with grotesque. Only those authors who have a good understanding of the mythical, the traditional, and, if you want, the customary, can bring a picture of the reckoning of the "dirty" individual with the collective, that is, with the totality of codes that determine the collective. Jasmina Ahmetagić he also writes that the absence of black and white techniques in the presentation of circumstances and relationships and the contrasting of individuals reveal not only that "Kovač is simply a good writer, not a socialist spider - but also a special intention that he achieved in that way". Therefore, one should not be angry with a semi-intelligent when he concludes that the fiddle in his hands is an indicator of anything other than the fact that Mirko Kovač grew up in an epically assigned space.

In the last decade, he occasionally returned to that area. There were emotions on both sides. Thirteenth of July, p Njegosheva. Thus, his name is engraved in the marble of Billiards, to defy the majority of others, who arrived on the board through the compromises of time, according to the laws of small, transient interests. Receiving the award, he announced that the recognition of s I care his name has a special significance in his life, especially due to the fact that he is "the first winner in independent Montenegro." And then, with Kovačev's magic, he played with a quote, and instead of the thesis that the poet speaks from the head of the people, he announced that the people must speak from the head of the poet, "in the language of poetry". And here we saw Kovač again, standing opposite the canon. And what kind.

And in those last years, he gave a possibly decisive impetus to the processes in the Montenegrin language. At the invitation of a linguist from Montenegro, he joined the body that standardized the Montenegrin language, as a writer "who experiences language and language finesse much more through some intuition or hearing, and only then scholarly or scientifically." Even then, Kovač acted as a free man, whose only obligation was to defend freedom, including the freedom of the Montenegrin language and its speakers.

...they were the first to start yesterday in Podgorica Days of Mirko Kovač, a sort of continuation of the event that started in Rovinj. It was a special pleasure to see how friends and admirers of the personality and works of this great writer from all over the former Yugoslavia responded to the festival. And how, without hesitation, they decide to go to Podgorica, in the middle of the 12th month. It goes without saying - it's thanks to Mirko Kovač.

Blacksmith in 2007 in Podgorica
Blacksmith in 2007 in Podgoricaphoto: Luka Zeković

Miljenko Jergović announced for Focalizer how he hopes that this manifestation will come to life and become traditional, "not so much because of Kovač, but because of us and our new readings". These are slow processes, but necessary, because without reading "subversive" authors, our society, that is, our societies, sink into ever deeper darkness, a darkness created by socio-political short-term interests or quick profit making. Kovac's example, as well as the fates of his (anti)heroes, remind us that against the rigidity of a system, a strong individual would have to stand, who by his very appearance will break prejudices and myths, which will "hurt" our society, just as every injection sting hurts . That's why we won't promise anything, neither to society nor to Mirko Kovač, but we will Focalizer to work relentlessly for the affirmation of his work, as if the fate of all our children depended on it.

(The author is the editor-in-chief of Focalizer)

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