About the novel in verse "Children" by the author Milena Marković, for which she was declared laureate of the 68th NIN award for 2021, Miljenko Jergović pointed out that it is "the greatest book about femininity, about motherhood, daughterhood and sonship, a dangerous novel about history"...
"'Children' is a poem about thwarted, eternally unfinished growing up, powerful, incomparable in our languages, the greatest book about femininity, about motherhood, daughterhood and sonship... a dangerous novel about history, the most important and traumatic one for us, which begins with the Second World War war, continued through the XNUMXs, the decade of our growth, and ran over us during the XNUMXs," he wrote.
Last week, Milena Marković presented her novel "Children" in Budva, organized by the National Library, and on that occasion she spoke to "Vijesti".
Marković is a screenwriter, playwright and poet, born in 1974 in Zemun. With the play "Pavilions, or where I'm going, where I come from and what's for dinner", she graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the Department of Dramaturgy in 1998 in Belgrade.
She has published several books, her plays have also been performed, and she is the winner of numerous awards: Special awards in Vienna for the best plays from the ex-YU area, three awards from the Sterija Theater for the best play text (Nahod Simeon, Ship for the Dolls and Zmajebice), as well and the "Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz" award for dramatic creativity, and awards bearing the names of Todor Manojlović, Đura Jakšić, Miloš Crnjanski, Biljana Jovanović..., as well as the "Pero Despota Stefana" award for poetry.
Based on her script, the film "Tomorrow Morning" was directed by the director Oleg Novkovic, she wrote the screenplay for the award-winning film "Beli, beli svet" also directed by Novkovic, and for the films "Otadžbina" and "Ziv čovek", as well as for the documentary film "Mining Opera". In addition, Marković is also the co-writer of the series "Unclean Blood", and he talks about the novel "Deca" for "Vijesti".
If everything, including writing, as you often like to say, has to be paid for, a sacrifice must be made - what was the price of completely exposing yourself that you engaged in in the poem "Children"?
The sacrifice must be given for the gift and for the possibility of knowledge, which on the one hand gives greatness to the one who is the medium for general human feelings and knowledge, and on the other hand gives a state of eternal longing, dissatisfaction, envy and often a tragic feeling of the world, precisely because of that knowledge. In all those great novels about tragic, comic, poignant initiation into art, there is a story of terrible ostracism, and in "Tony Kreger" Thomas Mann i Tolstoyov diaries and in "Dablinci" and "Portrait of the Artist in his Youth" Joyce's and in "Glass Bell" Sylvie Plath, there's that in "The Prodigal Son" too Bukovsky and code Fantea. Knowledge means ostracism, priests, artists and others who serve are separated from it. And everything that is for nothing stinks of rubbish, to paraphrase Selina.
As for the nudity in "Deca", I've done it before, but now it's all under my full name, so it's even more radical.
When and why did you decide to get under your own skin until the end, in Mandic's words, and did you ever think that you had gone too far, that you were too personal and that some things should be kept quiet?
I kept quiet a lot because it's just not interesting in a literary sense. I decided to go all the way when I started writing, nothing else interested me. It's just that I had different style mechanisms. And it never mattered to me whether I went too far, it was only important to me that it be right and that it succeeds. I think all writers are personal. Even the most serious among the so-called genre writers, for example James Ellroy, they write a personal story. His mother was strangled with nylon stockings and dumped by the side of the road, they never caught the killer. And then the greatest noir writer, the man who wrote "The Black Dahlia" and "LA Confidential" Code Agatha Christie again you have personal, class, British, First and Second World War. Code Charles Dickens again personally, he himself was a boy who cleaned gentlemen's shoes in the terrible streets of East London. All that remained was the question of style, theme, idea.
Did this book, in which you presented many lives and destinies "on a plate" to the reader, have some kind of therapeutic effect on you?
It's not. Only dilettantes and amateurs are treated with artistic work. They rarely manage to interest anyone other than their doctors, family and friends.
How did the family react to the poem and did you fear that, due to sharing many private family stories, the same thing that happened to Knausgor ("My Struggle") and Oster ("Discovering Solitude") would happen to you - that the family would "go to war" with To you?
When you have a professional soldier in your family, you know he can die. When you have someone working on an oil rig, you know they're going to be in the field all the time. When you have a writer, you know that he can write down everything he sees and hears.
I wouldn't compare Oster with Knausgaard, he's just a member of that most powerful language, so the whole world knows about him. Knausgaard wrote a masterpiece. His family are small townspeople. Mine are not petty citizens. It is written in the book who they are and what they are. So far, no one has touched me, from those who are important to me and to whom I owe something.
My life is not such that I now go around and wallow in the sauce of my importance for Serbian literature until I get high and stink. Very little and I think of myself that way. I'm just working.
You managed to do what few people here succeed in only for a short time, in death - to gather around you, that is, your work, people of different ideological, political, and even literary views. Praise for "Deci" comes from all sides... How do you explain it and does it mean anything to you?
I am very careful ideologically and politically. As a poet, I got something called people's love. I serve people. There is no need for them to know anything else about me other than what they got, no need for them to know my opinion, views, commitments. Let them take what they need and experience it as they know how and as it suits them. What happened with this novel is that I just got more love. This happened, among other things, because of the tactile and sensory associations related to childhood and the era that has passed. It means a lot to me, there is nothing more to talk about.
You yourself, after receiving NIN's award, raised the question - what to do next. Does it make sense to write after "Dece", which many critics consider not only your best work, but also a book that represents a turning point in Serbian literature?
I have to write, I don't know what else to do, it's my calling. A friend almost told me, he's a great guitarist, it doesn't matter who he is, I don't like to throw names, he said "I'm a string, what will I do if I don't play". It eats you if you don't work. I'll see what makes sense to write. Now I have to write the script for the series, they are waiting for me. My life is not such that I now go around and wallow in the sauce of my importance for Serbian literature until I get high and stink. Very little and I think of myself that way. I'm just working.
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