Knowing that "life is not just a field trip", the wise Ivo Andrić wrote that everyone who lives through it should be awarded a medal. Sreten Asanović knows what life is and how to live it if you want it in a story, in memory, if you want a beautiful death. With the unusual phrase beautiful death with which he titled his best book, Asanović, in the spirit of Montenegrin tradition, expressed the view that even death must be earned - by life, as it was lived in Montenegro.
In the spirit of this ethical attitude, his literary work, created in and in Montenegro, is actually about its people. In an environment bordered by hills like dry walls, in an area over which the sun burns mercilessly, in the desolate Ćemovsko kamipolje, in the karst and waterless, Asanović's heroes and characters live and endure a specific life, connected, or rather in conflict with nature and the environment, reduced to what they are, brought to light, put in a situation where they have to show their dark side or the other, in any case - human side. Everything conspired against man - time and storms, wars, famine, cracked earth, sky, swarms of locusts that ravage the seeds under the scorched earth. But a man does not surrender - because he is a man and knows that he must be a man. He doesn't complain about fate, but he doesn't make peace with it either, he fights, defies, stands up, especially when he is faced with death, and that is most often, when he knows that he must not humiliate himself, humiliate himself in front of his own people and even more - in front of others , at the end - and in front of you.
"The world of my heroes is the south of Montenegro - writes Sreten Asanović - where some peculiarities have condensed in a small space, which with their simplicity, bareness, represent a synthesis of bare karst, sun and dry plains. That environment was created for artistic transposition, because the man of that region was instructed from early childhood to deal with the evil that hardens him and the beauty that threatens to kill him. Man's sensibility is sharpened there not only in the harsh conditions of life, but also in communication with nature, with a heavy heart when the sky and the earth are burning, because the sun is too close and the stars are too far. The old civilizations that once existed here, as if they were not buried by the earth, but were scorched by the sun and only a rampart, and most often a stone in the roof of a house, testify to the times that have passed and that only man could survive thanks to his memory and directed at oneself."
The writer, Sreten Asanović, speaks on behalf of that man, deeply knowing the psychology and mentality of the people of this climate, suggestively conjuring the atmosphere in which his real and literary heroes and characters "found themselves". Asanović does not think twice, with sentences reduced to the smallest measure, he shows his heroes, shows, tells and presents the artistic truth about man.
That's why his heroes, no matter how recognizable they are like ours - carry a universal meaning, become a metaphor for human behavior in existentially specific situations. Although the inheritor of the Montenegrin tradition, Asanović enters its literature as a writer without predecessors and role models. He is the first writer of the short, modern story, the first, the best and the most consistent "respecter" of this literary form. For over fifty years of creativity, he continuously published books of short stories and only one novel - "The Traveler". In that literary form, he grew into a top master in the former Yugoslavian area. Microscopically focusing his attention on the selected motif, Asanović is able to "see the world in a drop", to masterfully, so to speak, in one stroke, give a complete picture of a man in a characteristic turning point for him. Short and reduced to a basic structure, Asanović's stories challenge the reader to return to them again and to think about them and about them, discovering their depth and multi-layeredness.
His stories provoke a story about a story. Thematically different, they have something in common - coherent structure, simplicity of narration and plot, rich and metaphorical, skillful introduction of the reader into the action and his even more skillful leading and seduction until the very end - when he surprises him with an epilogue which, effectively ending the story, actually opens it up to deeper reflection and questioning of both one's own and others' actions. A life episode becomes a life. The minimum is the maximum.
There are no superfluous words in Asanović's stories, even less one that would be missing. Asanović disrupts traditional notions and understandings of the literary genre called the short story. By reducing its form and scope, it achieves the opposite, expanding its content possibilities and meanings. And only great masters and artists can do that.
The reader, especially the critic, is always in a dilemma as to which of the stories to single out and confirm his assessment of their high artistic reach. Should he take the first one he comes across?
His novel "Putnik" is like that - a story or stories about the man of the world, Bož Tomović, an interesting work because of its author's breakthrough from the literary genre that he sovereignly ruled, the method by which he transposed the structure of life into a literary one, as well as because of the ambient and thematic conquest new spaces, transition from microcosm to macrocosm.
The author of stories that are actually novels in miniature or small novels, he managed to create a real novel, unique in Montenegrin literature. Comprised of forty special stories, chapters that do not in any way disturb its basic function and fable realized with a pure realistic method - Asanović's "Traveler", which is a kind of paradox, has a simpler, more spontaneous and fluent story than most of his short stories. With an archaic style and vocabulary, Asanović achieves modernity, and with Bož's speech in the Leškopolska manner, with mistakes in cases and Romanisms thrown in, he masterfully shadows and paints Bož's psychological character, constantly maintaining a mildly ironic context...
Here is what Asanović says about his writing credentials:
"I am writing down my time, I am trying to save from oblivion that small part that I liked in time and on the earth where I fell headfirst, where everyone is condemned to share the fate of man and nation. If what I am writing down resists death, if it is not just a sound that only I hear, if my pursuits with death, even if it resembles a conversation with myself, is recognized on its own soil and at the same time reaches others - then my effort will not to be in vain, then I from my only life, in pursuit with death, emerge victorious. Even when the writer discovers evil, and when he believes that there is more of it than good, he fights for good. He wants evil to overcome, for it to lose the battle, even though it is often Sisyphus' work."
Created in Montenegro, Asanović's work remains its cultural and national asset of timeless value and splendor. It is that Zogović lighthouse that shines as long as it exists and exists as long as it shines. Permanent and unquenchable.
Bonus video:
