The novel The Librarian: Cetinje records by Marko Špadijer (Zagreb, 2017) is a very complex, layered, aesthetically successful and valuable literary work, not easily defined in terms of genre.
The novel has an unusual content and form.
According to the author, these are the records that he, as a librarian in the Central National Library of Montenegro "Đurđe Crnojević", made "about Cetinje, the Library and the people" with whom he worked and came into contact between 1964 and 1972, in to whom both Montenegro and Cetinje began to wake up from a decades-long slumber and partly free themselves from imposed mythical consciousness, along with a timid search for themselves and their own identity.
The author skilfully and wisely connected his notes into a whole and created a novel or, as he says, "like a novel". In this sense, the question of form can be raised - is it really a novel or an autobiographical record?
It is about a specific creative process in the creation of this work both in terms of content and form. A writer is like a demiurge. He himself creates the world of the work of art, and that is always a great miracle and enigma - the secret of artistic creation.
When these records from Cetinje began to be created, the author was only 26, and he stopped recording them at the age of 34, in full youth and creative maturity. The novel covers eight years of the writer's youth while he worked in the Central National Library of Montenegro, which were dramatic for him, for Cetinje, and for Montenegro.
These are records of people and events in society and culture in Cetinje, which is the cohesive point of the novel around which the whole gathered, the stage where everything happens and, even more narrowly, in the Library, which has not only a real but also a symbolic meaning.
In the laconic and intelligent preface, the author said everything that was necessary. But what is important to point out is: one is social and the other is artistic reality - the world of novels. The author changed the names of real people, invented new, fictitious or hybrid literary characters.
Those who are familiar with that time and the spiritual atmosphere of Cetinje are curious to find out who is behind the name of a character, but all other readers are not interested in that. For them, what matters is whether the work of art succeeds or fails, whether the novel holds up as a novel or not.
In this sense, although the novel The Librarian is also autobiographical in nature, it is as such independent of its creator, the writer Marko Spadijer.
In the novel, the narrator and main character are the same - young librarian Petar Delja, an almost finished student, an intellectual - a man of his time, the author's literary double. A whole gallery of characters parades through the novel, and in its plot, which is largely defabulized: from the Library - Cartographer, Ksenija Mihailović, librarian and party secretary, Novak Simović, director. The professor (whose name and surname are not mentioned), Marija, who is in a relationship with the young charming, witty and educated Delja, Olga Vuković, Delja's schoolmates, who are personalized and lead youthful intellectual discussions, and professor Vida Martinović, librarians Marko Lagator and Sanja Moštrokol, Stefan Bečić...
Their work and part of their lives takes place in the library.
Among the important figures of Cetinje, there are the characters of Miloš Vušković, painter; Rista Piper the historian; Sava and Jovan Muchalica (twin brothers), painter Milutin Plamenac; the poet from Belgrade, Delia's friend Milan Okuka, and the mysterious Jelena who suddenly appeared in Cetinje, etc. As well as other more or less developed and episodic characters, except for old Mrs. Marić, the characters of the secretary of the municipal committee Vujadin Strahinja, the head of the Udba and ambassador Vukašin...
The structure of the novel consists of exactly XX chapters or smaller compositional segments, whose titles are both concrete and symbolic: Library; Schoolmates, Dedinje Self-Government; Forum of readers, old books and new editions; Poet; Eagle karst; Salon of Mrs. Marić; Secretary of the Committee; Mead; About the mouse; Ozna knows everything; Lenin - city bridges; Montenegrin Book Museum; Belgrade; Cetinje historical stage; Commitments; Epilogue before the end; Ancestors and descendants.
Conversations, polemics, observations and meditations of literary heroes, especially the young librarian Petar Delja, as well as what happens to him, what he thinks about and imagines, connect the fragments of the record into a mosaic form, and the aesthetic is what gives the whole coherence and emanates from the being of the novel. . Everything is refracted through people and Cetinje. And the position and fate of Cetinje also determine Montenegro as a whole. This is Cetinje, which is no longer the capital, which stagnates and dies in the higher sense, but thanks to youth and new generations, it still wakes up and rises like a grass root.
The author did not burden the manuscript with subsequent knowledge, he did not project the present into the past, but he revived the former present, with an undoubted skill of transposition. On the thematic level, the author gave a broad picture of Cetinje and Montenegro, not only in the years when the records were created, but also through the centuries-old history and destiny of Montenegro and Montenegrins, sometimes in the halo of glory and historical greatness, and sometimes to the point of completely erasing their identity, which on at the end of the novel, it culminates through the growth of unitarism and the expansion of the Great Serbian consciousness and leads to the marginalization of everything Montenegrin, to the marginalization, which, unfortunately, had a foothold in Montenegro itself. This ultimately led to numerous crossroads, and in the novel to the split between Petar Delja and his adored director Novak Simović.
This situation culminated in malicious questions from Belgrade: "What do you want television, you want daily newspapers, you start magazines, you found a University, you are looking for some kind of Montenegrin culture, Montenegrin literature, you are building a mausoleum to Njegoš, you are revising history." All this is directed against Serbia".
And so accusations against Montenegro were constantly hurled, which awakened defiance and awareness in the main character and a few others of the necessity of resistance and struggle for their identity, nation and homeland, culture, language, institutions, everything.
In terms of meaning and content, the novel The Librarian, although a literary read, is indispensable for getting to know not only life in one period of Montenegrin post-war society, but also the conflict between traditional and contemporary, past and present. Thus, although "flour from the same bag", Petar Delja and his director Novak Simović are two worlds, two irreconcilable consciousnesses, which are diametrically opposed. In the novel and in reality they are mutually exclusive.
Cetinje is an enigma between history, legend and harsh reality. The novel is also a saga about the Montenegrin capital city.
From a formal and axiological point of view, Marko Špadijer's novel The Librarian - Cetinje Records opens several literary theoretical questions, and above all the understanding of historical time: is a literary work interpreted in the context of the time in which it was created or when it was published.
In my opinion, the author M. Špadijer, within the scope of his poetics, represents an opinion about the indivisibility of time. Therefore, this novel "from two eras", when it was written and when it was published, can be viewed on a simultaneous level - towards the past as a memory or memory and the present, as the moment of completion and the future as the future past, but also the novel as a bequest for the distant the future. This novel seems to have founded a new genre in Montenegrin literature. If it had been published when the records in it were being created, it would have been too avant-garde, a hint of postmodernism.
Like the face of Janus, he looks both into the past and into the future. This literary work shook our traditional understanding of the novel to the core. It has a mosaic form but also elements of a palimpsest of memory, with an undoubted degree of originality and modernity. The novel will have its own special place in literature, in Montenegrin culture, as a distinctive artistic achievement, created on several levels.
The work seems to ask questions: how to live with history, how to survive without history. It reflects the interaction between literature and life, as well as Mark's specific understanding of history, which emphasizes both the "burden of history" and it as a refuge.
With this novel, Marko Špadijer earned his own place in Montenegrin literature, as a forerunner of Montenegrin postmodernism - with the question: where is the origin of this work? As a connoisseur of trends in world literature, he made a departure from traditional novel practice, as if he wanted to show which paths of literary creation could not be followed, and which should be followed, in times that were not very favorable to it.
In Marko Spadier's great dilemma, whether after these records, four and a half decades ago, he should continue to be a writer or a politician - the politician temporarily won over the writer, but the writer won forever with this exceptional novel.
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