Cities of Memory and the Novel of Guilt

Dragan Velikić is a writer whose literary world is recognizable from the first sentence: from early novels like "Via Pula" and "Astragan", to later books like "Russian Window" and "Vienna Novel", he builds a consistent prose space in which the fates of the characters are inextricably intertwined with cities, history and personal memory.

At a literary evening hosted by a writer and publisher Gojko Božović, the conversation was focused from the beginning on that recognizable map of Velikić's writing, the map of Central European cities and the internal biographies that intersect within them.

The novel as the only true form

Božović pointed out that Velikić is, first and foremost, a novelist. His prose almost entirely belongs to the novel as a form, without relying on a fragment or short story as a dominant expression.

In this sense, his writing can be described as consistently “novel-centric”: everything starts from the novel and everything returns to the novel: experience, memory, history, document.

Cities as a structure of memory

In Velikić's books, cities are not decor, but active narrative structures. Pula, Trieste, Budapest, Prague, Vienna, and Belgrade function as points in a broader, Central European topography of memory.

These spaces exist not only in geography, but also in time: each of them carries layers of personal and historical experiences that constantly overlap and illuminate each other in the novel.

Storytelling from doubt

One of the key features of Velikić's prose is the constant perspective of doubt. His novels do not offer stable truths, but a process of constant questioning: personal, social, and historical.

The characters are often caught in situations where they are trying to understand their own decisions, but also the mechanisms of the world that shapes them. It is in this space that the tension in his prose arises, between personal experience and broader social logic.

“The Viennese Novel”: guilt without guilt

A special focus of the conversation was on the "Viennese Novel", which starts from personal experience, but develops it into a broader story about contemporary society and institutions of power.

One May morning in 2020, the Viennese police knocked on the door of the apartment of young psychiatrist Pavle Marić. Accused of poisoning his colleagues at the Central Hospital, Pavle will find himself in judicial limbo. After seventy days in pretrial detention, the trial continues as the reader unravels a tangle of unsuspected manipulative threads that have made Pavle an innocent victim in the hands of a higher power.

Dragan Velikić masterfully paints a portrait of the European system, a judicial system in which there are privileges for some and dead ends for others. How can an individual defend himself in such circumstances, to what extent is human life reduced when an unexpected combination of influence, power and peasantry unite against him - these questions are delicately woven into a nuanced portrait of family relationships that reads like the most exciting crime story.

At the heart of the novel is the question that determines its ethical and narrative axis: how is it possible for a man to be declared guilty without actual guilt? From this experience, a story develops about prison, investigation, and the system that produces truth as a construction.

The winner of two Nin Awards, Velikić, says that "The Vienna Novel" is his most personal work to date, and that the novel's template is actually a true event from his biography.

Considering that in this book he shares a painful period of his life, colored by fiction, Dragan Velikić states that, due to the fear of falling into banality, it was difficult to write this work.

"I wasn't even sure I would publish this novel when I finished it. I wasn't even sure I would be able to incorporate a real event into the novel, and have it work for a reader who doesn't know, nor does he need to know, the background of the book," he said. The novel's core is based on the accusation that the main character of my novel poisoned his colleagues with medications during the coronavirus pandemic," he says.

The novel thus approaches the Kafkaesque tradition, but remains firmly tied to the contemporary moment and its political and social contexts.

A departure from autofiction

In the conversation between Velikić and Božović, it was emphasized that contemporary European literature is largely based on autofiction, but that Velikić's novel makes a clear departure from that model.

Although it starts from personal experience, "The Vienna Novel" does not remain in the space of an autobiographical record. The personal story is transformed into a social and historical narrative, in which private experience becomes material for a broader picture of the world.

“The Vienna Novel” deals with family drama and introspective questioning. The novel follows the story of a young psychiatrist Pavle Marić and his father Andrej, who are facing their own mistakes and failures. Velikić said that it is an autofiction, about the events of 2020, during the Covid era, which affected his family. He emphasized that this is a novel that talks about parenthood, and the relationship between a father and son, above all.

Central Europe as a literary space

Velikić's literary world is deeply rooted in the Central European tradition - from Kafka i Musil do Ticks, Rain and other authors who shaped the space between empire, bureaucracy, and historical instability.

In this tradition, as has been pointed out, Vienna and the wider Central European space are not just places, but systems of thought: a space in which individual destiny constantly collides with the mechanisms of institutions and history.

Spectacle society and media reality

At the end of the conversation, the question of the modern media environment in which even the most difficult human destinies are turned into a spectacle is raised.

In such a context, literature remains a space of slower understanding, a space in which experience is not simplified, but rather decomposed and re-examined.

Literature as a return to the story

The conversation ended with the reading of an excerpt from "The Vienna Novel", which summarizes the basic line of Velikić's poetics: the novel as a space in which life is not confined to a single truth, but constantly returns to itself - through memory, doubt and storytelling.

In this openness, Velikić's novel remains a place where private and historical experiences are not separated, but constantly intertwined in one and the same, unstable picture of the world.