"Getting to know someone else's foreign land, I wanted to lose my own, to see what it's like to be a stranger in another's country, since I was a stranger in my own, and all this so that one day, if I succeed, I would return to it as a native... I only managed to as a foreigner and here and there at home. To become a stranger everywhere. At first I was a forced stranger, and it hurt. When I became a foreigner volunteer, a foreigner by choice, the pain subsided. I realized that alienation is my nature, my destiny. That I will always and everywhere be a stranger", he wrote Borislav Pekić in the letters "Correspondence as Life, Correspondence with Friends (1965-1986)".
And as it usually happens in these areas, you only "get home" when you stop being. Only then do you lose your foreigner status.
With the desire to popularize the literary work of the famous novelist, playwright and screenwriter Borislav Pekić, the Šavnik Center for Culture, Sports and Media is in the Creative Hub Kuća Pekić (a residential center for writers and other artists) in Šavnik, as part of the one-day event "Writer and Homeland ", organized a round table with the theme "Ethical and poetic profile in the works of Borislav Pekić". She was the moderator Slavojka Marojević who referred to the mentioned letters, pointing out that the letters, as well as Pekić's entire oeuvre, speak of the fact that life and literature are connected in a solid coordinate system and that they contain universal motifs.
Dr Radoje Femic analyzed the images of the bourgeois class through the motifs of ownership in the novel "The Pilgrimage of Arsenija Njegovan", pointing out that it is, first of all, a bourgeois novel, and then a social, family and character novel.
"The main hero of this novel, in Pekić's artistic vision, is depicted as a typical representative of the middle class, who grew up between the two world wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. That is why it is very important to emphasize that this novel is a pessimistic projection of the individual and collective existence of the bourgeois generation, unwilling to adapt to the great changes brought about by the ruthless historical mechanism", said Femić.
Confronting the phenomena of property, on the one hand, and revolution, on the other, the narrator, according to Femić, conjured up an imaginary reality in which the protagonist suspects dark, elemental forces that threaten the right to private property and capital accumulation.
"A kind of redemption of Arsenio Njegovan in the eyes of the readers is contained in his spiritual attitude towards the acquisition of material goods, which are not only an expression of status and economic power, but also show the true character nature of the titular. With this text, Pekić's imaginary world introduces the reader to a kind of saga about the Njegovans, who represent the center of his artistic universe, as a vine whose fate corresponds to the archetypal structure - the biblical Noah, who was exposed to the flood as a manifestation of God's wrath for human sins. "The parallelism between the ancient, legendary, and the modern, dehumanized world is imposed as the foundation of Pekić's poetics, based on the pessimistic belief that man is always at a loss in a collision with the forces of history, ideology and politics, and humanity is defeated in advance before the ruthlessness of dogmatic manipulation," he believes. Female.
Mr Marijana Zecevic speaking about the novel "How to appease a vampire", she pointed out that it is a work that talks about "a whole process of development of civilization that was based on evil and extreme methods and devices for torture, and questions about dehumanization, morality, evil, satanization of consciousness , to man, history, art, murder, totalitarianism of those who enjoyed the voice of cruel and efficient conquerors, Nazi practice and death".
"The central thematic complex in the novel 'How to appease a vampire' is based on external philosophical principles, as patterns of thinking, it is woven deep into the internal structure of the work, trying to get into the mechanisms that influenced the segment of history, establishing determinism that becomes a potential alibi for the main character loyalty to the norms of the Gestapo, abstracting only evil as the intellectual need of the mind to go into the philosophical," Zečević pointed out.
Mr Aleksandar Ćuković he spoke about Pekić's experience of freedom and democracy, as well as the book of political essays and speeches "Footsteps in the Sand".
"For Pekić, freedom was not a momentary feeling of a state, but a permanent feeling of a goal. For him, personal morality is understood as the basis of any general policy, and Pekić did not deviate from that. For Pekić, democracy, as the least evil form of government, was nothing more than a compromise, and compromise was synonymous with life. All misfortunes and any absence of life in the Balkans, and especially here in the land of the former Yugoslavia, was considered possible and frequent precisely because of the absence of democracy, the essential one, and not some kind of historical or geographical curse, which the lay and professional public most often used as an argument in the past century", said Ćuković.
Actor Slobodan Marunović he spoke Pekić's quotes.
The event "Writer and Homeland" was organized as part of the "Culture with two dawns" program, which the Center for Culture in Šavnik realizes with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Media of Montenegro and the Municipality of Šavnik.
The premiere of the duo drama "In Eden, in the East"
The premiere of the duo drama "In Eden, in the East", by Borislav Pekić, will be held on May 30 in the hall of the Center for Culture, Sports and Media in Šavnica, starting at 20 p.m. It is about the premiere of this play by Pekić in Montenegro, directed and dramatized by Milo Vučinić, for whom this is also the practical part of his master's thesis. The roles are played by Dejan Ivanić and Stefan Vuković.
"In Eden, in the East" - as a conflict between the persecuted and the persecutor - for me was a journey through the complex and intricate depths of the human psyche, where illusions and obsessions became reality. The process was exploratory in its essence. We studied the hermeticity of Pekić's world, looking for ways to mark not only the conflict in the text, but also the shades of loneliness that feeds it," said Vučinić.
According to him, Pekić saw the mentioned work as an optimistic farce, which poetically, intellectually and comically questions the paradox of the relationship between the persecuted and the persecutor, as universal and timeless social relations of the individual and society.
"The work process was a democratic, joint venture in which the actors and I came up with most of the solutions together. We were fascinated by the complexity of the relationship between the characters - the persecuted and the persecutor, two sides of the same coin, woven into a timeless dance of power and powerlessness. We also tried to indicate how their loneliness and illusions distort reality. This is also a portrait of a world in which the worst things happen to the best, and vice versa," said Vučinić.
He believes that they managed to at least scratch the surface of the complexity and depth of Pekić's world, highlighting the eternal conflict between the persecuted and the persecutor through the prism of personal obsession and loneliness. "In Eden, in the East" is not just a drama, but a reflection of the universal human struggle for realization and recognition in the world of illusions.
The Center for Culture, Sports and Media Šavnik realized this project with the support of: the Ministry of Culture and Media of Montenegro, the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, the Montenegrin National Theater and the Municipality of Šavnik.
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