Ognjenović: Kanjoš is a bit of a cynic, a bit of a mocker, a cousin of Don Quixote

The 22th Grad Teatar Budva festival will be officially opened on the stage of the Terrace between the churches tonight at 28 p.m. with Vida Ognjenović's play "Kanjoš Macedenović".

Paštrović, who was remembered and loved by the Budva audience for 22 years, since the cult first performance in 1989, returned to his homeland, to the stage of the City Theater, in a new version, premiering with great success, on July 2011, XNUMX.

Vida Ognjenović, playwright, theater director, prose writer, novelist, president of the Serbian PEN Center and vice-president of the International PEN Congress, talks about her hero for "Vijesti".

"Yes, here he is again, the young and nimble Paštrović arrives from overseas on the Terrace between the churches, in a new Dolce & Gabana coat and a dandy hat, tired and mysterious. He arrives to tell about his time in Venice and to observe how his compatriots spend their time in his story. He gets to experience the development of his own myth about himself in the making of a new chapter."

• Last year, the Literary Program of the City Theater was opened with your guest appearance at the Poet's Square with the book of stories "Living Examples". How do you see the Budva festival in these twenty-eight years that it has been going on, especially today, when all aspects of culture are collapsing - aesthetic, moral, values, social...?

"My story about the Budva City Theater festival is extremely subjective, although I don't think there are any other ways. I see it as an excellent, firmly established festival formation that has established itself in the difficult gap between shamelessly mundane entertainment and angry penury. The festival was defended by a loyal, select and stoically persistent audience. I mean the part that resists this cancellation of everything that is not entertainment. People, it seems to me, have largely become depressed addicts of entertaining nonsense and noise. And if, even for a moment, they peek out of that trance that this violent pastime imputes to them, they find themselves face to face with a life whose alphabet they no longer recognize. Well, in such a time and environment, Grad Teatar perseveres in its fight for the artistic face of the world. So isn't that a heroic fight, no matter how quixotic it sometimes seems, or maybe on the contrary, that's exactly why such a fight should be appreciated. After all, I don't think that Don Quixote was a delusional dreamer, because a real knight is easy to defeat, anyone stronger than him can do that. But the soulless windmill, which claims to be useful, can be unmasked and its conceit overturned only by Don Quixote.”

• What is your personal relationship with Kanjoš, a dramatic character who, through two productions at different times, certainly experienced the most exciting fate of all your heroes?

"Kanjoš is a seductive hero. An obsessive, all-round artist, a man with a hundred faces, in none of them completely, not permanently. Kanjoš is a bit of a cynic, a bit of a scoffer, a bit of a hero of the Song of Songs, a bit of a cousin of Don Quixote, a bit of a Voltaireian aware of himself and others, and sometimes a ravished cat in boots - wherever he jumps, he is met with his feet, that is, with intelligence."

• The Kanjos of our time is neither so traditional, nor so mythical a hero, social and political circumstances have changed him, only one thing has remained the same - he still lives in a small environment that is in a vassal relationship to the big world, and still tries to work for his own interest using petty manipulations and frauds...

"Kanjoš is different in its exceptionality. Today's copies of him are swindlers, unimaginative cheats, people who remove wedding rings from widows' fingers, shoplifters, petty thieves, because they don't know how to count large sums of money, nor how to sign a check. Even a small environment is too big for them. Kanjoš does not live in a small environment, but in his imagination. With it, he magnifies every environment in which he lives. Yes, you are right about the conflict between small and large environment. Today's small community is unimaginatively hypocritical and duplicitous in its miserable conceit and inflating its own pygmy stature into false grandeur. This only provokes the wrath of the big world, which does not forgive the ambitions and predominance of small Napoleonic complexes. That's why the big middle prefers to silence and humiliate the little one, seeing only her flaws, and refusing to actually learn anything about her, or to get to know her better. A metaphor for the conflict between small and large communities is the conflict between Kanjoš and Furlano. Only when he gets a good close-up of him, Kanjoš realizes his delusion and how much he is actually a victim of a stupid stereotype."

• Describing Kanjoš, a merchant from Budva who went to fight with Furlan, the bitter enemy of the Venetian Doge, in order to improve the position of his Paštrovići, you stated that today he would probably be finishing his training as a UN soldier, that we would meet him on various battlefields in the world as a well-trained a soldier who receives decorations for it.

"Yes, today's warrior is employed, has an excellent salary, fights in countries he knows nothing about, whose language sounds to him like birdsong, whose customs he considers backward, punishable and politically incorrect. If we were to read Kanjoš as a paid mercenary, today we would meet him in one of those UN units."

• However, in your play, Kanjoš no longer kills Furlan, but becomes friends with him... What is sincere justice and patriotism today?

"Yes, I understood Kanjos differently. For me, he is a runaway from a small environment, a boy adventurer, a do-it-yourselfer, a mind always after the sea and experiences, agile, skilled, but also sensitive and honorable in a way. He refuses to pay for Furlano's death, because he didn't actually kill him, so he thinks it would be a dirty trade, instead he asks for something for the common good, some privileges for his compatriots. Of course, he gets all that in words in that pathetic moment, so that all those promises in words would end. And as far as fairness and patriotism are concerned, I think they are two of the most unfashionable, worn-out, scattered and ridiculed concepts. Hyperbolized in mythomaniac and anachronistic nationalist trumpeting, and canceled out by superficial entertainment based on thinking, ecstasy drinks and the slogan that the most important thing is to live well and not deprive yourself of anything that can enable you to do so."

• The new "Kanjoš" is both a tragicomedy and a melodrama. Do we live our lives in that "genre" today?

"We live hard and we try to dilute those difficulties a little with simulated feelings from cheap melodramas."

The government does not even ask us to trust it, but to fear it

• During the three years since the premiere of "Kanjoš" in 2011, a lot has changed in your environment as well. How do you see the "new-old" government in Serbia, do you believe what the "new-old" people who are now leading the country say?

"Oh, please, what a romantic question - who trusts any government today. Even the government itself does not believe in itself. The government, in fact, does not even ask us to trust it, but to fear it. And it achieves that, doesn't it!

The play "Kanjoš Macedonović" was co-produced by the City Theater and the National Theater from Belgrade, the playwright is Božo Koprivica, and the main characters are played by Igor Đorđević, Marko Baćović, Predrag Ejdus, Branislav Lečić, Branko Vidaković, Aleksandar Đurica, Pavle Jerinić... Set designer is Miodrag Tabački, costume designer is Ljiljana Dragović, and music is composed by Zoran Erić. "Kanjoš" is on the program of the City Theater and tomorrow, at 22 p.m., on the same stage.