We do not know for sure when he was born, nor the day when he died, a rhapsode from the era of the late Montenegrin epic - Starac Milija Kolašinac.
The old rhapsode could neither read nor write
We know that Vuk Stefanović Karadžić copied from him "Marriage of Maksim Crnojević", in two weeks, Mr. 1822, probably pouring him his brandy and strengthening the poet's concentration with sly encouragement.
The following year, in 1823, according to his own admission, Vuk did not find him alive in the village of exile, in Požega Nahija.
It was used in only one time, out of the three known to us - the present
These days, when we celebrate the bicentenary of Njegoš, we cannot help but remember his predecessor. When the old poet died, Radivoje Petrović was only ten years old. (Vido Latković knew from somewhere that Njegoš admired the beauty of "Maxim" during his stay in Vienna a quarter of a century after the author's death.)
Especially since the works of both poets are one and the same genre: epic. They are brothers in many ways, but practically nothing, at least in terms of genre, separates them. Radosav Medenica, an extraordinary connoisseur of European epic poetry, especially German and ours, points to this unequivocally:
"Summed up in the shortest setting: the poetic power of Starac Milija represents in a sense a thread that leads to Njegoš. The embodiment of a nugget of that primordial strength that manifested itself so grandiosely in Vuk, also his countryman, in the aspect of a broad European perspective." (Cf. R. Medenica: Naša narodna epika i jeni tvorci, Cetinje, 1975, 67).
The old rhapsode could neither read nor write. In this brief discussion, we will rather avoid, rather than highlight, that extravagant record.
He sang about both existence and records - a different approach to this problem, including a more complex thought approach, he didn't seem to have, nor did it concern him much.
It was used in only one time, out of the three known to us - the present.
A poet of music
That time was called music. The poet experienced the entire era through music.
Vuk, who, however, knew what the past was, and maneuvered with it in his Jesuit strategy, saved what he could
He used only a monolithic discourse. What it means?
This means that he could not stop in his singing, otherwise he would lose the thread of the story and the connection with the subject. Without rhythm, he would no longer know who's name is or what they do.
He sang Vuka over and over again his (and folk) "Maximus", accompanied by a fiddle, as many times until finally the fable and poetics of this bloody drama agreed, settled down, calmed down, on the pipe, like the avalanche of Pompeii in the squares of the unfortunate city in the Neapolitan plain.
Protagonists of the story: child Maksim(e), unfortunate groom; Ivan Crnojević, his frantic father, the king who caused civil slaughter and war; Duke Miloš, "lord's knee", struck by a spear in the middle of the forehead; "beautiful Latin woman" (the first "companion" of Lady Macbeth in world literature); and many others ("a thousand wedding guests")... turned over in their graves - feeling for the first time, after so many centuries of oral interpretation, contact with syntax.
Vuk, who, however, knew what the past was, and maneuvered with it in his Jesuit strategy, saved what he could.
Unfortunately, he didn't tell us anything more about Milija.
He had no will to single him out from his group of folk singers; perhaps he did not feel responsible for its uniqueness.
The oral past is a past without records, therefore, a past without its own time, a blind past
Shorthanding a history of music, no less than the history of warfare, wedding mobilizations, the history of anger or the history of literature, he did not find time to honor his rhapsody with the place it deserved. He regretted it when he got back to his Vienna, very likely, but he couldn't do anything because it was too late.
More of these "not" can be objected to when it comes to "Maxim's" creator (co-author, editor). We, to put it most modestly, join those futile objections, but slightly, according to an intuition that does not belong to the time or to textual criticism.
Vuk saved Maxim, but Milija ran away from him. The following summer, when a man from Vienna went to the old town and asked about the rhapsode, "they told him he had died."
The past?
Maxim and Macbeth - falsifications of history
A picture of the past - is that what it's all about?
The question does not sound "past", but what past?
Image of which past - oral or manuscript?
The manuscript past is, in spite of everything, a past with a certain - smaller or larger, justified or doubtful, researched or unresearched - record.
The oral past is a past without records, therefore, a past without its own time, a blind past. Nothing is evident there except the abstraction of the past.
Not only is the picture of the written past incomplete - about the picture of the oral tradition, it is a shame to waste words in that direction - but also the methods, research, compilation, interpretative methods, therefore, can either leave it as it is, despite efforts, or even complicate it in one of the many directions of complications.
Both "Macbeth" and "Maxim" are historical "forgeries" of the first order
("The picture of the past which we can thus compile is of necessity incomplete", says RD Sweeney in his study on Latin manuscripts, which delves further into issues of manuscript culture in general, "but the methods of approach are so different that the lacunae which remain from the use of the method can often be failed in by another. A true picture of the availability of classical texts at various times and places can thus be formulated, or at least one in which the flaws arising from inaccuracy of restoration or inability to perceive the necessity of using all our evidence in this restoration. Yet very much remains to be done." Cf. RD Sweeny: Vanishing and Unavailable Evidence: Latin Manuscripts in the Middle Ages and Today, Cambridge University Press, 1971, 34.)
The restoration of the "past without the past" in a certain way is digging into the unknown on the basis of the known, more or less evident, which, however, can easily turn into an empty praise of the records.
The comparative parameters of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and "The Marriage of Maksim Crnojević" lie almost as much in the Scottish as in the Montenegrin-Balkan epic tradition, since they are parameters without records, bare parameters of dramatic situations about living people, who tell their story to other living people.
Both authors, both the learned Elizabethan (however much his friend and godfather Ben Johnson criticized him for "knowing little Greek and even less Latin" in his graveside speech in his native Stratford, on a rainy April day in 1616), and the seafaring rhapsode, after all, deconstructed the historical records.
Both "Macbeth" and "Maxim" are historical "forgeries" of the first order.
He spoke through music, and music is the only art that does not have its own past
The poets reserved a second-class place for history in their existential restoration of women, who love and persuade their husbands to kill their rivals, regardless of what history says otherwise.
The destruction of records, therefore, is present both in the oral and in the manuscript past.
Totally in oral, partially in manuscript.
Beautiful Latina - personal experience?
Even in the impersonal era of oral creativity, however, this poet does not resemble any other poet.
The freedom with which he deconstructed folk traditions sets him apart from the Bronze Age.
He didn't try to leave us a picture of his past, or anyone else's.
He did not consider the past to be important. Not much fun either. Not even recognizable. Although epically oriented, like all men, he deconstructed the historical record and erased time from the real flow of things.
He spoke from personal experience, but it was not the past.
"Beautiful Latina" from "Maxim" is a deeply personal experience, a furrow of pain, an intimate experience of the eternal present
That poet was not born in the past.
He spoke through music, and music is the only art that does not have its own past.
The semiotics of music took over his whole being, and he, turning music into a miracle, bridged the gap between the folk verse of old eras and his live listener (his "client", because he sang, like all rhapsodes, for a flask of brandy and a piece of bread).
Đurić seems to be talking about him in his Anthology of Yugoslav Literature, when he talks about the arrangement of vowels and consonants and occasional rhyming - because with Milije, rhyme is not regular, but serves musical semiotics.
"The musical effect of folk verse springs from the virtuoso use of rhymes and the melodic arrangement of vocals and consonants. Rhymes do not appear regularly or in fixed places, and therefore make a very strong impression; they are like a multi-colored sound light that occasionally shines above this or that place to single it out and highlight it. But more than them, the music of the vocals and consonants fascinates. It is often truly unsurpassed playing with sound." (Cf. Vojislav Đurić: Anthology of folk poetry, Nolit, 1960, 8.)
The old man Milija Kolašinac was the first, in our region, to introduce a woman onto the scene of life (with a big door), as an individual phenomenon, a person and resolved to make a decision that takes away or gives away a man's life.
He was the first to introduce psychological dramaturgy into our literature. His predecessors, and even his followers, up to SM Ljubiša, did not show excessive interest in such a thing.
It is certain, therefore, that, like his Lady Macbeth ("thin Latina"), it was a deeply private experience
His speech is imbued with a deep personal tone, erasing the past from the map of existence, ignoring the future, ironic distance from the records.
He was fascinated by the present: music.
"Beautiful Latina" from "Maxim" is a deeply personal experience, a furrow of pain, an intimate experience of the eternal present.
The old rhapsode moved her from history to music. With one stroke, he freed her bridal veil from all the attributes of the past. He has put this young woman in the position of an angry bride, who gives her husband the order: "Kill!"
The paradox of vocation
He spoke in the categories of people's destinies, and the situations they created by their noble or selfish, wise or foolish, good or bad actions.
He knew only one time, the present, into which he stuffed something that happened (or could happen) regardless of when.
Thus he, a poet without syntax, filled the present with enormous possibilities and made it, despite the cruel time in which he lived, comforting.
Vuk, in the familiar hurry and nervousness of a businessman, informs us that the rhapsode's face was covered with scars, as it seems that he once had a bloodbath with some Turks in Morača in his youth. Of course - it was.
He lived at the turn of great epochs (oral and modern era) and felt the taste of both
It is certain, therefore, that, like his Lady Macbeth ("thin Latina"), it was a deeply private experience. Maybe from those incest, who knows, maybe from some other context in his youth.
A woman of music, a woman of the present, a woman of all life.
Despite his genre, the epic, which is all in the past: distant, dead, finished, perfect, untouchable – this poet was born in the present, lived in the present and died in the present.
His paradox of vocation (reform of the epic genre) gained momentum two and a half centuries ago (Milija was at the peak of his power at the end of the 18th century), but it is immanent in world literature in depth - until the most ancient times.
He lived at the turn of great epochs (oral and modern era) and felt the taste of both.
This paradox of vocation was familiar (in a significantly different cultural climate) to the great reformers of genres: Euripides (480 - 406 CE), in antiquity, John Donne (1572 - 1631), among the metaphysical poets of the West and, more recently, for example, the American Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972).
(Excerpt from the study "Maxim & Macbeth")
Bonus video:
