The truth about Sava Šumanović is being invented in Budva

The novel "Jelen noći", a novel in which fiction and truth are combined, will be presented at the "Ćirilica" festival on August 26, right after the documentary film "Light and Shadows".

Radomir Uljarević, on behalf of the Association of Publishers and Booksellers of Montenegro, organizer of the festival, tells Vijesti that this is one of the most beautiful novels about the great painter of tragic fate, Sava Šumanović.

According to the author Dragan Jovanović Danilov, the title of the book is a challenge, a signpost and a clear indication to the reader, and the name "Deer of the Night" comes from Šumanović's dreams in which he saw himself as a deer running through the night.

Danilov, an erudite and expert connoisseur of painting, combines and settles an exciting prose weave and a brilliantly written dialogue essay about Šumanović's painting. Sava Šumanović's well-known but also secretive life, especially his stay in Paris, provided him with extraordinary opportunities for a novel adaptation: "Jelen noči" is not a romanced biography, nor some kind of commemorative prose, but a narrated life, but also fiction.

Danilov goes on to say that his novel, like the Tower of Babel, is based on fiction. "In my novel, the lie of the invented and imagined is conveyed as truth. However, in addition to being fiction, the novel is also a testimony. I wanted to get to some still untold stories and secret stories about Sava Šumanović. And they were most often hidden in dreams and dark mirrors of the unconscious. I tried to hear voices from the past (and they can only be heard in the present) to resurrect a past time and to cross the personal fate of Sava Šumanović with historical experience. I was interested in the forces of fate that carried Šumanović, those incredible reversals of fate," continued Danilov.

The organizers of the "Ćirilicom" festival invite the audience to the premiere Budva presentation of the fantastic novel by the great Serbian novelist Danilov on August 26, at 21 p.m., in the square between the churches in the Old Town of Budva.