Contemporary novel: "Aurora" by Balša Brković - City as text

(Balša Brković, Aurora, Nova knjiga, Podgorica, 2023)

In literature, cities have always been an important motif, symbol and way for a culture to speak about itself, and for that reason they have been a kind of literary hero. There are many studies on the city in literature and the relationship between literature and urban experience. Certain authors have become permanent synonyms for certain cities, such as Dickens for Victorian London or Joyce for Dublin, Dostoyevsky i Blog for Petrograd, Marquesa for Macondo, Murakami for Tokyo... Those cities are an imaginary geography and a world to which it is always possible to return and follow familiar paths.

The city in literature is a spectrum that can expand from the utopian and ideal New Jerusalem from the Book of Revelation, to Pekić's the infernal New Jerusalem. Penelope Lively, novelist City of the Mind, says that "the city is a text waiting to be read and written or rewritten in literary terms". In novels Balša Brković it is Podgorica, an "urban text" that manifests itself as a state of mind, as a filter that sharpens social and personal reality, bringing a plurality of views and perspectives.

If Podgorica from Brković's previous novels is a pulsating framework of transitional monstrosities, u Auroras the city becomes an active organism of possible qualitative change, and also a place of culture and inspiration. Podgorica is also here a chronotope that makes visible and embodies strong, although often invisible, social changes, attitudes and challenges of that time that are reflected in our time as well. Podgorica is in Auroras the embryo of modernity in patriarchal and petrified Montenegro, a place where various cultures, languages ​​and ideologies merge and mix. In such a social landscape of Montenegro at the time and a political arena in which conflicts between tradition and new ideologies take place, Brković places the individual experiences of numerous heroes, of different generations and identities, political affiliations and ideals.

Aurora takes place from the beginning of March 1932 until New Year's Eve 1933. Two sports "frame" and connect the heroes - chess and football. White Russians bring chess to Podgorica, and the title of the novel is actually the name of a chess club. Characteristic of many chess games, everything starts with a slow opening, with a slow increase in the dynamics of the story and an effective ending. As a symbolic picture of the world, with figures that also represent role models in the hero's world Aurore, chess proves to be an excellent way to explore struggles, internal and external conflicts, psyche and manipulation and control over people, moral dilemmas of heroes, agents of social change. Football, on the other hand, is a way to show that violent and always conflicted Montenegro. Through the story of two football clubs, Budućnosti and Balšić, the story of Montagnard passion, rise and fall, ideological affiliations and irreconcilable divisions unfolds.

The author carefully and with an unerring feeling for the symbolism of the details and for the narrative flow immersed himself in the history of the city. In the clip of the time shown, more or less open political conflicts take place, then the social "explosion" of the founding of a women's chess club, the collision of two football clubs that embody the two Montenegros, and even one murder. In the kaleidoscope of characters, there is not only one truth, only one view of events, but everything pulsates in the dialogic plane. The fact that the Montenegrin reality is reflected in the fates and traumas of the White Russians of Podgorica contributes to this dialogue, but also vice versa.

The network of facts and fictions that breathes life into them functions in an Aristotelian way: u Auroras shows what could have happened according to the laws of probability and necessity. It is mostly factual in numerous micronarratives that the author found in the press and records of the time, but also in his own memory and experiences. Numerous episodic heroes, especially the carnivalesque subversive figures of the Podgorica "originals", contribute to the novel's polyphonic structure and reveal the entire spectrum of social strata. After all, speaking Russell's in other words, the history we study is always a story about crimes and genocides. The true history of mankind, the history of the ordinary people who make up mankind, its countries and cities, cannot really be told in the way of historiography. Such "history" is the field of literature, and in the case Aurore realized in the manner of new realism, built and enriched by the experience of postmodernism.

It can be said that the authors of new realism mainly depict urban alienation and the dark experience of city life. With Brković, we come across such a city in his earlier novels, Private gallery, Paranoia in Podgorica i Beaches of Imelda Marcos. Podgorica Jara is a natural hellish framework for the transitional social and cultural inventory of both the city and the country. Aurora is, however, a completely different novel. This Podgorica from almost a century ago is a dynamic center and a Montenegrin melting pot that calls for an inventive consideration of a different urban experience, for the historiographically invisible life of the city, preserved only in anecdotes, but never brought to the "grace of embodiment".

Aurora is a novel in which there is a whole gallery of female characters, heroines with different characters, ambitions and affiliations. Speaking with the symbolism of chess in which the queen is the most important piece, Brković tries to establish a convincing female perspective in the story of the novel. This is not an easy task even in today's, and especially in Montenegro at the time, and that is why chess and the formation of the first women's chess club and the upcoming duel with the men's club are proving to be a fruitful motivational solution. One heroine Aurore her name is Judita, like the famous Hungarian chess player judith polgar. As a parallel, in the novel we also have a criminal twist that reveals what the tyrannical Queen from Alice in Wonderland, here in the form of a paradoxical slave of tradition that always condemns a woman to only one role.

Brković's novel also establishes a network of references to world events. It is mentioned Lindbergh baby, Aurora promoted by communists, a Zogović, Đilas i More frugal indicate their differences and views within the same ideology. In Germany Hitler he just lost the elections, which is a strong ironic detail from the point of view of readers who know what happened after that "victory". There is the group JONA, there is often talk about the Zeta banovina and its position in the common state, about the kings nikoli i Alexander... Into this historical framework, Brković also "brings" Tina Ujević, a chess grandmaster Bor Kostić, Milo Milunović, Metropolitan Gavrilo Dožić... This is how an urban microcosm is created in which the story and its many branches are truly enjoyed.

Threads of urban legends, toponyms, landscapes, picturesque heroes, mass scenes in all narrative units - all this is a different Podgorica from the one Brković depicted in his earlier novels. The language of the work and the discreet presence of expressive words and expressions characteristic of Montenegro and Podgorica contribute to the impressiveness of the novel. However, the linguistic "local color" is the result of careful selection in such a way that the novel is easily read and understood by everyone who speaks the common four-name language.

In a way, a novel Aurora is a dedication to former Podgorica, but there are also numerous similarities in it that point to the present day. The network of contextual references, the fact that we as readers know what the heroes know Aurore they do not know and cannot know, calls for a more careful consideration of our own present and what seems certain and unchanging in it. Brković demonstrates the dual movement of the concept: the visible and its invisible essence. In this way, he establishes an ironic relationship to reality, and to which every ossification and conservative preservation of some petrified value can be returned to us as its own caricature.