Young, especially gifted, or giftedly special Vukić Antović, still a graduate of the Nikšić High School, in 2021 he wrote the script for the drama "Immortality in Copenhagen", which was performed a year later in several cities of Montenegro as a high school play. He turned the scenario into a drama of the same name, or an esoteric-quantum poem, which he promoted in Nikšić's "Zahumlje".
For him, man is a being who doubts and believes, who vacillates between skepticism and hesychasm, aware that the most terrible of all forces before which man fears and tests his faith is death. And when thinking about death, it is essential, says the young author, to think about immortality.
“Immortality is not something that is earned once and stays there forever. It is not gifted to us, as death and self are gifted to us. It is conquered and always anew or found," said Antović, a third-year archeology student in Belgrade.
Immortality, according to him, is a matter of freedom, not necessity, and it never lasts long.
"Essentially, it cannot last because it would also be temporary." Then we would have mortal immortality or temporal eternity. Earthly immortality, which does not last even the briefest moment, is the arrival of eternity in time," said Antović.
The book, which, according to the author, is a praise of his madness, is a map of his spiritual play, mourning, psalm singing, boredom...
"It is my hermetic confession before the reader, history, spirits, myself and finally, God, about whom I know nothing, but who knows everything about me. It is not at all easy to talk about one's own work, because there is always the possibility of revealing a secret, of expressing what should be kept silent, what, if it is said, will destroy the charm of the game."
And Antović likes to play with words, worlds, combinations, and likes to eavesdrop on the "whispered conversation of two divine twin sisters who live in all of us - immortality and death".
And when you read his play, which turned into an anti-drama, as the playwright said Obrad Nenezić, from unrest to unrest, "it will become clear to you that days should not be sold for nothing".
"You have young wisdom and old craziness, you have long since outgrown mediocrity and annoy stereotypes. You are a prodigy from the beginning because who else would write 'he spent more time thinking than breathing', except you. You found a window in time with the words: 'The greatest wisdom is silence, waiting and the absence of vanity. Glued colors to the air, quartered a tear... you managed to write time, 'because time', as you claim, 'you never had,'" is part of Nenezić's letter to Antović, which the playwright read.
According to Nenezić, the drama "Immortality in Copenhagen" is a simulation of the imitation of life, a tragedy squared, a grotesque squared, a linear node, a non-linear highway.
"Your antidrama is a song of pain that is not acted out, but lived. Your heroes are the dead alive and the living dead and that is why it is necessary to read you...'because only in pain can you look at the sun with wide open eyes'. You say and go into your light darker than a theatrical blackout. And we can't wait for you to come back to us with the next immortal in the sheath", said Nenezić.
Professor Large Perutović, who prepared Antović's drama with Nikšić high school students in 2022, said that it is a text that summarizes the peculiarities and characteristics of different literary genres, but also a text that breaks all genre conventions and could be called an anti-drama.
"The work has a fragmentary character - it consists of five parts: four acts and an epilogue, and each part is apparently a separate story. The plot of the drama is not complete, it is not presented chronologically, it is not based on action and classic dramatic conflict, but arises from the story, from the characters' stories, from dialogues and monologues that very often turn into classic storytelling", said Perutović and added that immortality, eternity, existence, meaning, topics that the author thinks about and wants to touch on.
"The book 'Immortality in Copenhagen' is a work of innovative and, one might say, experimental way of writing. The reader must show curiosity to discover what is said in it, but also possess certain intellectual abilities to perceive the world of Vukić's book. It shocks, confuses, leaves unanswered, does not allow to be unraveled to the end, to enter its space and master it with classic formalist, structuralist and other interpretations. It opposes everything simple, easily accessible, comprehensible. It exists as such, creating, within its cover, a world with special rules and logic, a world as a secret that resists nothingness and transience, a world that leads to immortality," said Perutović.
Physicist, prof. Ph.D Marigold Antović she tried to explain why "Immortality in Copenhagen" is an esoteric-quantum poem, that quantum superposition means that you are in two places at the same time, and maybe you are in the same place in two different times, that in the drama there are "entangled states ", as well as that objects and measuring instruments are a connected system and connected in a system.
"In the drama - experiment, and in the drama within the drama (experiment within the experiment), different types of conflicts appear, mutual, with themselves, with others, among others... The heroes of this work will declare themselves in favor of paradox, and against logic, for complexity and introversion, and against simplicity and extroversion. They decided (to fight) - against Marx for Christ, against red for white, against meditation for prayer, against Andrić za Crnjanski", said Nevenka Antović.
According to her, she is sure that Vukić Antović succeeded in not "pouring drops of creation" with the presented book, but making a shower of quanta out of them.
She was the moderator of the program Kristina Radovic, art historian and editor of the program at JU "Zahumlje", who pointed out that the book is an expression of almost all dominant currents in science, philosophy and art, and that the action in the play is told in an intimate, but lucid and humorous way.
The organizer of the event is JU "Zahumlje", as part of the July repertoire of the Nikšić cultural scene, and excerpts from the book were spoken by the professor Michael Perosevic and a third-year student at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade Matija Gredic, who also played in the high school play.
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