One of the current occasions for a conversation with the writer Mirko Demić is certainly his new book "Rose under ice", an autobiographical novel of fifty stories harmoniously interconnected and well connected into a novel whole. Mirko Demić has been engaged in literary and journalistic work since 1990, and his best-known prose works are: Apples of the Hesperides (1990), Straw in the Nose (1996), Amber, Honey, Oskoruša (2001, 2005, 2011), Apocrypha of Furtula ( 2003, 2020), Servants of the Whimsical Archer (2006), Minor Chords (2008, 2009), Sobers on a Drunken Ship (2010), Po(v)War Requiem (2012), Attack on Ithaca (2015), Hearings from Gora (2016) ), The Adventures of the Bač Obsenar (2018) and The Rose Under the Ice (2021)
He wrote several books, essays and smaller texts in the field of journalism, then dramatic works, and also prepared several important readings.
Mirko Demić is the winner of numerous literary awards and recognitions: "Andrić's Award", for the book of short stories Minor Chords in 2008. Then the "Dejan Medaković" Award, for the novel "Trezvenjaci na pijanoj lađa" in 2010. The "Đura Daničić" Award for work in the field of librarianship, 2013. Prize of the magazine "Ulaznica", for an essay by Fr Vitomil Zupan entitled (The) laughter of a man who knows too much, 2009. The "Meša Selimović" award for the novel Ćutanja iz Gotra, 2017. The "Miroslav Dereta" award, for the manuscript of the novel Pustolovine bački opsenar, 2018. The "Branislav Nušić" award for the drama Winners, winners , 2018. "Nebojša Devetak" award for the essay Denial as a mirror game by Crnjanski, 2021. Many of his books have been translated into several foreign languages.
Your recently published book "Rose under ice" was very well received by readers and literary critics. Can you explain its title and how you came up with it?
- The title of the book came from an unusual family legend that tries to answer the question of where my ancestors in Bania came from and where exactly in that place. My unnamed ancestor, while riding in the desert, came across a frozen field, in front of which the horse did not want to move. He got down, bent down and saw a rose under the ice. He interpreted that as a divine sign and decided to settle his large family there. I carried the image of a rose under the ice with me all my life as the greatest family treasure, because it proved that in an extremely epic world there can also be something extremely poetic. The reincarnation of that rose happened near the end of the manuscript of this book, when on Christmas Day I received a photo of a rose that bloomed that winter at the entrance to my birth house, which had already been robbed several times. The photo was sent to me by friends who live in Zagreb. I felt that this gives the book an effective ending, and the rose becomes the central motif; the beauty and fragility that live, despite the winter.
"Rose under ice" is a novel composed of fifty stories independent in thematic and compositional sense, but harmoniously interconnected and well connected in a novel whole. What is their main framework and in what time were they created?
- This book is a compendium of my early and late miseries, where allusions to my role models, Copic i Rain, are not hidden. As I moved away from my early childhood, it increasingly acquired a strange mythical and poetic power that I could not resist. The decisive impulse for compiling all those episodes into a fictional whole, the selection of impressions and the selection of characters that made up my childhood was - the death of my mother. The unease with her departure took me back to the years I spent around her, the time when I learned my first life lessons and received my first early childhood experiences. Some of these parts were written a long time ago; now I tried to put them into the function of the whole and find the appropriate tone. However, the greater part was created later, when the longing for the lost homeland became a permanent feeling, as well as the recent earthquakes that seem to have added an apocalyptic dimension to everything. I had the impression that I was not only writing about a time long gone, but also a topography that had been erased from the face of the earth.
The legend of the rose under the ice is made up of stories told with a special writer's sensibility, the common thread of which is the growing up and life of a boy viewed from different perspectives. What does his upbringing, his unbreakable connection with his birthplace represent for you as an author?
- It has been established that every childhood is carefree and happy. My childhood in a Banija village was not like that. From a young age, I started doing adult work. But, despite that, even in such a childhood there was beauty, small revelations, and if you want - poetry. In other words, every childhood is worthy of literature, provided that it is written about with a literary gift. He poetically saves from the banality of everyday life and tries to tell a universal story in which every reader will find a part of his own growing up.
How autobiographical is this novel, how much is it based on real events?
- Undoubtedly, the basis for this novel is autobiographical in the broadest sense. He is an amalgam of stories that I have heard or sensed, so after years of maturation I made up and told them. The events that were told to me by my elders have passed through the sieve of time and have become part of my biography.
Can it be said that the novel "Rose under ice" is more of a universal life story told in an attempt to overcome the PERSONAL, or is it still a family saga designed as a shield from oblivion?
- This, and not only this work, was written in the sincere desire that it not only remain my story. I am convinced that all childhoods have something in common. It is precisely on this that literature with artistic pretensions builds its strategy; he is looking for close friends in the readers who will convince him that he did not make everything up, but tells the story of a childhood, which is repeated in countless variants. Thus, we are witnessing a kind of paradox in which persistence on the personal results in serving the memory of humanity.
Some stories of the novel "Rose under the Ice" are told in several levels and have contacts with characters from your novel "Silence from Gora". What can you tell us about the concrete meaning and importance of those contacts?
- The sources of my literature are stored deep within me, both on a conscious and an unconscious level. Those who claim that each of us, in fact, tells a single story, reaching for motives and impulses from personal and collective memory, are not wrong. Such is my case. My heroes also live outside my books, like apparitions they enter and leave them, wander through my consciousness and often have the need to, at least episodically, return to the scene. And I, as their creator and servant, have a weakness for their whims and allow them everything.
You received the "Meša Selimović" Award for the best book in the Serbian language in 2017 for the novel "Ćutanja iz Gore". The central theme of this book is the fate of Serbs in Croatia. Can you tell us what motivated you the most to dedicate yourself to this topic to a large extent?
- The main character of that book is Petrova Gora, a mythical mountain, which, according to the logic of things, has diametrically opposite symbolic potential and character for the two peoples there. I tried to understand those two opposing viewpoints (Serbian and Croatian) and to reconcile them poetically by letting the dead speak in the novel, since the living could not agree on anything, despite the common language. Also, I tried to show that in the bowels of that mountain lie Romans and natives - Japuds, prophets and saints, monks and kings, fairies and ghosts. I gave each of them the opportunity to contribute their story. I tried, and this is the only thing that can be done in literature, to give them the opportunity to speak and present their part of the truth. My motives are easy to recognize - a permanent wonder at what history has served us continuously, for centuries. I understand literature as a search for the causes of our misunderstandings, and then tragedies.
In the course of writing the novel "Silence from Gore" did you intentionally leave the individual from the universal insufficiently demarcated? I'm asking you this because I got the impression that in your books these two are often intertwined, that they build a new prose fabric that pleases the reader, but also confuses him to a certain extent.
- And in real life, those two streams are never completely clear or separated. I did not see the purpose of dealing with literature in the mission to demarcate them and introduce order in the general disorder, but to play with their symbolic potential. The intertwining of these two streams leads to a sea of paradoxes, and the fight against them is always uncertain and therefore challenging. Maybe my books ask for too much - a dedicated reader, they are not a means of relaxation and easier falling asleep. Literature should not be taken too seriously, but it is far from being frivolous work.
As in some other books, as well as in the novel "Silence from the Mountain", you focused on the creation of a family and collective myth without going too far into national waters. You did that on purpose, why?
- I am of the opinion that even when speaking from a national perspective, that voice must surpass it and be comprehensible to someone else, some others. Nationality is also easier to understand when viewed as one of many. Playing exclusively on the national card is a slippery slope and can often lead you astray into daily politics and sectarianism. You shouldn't be ashamed of the national, but you shouldn't push it in front of you either. Literature is first and foremost a game, first of all linguistic and then symbolic. There were times when literature was given tasks that it could not fulfill, then there was disillusionment with its power. Fortunately, it cannot change the world of generations, but the consciousness and conscience of some readers.
As a trained JNA officer who swore to preserve brotherhood and unity in the ex-Yu area, as a man to whom "all people in the world are brothers", how do you perceive today's national and nationalist divisions, how do you view the increasingly obvious influence of these divisions on culture and art , especially on literary creativity in our region?
- The world in which I naively believed in my youth has long since collapsed. I look at the stages of that collapse with bitterness and disbelief, because I was among those who paid heavily for the "creation of a new order". I did not allow them to take away my language in all its variants and what we call cultural heritage. Writing is, among other things, a means by which we remember. On those ruins, one can still find a precious voice that testifies that not only manipulators and traffickers of emotions are born in this space, but also spirits whose pens cannot be turned away by phalanxes of bloodsuckers and unscrupulous people.
With a well-thought-out content and specific genre definition of your books, you bring your homeland closer to the reader, comprehensively, characteristically and historically clarified. How do you "justify" it?
- In the general misfortune, I am lucky that my hometown is a closed book in the political sense. The issue of his ineligibility and disruptive factor is a thing of the past. Hence, it relieves me of the fear that someone will call my literary archeology literature with a thesis, that is, literature with political intentions. So I was left on the bare backwaters of poetic imagination, having only literary devices and strategies at hand. And that's why I pay the price, because I'm not current, because in the era of fast food-literature, I only offer dead capital. I cannot give up my homeland, because it defines me both in terms of destiny and character, but neither does the world that surrounds it. I look at it from all sides, would I not find a new angle of view and thus discover previously unknown beauties and secrets. Genre diversity is a consequence of curiosity and an insatiable need for play.
From story to story in your books, you also talk about human life and its foundations in a general sense. Experience teaches us that everything is relative and transient, just as man and his everything are also transient. That's why I ask you: in your opinion, how justified is the effort of man to keep (or to appropriate) something that he thinks belongs to him, according to some human standards? How much sense does that ultimately make?
- Most of my heroes are deeply aware of the transience of everything, but they do not agree to give up themselves and their essence. Literature is born out of this paradox. Even if she was naive in her endeavor, as he would say Vladan Desnica, to humanize man. It's never a finished job. And you shouldn't give up, despite everything.
We know that the greatest number of misunderstandings today are based on people's tendency to judge, judge... That they should be judges. In doing so, they often refer to God and God's justice. However, God said in the Holy Scriptures that it was not given to man to judge. How would you comment on this?
- The less knowledge a person has, the more often he gives himself the right to judge. The world and the phenomena in it still transcend the human mind. That is why serious literature refrains from judging and judging. Rather, it tries to illuminate a certain phenomenon from as many angles as possible. We have learned from great writers that good literature makes sense as long as it asks questions and avoids giving undeniable answers; it leaves them to practitioners and jack-of-all-trades who have become arrogant in their intention to fix the world according to their narrow standards.
Someone deliberately leaves their homeland for better living conditions in another place. Someone is forced to do this and then settles in an area better for life than his "never regretted" hometown. Is it in vain that the people said that: "not all evil comes from evil"? What is your attitude towards leaving the homeland in a general sense?
- I am in permanent disputes and persecutions with my homeland. Our relationship is far from idyllic. The fact that we respect each other is hard to count. It is not a permanently set category. Remember Crnjanski who gave himself the right to choose Srijem as his homeland. Therefore, the homeland never coincides with the area from which we came. It's not worse if we have more of them. Those who claim that the homeland is where we feel good are not wrong either. One often wanted to escape from one's homeland because of misery and a difficult life, and this is present in "Rose under the Ice", but one also suffered for it in a foreign country. I know this from my neighbors who, after being expelled in the nineties, live in the United States of America and in Australia. However, a distinction should be made between remaining without a homeland by personal choice and the circumstances when it is taken away from you by force. That's why I approach my homeland as a metaphor, the birthplace of my intimacy and my view of the world. It is necessary to leave it, but it is also good to return to it; that's the only way we won't blindly enslave him, but we won't be ashamed of him either.
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