"Every reader, when he reads, is actually a reader of himself."
M. Proust
Correspondence as life, work Borislav Pekić, which she prepared Ljiljana Pekić, is an epistolary collection and confirmation of the great writer's gift of observation that, with the irony of a self-exile and the edge of spiritual and creative freedom - the counterbalance of indoctrination and nothingness, he dissects not only one social system but also the deeply threatened spirit of the intellectual community, to which he himself belonged. Borislav Pekić is a chronicler of literary life, let's use a series of three Platonov analogies: about the sun, the line and the cave, with a special emphasis on the third, in addition to the boxes with everyday ephemera, which interested him, he also opened some personal and general literary topics. He is, as stated by the author of the preface of the issue in question P. Palavestra, "...with his correspondence at the very end of the XNUMXth century, he refreshed and somewhat renewed Serbian epistolary literature. Critical consciousness was released, alternative cultural standards were taking shape..."
In a letter from 1965, obtained, as stated in the footnote on page ninety-three of this dialogue collection, by the kindness of Mrs. Mirjana Miočinović, Borislav Pekić, from the Military Hospital for Sušić patients, writes to Danilo Kish: "The real difficulties arise with the biography. First of all, because I despise any biography, not because it is inevitably fake, but because it is inevitably stupid. And then, none of the biographies I was invited to write brought me happiness. Just trouble.”
Borislav Pekić's work is a pilgrimage, not only Njegovan's, the architectural one, which from the first line, with the play 'under the red flag', disturbs the thought of the pre-war house owners, but the primordial one, where the pilgrim, "whose life in the swamp of duration resembles the tracks of redskins when they will not to be noticed", he returns from the high road "placing his heels in the footsteps of the old trail" (New Jerusalem) and disappears, leaving us at the mercy of his oneiric fantasy. Pekić's work is an example of artistic engagement and critical attitude towards reality. Perhaps, that is why there are difficulties when it comes to the biography of this creator mythomachy. With its structure, Pekić's work is reminiscent of an inverted, transparent pyramid, through which, through its sections, turned upside down, a man can be seen in the very center, like a rare and poisonous plant in the deaf silence of isolation.
"Only now do I see," writes Pekić, D. Kišu, "that it is easier to live one life than to write one biography." My biography consists of actions that bother others and those that bother me... In this way, my biography would be reduced to the only relevant truth if I was born."
Pekić's work is a city on the Simplegad rocks, with thin towers under the high and endless Argonaut sky. A work-city, which hides a secret within itself, like Le Corbusier's The chapel in Ronšan is about the "acoustics of the landscape", which, in harmony, are formed by various architectonic forms and the meditation of the holy place.
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"We took more than we gave, Cora," he said (John Hamilton, n. n). We have exhausted our resources. Spent credits. Contaminated the earth. Upset the balance. We behaved towards her like highway robbers, on the earth in passing, and not as her co-owners and accomplices. As if there will be no one after us. And they won't. We will pay. We were also mistaken in something else. Daniel Leverquin was right. We thought what the Rhabdo virus did at Heathrow was maddening. And that's what we've been doing ourselves since we've existed as an intelligent species. What have we made of ourselves, our biological chances, our histories, our lives and goals. That, Cora, is real rage.
And this is a disease, which we will overcome one way or another, just as we have overcome so far. And the question is not how many of us will remain, but why? Will those who survive be different. Because without it, survival has no purpose.”
At the end of 2019, a coronavirus (2019-nCoV) appeared in the city of Wuhan, China.
The international alarm for public health, by the World Health Organization, was sounded at the end of January 2020, a few days before the scientific meeting Borislav Pekić - ninety years since his birth (1930-2020), which was organized by the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts in Podgorica. And while in CAN, on February 5 and 6, 2020, speeches about the life and work of the writer, playwright and screenwriter B. Pekić were being developed, a question about the topicality of his work arose from one of the discussions. Immediately after the current affairs question, which was asked by the respected academician Momir Đurović, I had the opportunity to be at the lectern and the opportunity to comment that I see the actuality of Pekić's work, precisely, in what is happening and has been happening in China in recent days: Pekić's Heathrow, from the eighties of the XNUMXth century, on a scientific-futurological background, a possible announcement of a new collision at Armageddon. The heart of darkness, after centuries of rest, is back in the game!
"A bullet-shaped virus hits the heart of civilization... No one is safe."
In Pekić's "Besnil", that universal metaphor, whose literary relatives we can look for in Camus's "Plague" or Saramagov "Blindness", infected people wage war not only with an unknown virus but also with rabies in themselves and in their environment. The hidden truth about human nature is revealed before us, as if on a movie screen.
The virus, as an omniscient storyteller, points to the madness we are born with, which breaks through the thin membrane of consideration and self-respect and stops time. The apocalyptic vision is a striking confirmation of how well art knows how to preempt us and, just like a virus, surprise us. The choice of London's Heathrow airport is accidental. However, the fact that we have at Heathrow no less than four biblical travelers, doctors - evangelists, cannot be part of the case.
He writes about onomastics, which extends its phantasmagorical threads to unsuspected depths of meaning potential, penetrating the core of the original problematic of this work, substantiated in his essay "Fantasticism in the novel 'Frenzy' by Borislav Pekić". Dragana Boskovic: "Nomenic symbolic potential is primarily hidden in the names of the four doctors who are fighting the disease at Heathrow Airport: Luke (Luka), Johnaton - John (Jovan), Mattew (Matej) and Coro Marc (Marko), thus explicitly referring to biblical connection. Possessing the names of the four evangelists, the bearers of good news, these characters outgrow their original functions at the level of the plot of the novel, and thereby spread a fantastic prism around their role, thus offering the reader an inter- and meta-reception code, which (for some) readers is revealed at the end of the work."
***
Plato illustrated his teaching about knowledge with the allegory of the cave.
We all know about the play of shadows and truth on the cave wall. Also, we know that the main source of that eternal game and deception is fire. What, perhaps, has remained a little unclear is precisely that each time has its fires, as well as its shadows. However, there is also a different opinion - that the story of the cave is actually a story about a man and not about shadows.
It seems to us that it is most appropriate to quote the Serbian philosopher and writer at this point Radomir Konstantinović, who died in Belgrade on October 27, 2011, and at whose commemoration none of the current representatives of the then government appeared: "A person cannot dance, sing in front of a wall, in front of a telephone, in front of a plate on his table; he can only sing in front of man, and for man, in front of the awake, excited, curious man whose human restlessness is driven, always, only by premonitions of our ignorance."
Plato's myth about the cave ends with the question of what would happen to a freed man who managed to get out of the cave and look at the sun instead of the fire, if he returned to the cave and tried to explain to the chained what was really happening?
Perhaps, the answer to this and many other questions is hidden, precisely, in the pages of Konstantinović's cult book published half a century ago, which was placed as a cornerstone that serves to classify and recognize belonging to one side or the other, especially when it comes to deep-rooted divisions in to the myth-making society, whose author "Philosophy of Palanka" was an uncompromising critic: "Palanka does not like the unknown, in principle; it is one of its basic marks, which distinguishes its history, its culture, its mental world... The basic assumption of the spirit of the palanquin is somewhere in this: that it is a spirit that, forgotten by history, is now trying to transform this fate into its privilege, by the fact that he himself (as a wedge is removed by a wedge) will forget history, by this forgetting he will perpetuate himself in himself, committed to duration, on the other side of time. Time is on the other side of the hill, where world chaos begins, or the chaos of an absolutely-open world."
The importance of this work and its author is best evidenced by the attitude Latin women Perović, which says: "Konstantinović also predicted what would happen at the end of the century and what is still happening to us today."
***
In Borislav Pekić's work "Correspondence as Life", edited by his wife Ljiljana, published in Novi Sad in 2002, the selected correspondence was reduced to 16 writers and friends, that is, 335 letters, cards and telegrams. The correspondence covers the period from 1965 to 1986. Correspondents are arranged by the years in which Pekić started to hang out with them, starting from Nikola Milošević, Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz, Miodrag Bulatović, Danila Kiša, and further in order, following the addressee's questions and the addressee's answers.
Each individual correspondence is a portrait of a friendship, a key to a semi-open world. Pekić did not - regardless of the trust that comes from friendship - share everything with everyone... He was more cautious than Kiš and did not explain his "Heavenly Scythia" "in the ear of the Palanic arrogance". Few had that privilege, which is best evidenced by a selection from his correspondence.
Lucid and lordly, but also skeptical, Pekić saved one string, color and tone for each of the chosen ones on the big stringed instrument of friendship. And really, when one approaches his correspondence with one's fingers and when one more carefully flips through the written scores, the readers can, from that epistolary notation system, emerge sections of compositions written for several instruments and/or voices.
SELECTED QUOTATIONS AND COMMENTS
And Bronchitis acquired in Belgrade
"I am beginning to suspect, writes Pekić to N. Milošević, that my regular falling into bed at the slightest contact with Belgrade and the house are no longer exclusively physical in nature, but that there is also something psychological in them, perhaps in the sense of the theory that every illness is a kind of unabsolved sin (...) Since I have been searching for my Robinsonian metaphysical island for a long time, like some rationalistic drowning man, I tend to see more in those "Belgrade viruses" of mine than those biological, some, "metaphysical viruses" that through the body they communicate so far unclear and indecipherable messages."
The correspondence between B. Pekić and N. Milošević is characterized by immediacy, trust and sincerity. The key to that is their camaraderie from the Third Men's High School in Belgrade. Pekić's insistence on "Belgrade viruses" is a clear allusion to the socio-political and cultural conditions in Belgrade and "home". This thought varies with irony about the "dubious optimism of writers who are getting old", as well as the desire to talk to N. Milošević next time, but "this time alone". And walls have ears.
One wall stood in front of the writer's ambition to build a new myth on the ruins of the old ones, aware of the illusory nature of that undertaking: "truly there is nothing new under the sky." N. Milošević defines Pekić's obsession with myth with the term "mythomachy", which Pekić accepts, but he himself, known for his skepticism, is reserved about the realization of that idea: "Somehow it seems to me, for the first time in this book ("Atlantis ”, nn) on the way to turn from a mythmaker into a mythmaker, which makes me intensely upset”.
Nevertheless, he created a myth - or joined its creators - about the apocalypse, the disappearance of civilizations and humanity: J. Orwell, R. Bradbury, I. Asimov, O. Huxley...
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II That damned money
Borislav Pekić, through the magazine
"Sovremenik" from Belgrade to London,
June 3, 1979
"Dear namesake and friend of Borislava,
The artistic magazine "Sovremenik", honoring you, hospitably offered me to write something about you... I'm a little worried about you. And here is the concern:
How will such and such a person fit into this literature of ours?
Ours don't like it very much, we're not used to it, speculation and meditation are a headache for our world, scholarship tires us and doesn't allow us to laze around ignorantly - know-it-alls, the irony is a bit raining on us, we can barely open our lips to smile, we love a joke louder, more direct, and when we laugh, everything bursts behind the ears."
B. Pekić, with the intuition of a creator who believes in his projects, wanted to be known about him, so he had the most fruitful correspondence with the critics B. Mihiz and P. Palavestra. Unapproachable in his London bunker, especially about his poetics, Pekić exceptionally accepted B. Mihiz's suggestions regarding summarizing the novel's structure and segments déjà vu, which the author of "The Golden Fleece" does not hide: "I felt a little like a failed student."
On the other hand, for Mihiz, Pekić's encyclopedic impulse was unusual and, to some extent, incomprehensible, so he commented on it with benevolent humor: "And what, the devil took you away, you twist every story, you don't tell it like stories have always been told, but you turn one two-row three-row, and it turns out, as if it was and could not be (...) Likewise, on the ice when you were sledding and sledding us".
However, from this friendly tone, you can feel Mihiz's admiration for the original storytelling, but also the thought about the genre limitlessness of the novel and the indomitability of the myth. The correspondence of the writer, who made his way between Scylla and Charybdis of dogmatic times and a renowned critic, is perceived as a competition of spirit, in numerous variations, with undeniable mutual respect, which is given a special color by Mihiz's humor and language.
In the press conference, impressions are exchanged about the current situation in London and Belgrade. Pekić apostrophizes the English order and understandings, which he accepts but also bothers him, while Mihiz mainly sticks to cultural and social topics. The correspondence also contains the traditional pain of an artist - scarcity, because Pekić, with great discomfort, repeatedly asks Mihiz to help him solve financial and material difficulties: "I know that you are not exactly the most suitable person for interventions of this kind, but..."
The correspondence between Pekić and Mihiz is a valuable testimony of two top observers about a time "that was eaten by locusts".
(End in the next issue of Art)
Bonus video:
