The death of anyone, especially a friend, a close acquaintance, whenever it happens - it happens suddenly. We don't believe it at first, not for the first few days, not even weeks... or longer... Although aware of its inevitability, it is at that very moment that we frantically grab onto everything that made up our life - feelings, friendly encounters, conversations, correspondence, agreements, time spent together... Only then, in the grief of a departure, aware of how privileged we are to be able to speak about remaining everything remembered. Regardless of the fact that a life, someone's life, has now moved into memory, we are precisely making it continue to beat, to live, to be in our collusion, in our proximity...
That feeling shook me and still holds me - after the news that our famous poet, prose writer, playwright, critic died. Radojica Bošković. The constant of his fruitful literary work marked the Montenegrin literature of the second half of the last century and the first decades of this century. Many writers, the better known ones or those who had just begun their research path, published and gained their way to the reader on the pages of the Review Here, which Bošković edited very successfully for many years. The creator of a special dynamism, immediacy and dialogical ease with all of us who entered the world of books, thus searching for our world and our place in the social space, whose regularity and statics forced us to question it, to change it.
Radojica Bošković, in fact, wanted to know and recognize in his poetry what the ambiguity of our daily life is and where it comes from, rather than to radically and foamingly rush against it as it is. He knows that human life, which in his poetic opus is viewed, more or less, through the lens of a spiritual, traditional heritage, to which he himself belongs, no matter how disharmonious it may be and, compared to eternity - too short and detached, we can judge it through its value systems and moral codes. From them come the spark of memory, teaching, experience, duration, that pearly wisdom and suffering that remain; it is a traditional thread that, although less and less memorable today, still connects the galaxies of time, and through them the crumbs of our existence. Bošković felt this with all his being and therefore created his own poetic galaxy through which he would carry the face of man, and his suffering, hope, wisdom, goodness, but also his short-sightedness, greed, selfishness and misery of all formats. He would sift all this through his poetic vision and, with what remains as an amalgam of values, emerge before himself and the reader. And he came out with about 20 books - poetry, prose, drama, essays, anthologies...
And that's why, in conversations with him, whenever we touched on some constants, phenomena, habits, whether strange or familiar, there was always enough space to calmly and calmly reach conclusions, to some common ground that would later move us back into the discussion. Well-intentioned and with his eyes always fixed on tomorrow, he often accompanied his satisfaction with someone's text with praise, a measured, brief analysis, an acknowledgment that exuded a kind of optimism. In recent years, when we unfortunately saw each other less often due to his illness, he knew how to pleasantly surprise me, in a telephone conversation, with his interpretation of one of my texts, published in daily newspapers or magazines. I jokingly replied: "Well, Radojice, are you just now getting to know me as a writer?"
And the best evidence that he did not “just now” meet me is his desire and invitation to participate in a round table about his work, which was organized in 2017 in Plužine, as part of the “Poetic Meetings at the Source of the Piva”. The collection of works, which was subsequently published, showed in its true light all the complexity of Radojica Bošković’s themes, ideas, poetics and critical substantiality. I don’t even know why, despite the differently intoned poems that I spoke about on that occasion, I ended up stopping at those that moved the meaning of life and death. Here is that short excerpt: “As paradoxical as it may sound, death is a continuation of the story of the living, because it initiates memory. And memory is a kind of story. And as long as the story flows, as long as it does not stop - as long as we are alive. Radojica Bošković’s verses have given us, without a doubt, the knowledge that memory is the most successful resuscitator the ease of disappearance imposed on us".
From the shelf of our home library I take one of Radojica's collections, his own poetic galaxy. And I discover again: through it, as through all the pages he wrote, he drew different temporal dimensions, and through them our daily destinies. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with innocent compassion, or pessimistic melancholy, bitter realization, stripped-down relativism, but always turned to the Other. That Other is most often the poet's interlocutor, but often also a rival, a stranger, an unknown, a trap, a riddle... And all of this is presented extremely convincingly, suggestively, becoming close and recognizable to the reader himself.
All of this suggests that it is easy to disappear, but difficult to survive. Fortunately for readers and literature, Radojica Bošković survived. Through his works and his human journey, he showed that the true path could not have eluded him.
OTHERS ABOUT RADOJICA BOŠKOVIĆ
“The poet is preoccupied with the transience of life, its meaning, the effort to understand the flow of everyday days and nights. It is a kind of philosophy of existence, given through a Kafkaesque image of our chameleon life between obligations and needs, between desires and possibilities, between the cramped concrete walls of multi-story buildings and the wide expanses of forests and hills.” (Vojislav Budo Gledic)
"Bošković uses an anecdotal manner of poetic expression, the natural ease of writing verses and creating poetic units to evoke the cowardice of the living, the disorder in reality and the voice of that on the other side of life... Bošković has mastered a different sense of words, one that is closer to expressing the essence than the one that ends in description..." (Dragoljub Jeknic)
“Bošković, like a number of poets of his, and even younger, generation, very rationally and thoughtfully uses the accumulated, multi-layered native wisdom and generational experience to shade and highlight his own concluding modalities.” (Bogić Rakočević)
“Radojica Bošković's poetic scale ranges between a distinctive lyrical resignation, as a consequence of the tragic experience of the world and life, through which melancholy emanates as a distinctive serenity of existence, ontological and cosmic, in which human destiny unfolds, before the mirror of time, in a space without boundaries, in which poetry is the only refuge.” (Marijan Mašo Miljić)
"After a collision with life, in which the lyrical subject, an authentic self, remains consistent with itself from poem to poem, and which, the longer we think about it, increasingly takes on the characteristics of generality, therefore, after such a collision in which life is revealed as a destructive and destructive principle, while man remains passive, deceiving himself from the beginning with illusory hopes, only to eventually give up on everything, even on himself, after all the suffering, suffering and failures, the only thing left is fatigue. Persistent, inhuman, all-pervading fatigue and the insomnia caused by it." (Dragica Ivanovic)
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