I haven't read a more dramatic and human book in a long time. These are the udders. Jelena Trpkovic, painter and wife of the murdered Dubrovnik poet Milan Milišić. Jelena is a first-hand witness to life in besieged Dubrovnik, where she lived during the war and before. Only this extremely brave, and at the same time extremely talented woman, could have written this book. There is no avoiding the fact that the book is in a way a history of dishonor, and above all a moral manual, written in tragically - dark times. Written by life, more lasting than life. If everything passes and if it is forgotten, this book will not. It will testify from the heart of the events, from the scene. The book is documentary and above all literary. All naked reality: people and events.
There are many facts, details, personalities, situations that you describe in the book... How would you describe the situation in the city today, from a distance of over three decades, which is being attacked daily by the JNA and its reservists with all its weapons and equipment?
The memory of the siege and attack on Dubrovnik is permanently etched in my memory, even after thirty years, my everyday life. Both in reality and in dreams. And the images of that time appear in all forms. Also in reality and in dreams: sometimes as the horror of the people who were under siege of the City, sometimes as the surreal silence that comes from the sea due to the naval blockade, as a terrible fear of shells that could come at any moment from all sides, of the loved ones who were killed by those shells...
Sometimes it appears as a film about hordes of savages who randomly shoot people in a fortified city with every possible weapon, the most primitive or the most modern, mixed with footage from films about sieges of cities from Troy to Warsaw or today's Gaza, for example.
The knowledge that the attack on Dubrovnik involved both the initiative of the JNA general and the rampage of paramilitaries and reserve soldiers contributes to these scenes of arrogant, drunk, incoherent people destroying, burning, looting and further intensifying these scenes. Where there was a regular army, Cavtat and Mokošica, for example, there were fewer such rampages.
I wrote some of it down.
Milan dies at the beginning of the war, on October 5, 1991, as the first civilian victim. You continue to live in Dubrovnik under shelling. There are many details that cannot be forgotten. Your uncle, a lieutenant general, commander of the highest military formation in the then JNA, organizes special forces from Niš to take you out of the city. They suddenly appear in front of your door, tell you to get ready to leave, which you resolutely refuse, with the thought: how will you go out tomorrow in front of those who remain in the city: with the sick, small children, helpless women and the elderly. The children in the shelter have become attached to you, they see a certain security in all the uncertainty...
Milan was not the first civilian victim in the attack on the City. The first was a woman in Gruž who died in her garden. Milan is the second on the long list of civilian casualties.
No one knows and no one can explain the siege of the city without an army (there were no barracks in Dubrovnik, there were a few retired officers, there were no weapons). One of the questions that circulated in the city at the beginning of the siege and the first bombings was: Why don't they enter? And the old Dubrovnik saying: As they come, so they go.. The sentence with which they welcomed and saw off all those who wanted to conquer Dubrovnik for centuries, until Napoleon.
When I asked my uncle, after the war, who sent seven special forces from Niš to "extract" me from the city they had besieged, why the siege of Dubrovnik was necessary, he replied: I don't know. And he was the commander of the first military district! He doesn't know! Soldiers don't know, they just follow orders. And he also told me that sometimes the orders were on the side of the paramilitaries.
Of course I refused to let them “get me out.” How could I look at myself in the mirror and how could I look at the people that no one could “get” out of the hell of war.
The city is being rained down by shells, you move around the city, painting in impossible situations. It is interesting to see your paintings from that time and that environment. Milan is working on his manuscripts, reading Sartre. At the thought of a possible departure, you gather yourself, what should you take out of the apartment in that case? Milan says: dictionaries... And he has numerous dictionaries in various languages. What is he thinking about when he can't even take an ordinary bundle out, let alone books like dictionaries? And that detail speaks volumes about him.
When the first blackouts began, siren rehearsals, when the war was approaching, we talked about what we would take with us in case of evacuation. Milan said: I can't do without my dictionaries, I would only take them! He had two shelves of dictionaries. I was sure he would pack them up, load them into a cart and drag them with him. Dictionaries in one hand and the dog Čobi, from Šarplanina, in the other. Language was a true refuge for him. I cut my most important works into pieces that could be put together later and put them in a large folder.
Milan, at night, worked with lit candles in front of him, next to the open balcony, deep into the night and they came to warn him, there was a blackout of the City. It was the only light through the balcony door on the kilometers of Dubrovnik's coast. Most likely the only open balcony door. That was Milan Milišić.
I am giving my personal impression: before the war, Dubrovnik had a tolerant atmosphere. Socializing with friends from a cosmopolitan city and those who come to such a city. And you describe that, remember. Is there a hint then, in anything, of the rumble of future events?
You tell me that Dubrovnik had a wonderful atmosphere before the war. Maybe it was that way for visitors to the city, tourists. It wasn't really like that. Because of that somewhat mournful view of the city, Milan had that sarcastic sentence: When I hear the word Dubrovnik, I reach for my handkerchief. Dubrovnik is a small city, a closed environment. As Milan often mentioned, the only city on our coast that had no access to the sea, the lungo mare. He compared it to a shell that rarely opens. And like every city at that time, Dubrovnik had its problems, political sycophants, sycophants, silenced freedom of speech. Being a member of the party brought great privileges, any freethinking was punished, and we went through that warm rabbit, Milan was prosecuted for the texts he wrote, he lost his job, even I was in one of those purges, as ambitious party members called it, removed from a small job.
In Dubrovnik, evil is remembered for a long time. When that evil settles, there is no wind that can easily blow it away. There are no more ruins on which it is written in large letters: Boro - Bijelo polje, Miro - Nikšić. Budo - Titograd... but these graffiti are deeply engraved in the memory of the inhabitants of Konavle and the surrounding area of the city.
That's why I fear that the evil that befell the City, the human lives, the siege, the bombing, the looting, will be felt for a long, long time. And such a situation, of course, plays into the hands of politics and fuels it, to a great extent.
A gala dinner in 1989 on the occasion of the PEN congress scheduled for Dubrovnik in 1993... Some cracks are already visible, a delegation of writers from Serbia leaves the dinner. Milan is wearing the tuxedo of his father, who died when Milan was a boy.
Book entries Such are the times., began in 1989 with a gala dinner on the occasion of the upcoming World PEN Congress in Dubrovnik and Hvar, scheduled for 1993, at the Sorkočević Castle in Dubrovnik. A delegation from Serbia was also present. Milan was dressed formally, wearing his father's tuxedo for the first time. Milan's father had a fabric shop on Od Puča Street in Dubrovnik, and the shop was confiscated by the NDH authorities in 1941. Bales of the finest fabric remained in the attic in Dubrovnik and in old trunks around the house, and a tuxedo was also in the large wardrobe. Risto Milišić who fell ill and was ill for a long time. He died in a Dubrovnik hospital when Milan was a boy. Milan writes about this death in his posthumously published novel An officer's daughter.
At one point, at the beginning of the ceremony, it was a regional PEN conference, the delegation from Serbia demonstratively stood up and left, addressing Milan with harsh words. How that sudden departure came about, I don't know. But it was another in a series of signs of conflict at all levels. And there were many of them.
Parallel to these signs, people began to come together, to socialize, close-knit, everyday. It was as if we knew that soon we would all be alone in the days of war.
I wrote some down. Most I didn't.
I didn't even write down how one evening Milan and I sat in front of the TV to watch, I don't remember which one, but a long-announced, significant Russian film. It was taken off the program because of the film's Cyrillic subtitles. Milan, furious, called TV Zagreb unsuccessfully, but no one answered.
Milan is the soul of the City... He is highly regarded by his colleagues from all over the SFRY, including Danilo Kiš, Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, with whom Milan plays chess, while in the USA he translates Frost. These are significant relationships that speak volumes. Brodsky is better at chess, Milan gets annoyed...
The only trip we talked about was going to Italy. We were waiting for the call that was supposed to come from Brodsky who said he would find Milan a job at a university in Italy, in the department of Slavic studies or literature. Brodsky had strong contacts, he himself suggested it to Milan in Amherst, Massachusetts, where they hung out while Milan was translating Robert Frost in the summer of 1991, Milan Frost was not the most important poet, but he got a job from a publisher and a scholarship to translate him, and to Josip Brodsky, Joseph, as Milan called him, Frost was one of his favorites. It so happened that in addition to playing chess, they also talked about Frost's poems. Over wine, of course.
The letter from Brodski never arrived.
Milošević's propaganda launches as many as eighteen versions of Milan's death. The murder of such a great poet does not go to their advantage. Abuse of the death of a poet and a man, the most mundane political calculations.
There are about twenty versions of Milan's death. The first news reports said that Milan was killed by the Ustashas and that I was raped and killed... The most bizarre version from the then Radio Titograd is that Milan Milišić died in a car accident. The version I recently learned comes from Trebinje. The construction of that version is surreal. Milan's and my great friend, one of the best poets from this area, Ibrahim Hadzic has all versions collected.
You are a famous painter with authentic painting, but also a true devotee of Milan's work. I know of only one other case of this kind, and that is Nadezhda Mendelstam, the widow of Osip Mandelstam, to whom you dedicated an exhibition entitled Telephones of Nadezhda Mandelstam (1995). You prepared all of Milan's books, renewed editions, arranged and published his literary legacy.
I've been working on Milan's legacy for thirty years. I've been working on his manuscripts for a couple of years, on my paintings for a couple of years. It's impossible to do both at the same time. I've prepared 20 Milišić books in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Split... I'm proud of that.
I also held several exhibitions of my work that were important to me in Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Skopje. Could I have done more? No.
It's interesting that men, when their wives pass away, don't work on her legacy. Women work, they take care of it. Let's just remember Mire Miočinović i Pascale Delpesch za Danila Kiša, wife Borislav Pekić, Lily, Maria Kodama, wives Borges, or wives Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam...
Book Such are the times. is a collection of notes that I wrote, sometimes documentary-style, from the spot. From a ship, on a bus passing through burned areas. Little has been added, only some situations have been explained through conversations with the people mentioned in the notes and with the consent of most of them to publish their names. There is no fiction, no construction, just life itself. And that is why it has had such a strong effect and is having such an effect on people.
I am not a writer, the notes are written in everyday speech, proofreaders Dragoljub Stankovic i Tomislav Marković they didn't want to fix anything. Miljenko Jergović gave me the wind in my back that, when I shyly asked him if he would write something for the book, he said that it was good and that I had to publish the notes. I thank all three of them for encouraging me. I constantly encouraged myself that I was not a writer and that gave me freedom while I was transferring the notes into the book and organizing them. The problem was with the dates. Some notes are dated, some are not.
I am happy that the editors of my book, one from Belgrade, Dragan Stojković with his house Most art Yugoslavia and from Sisak Djuro Tadic who has the Association of Cultural Values. Both deal with the culture of memory, and we know how prone we are to forgetting and how short our memories are. It's no wonder, there is so much history in this region that it can't all fit into one human memory.
The reaction of the visitors to the promotion was surprising to everyone. Even the actor Sergej Trifunovic who read parts of the notes, he who knows how to feel and see the atmosphere of the scene and space, said: Damn, what's the emotion here! People were crying. Chins and hands were shaking from suppressed, repressed emotions. Everyone had their own experiences of the nineties, their own unwritten book of records. such times, and young people excitedly told me after the presentation that for the first time they had the opportunity to learn and believe, firsthand, about those times that are talked about, lied about, mystified, justified...
During the war, you initiated numerous anti-war activities with the freest people from the then Yugoslavia. While the war raged and people were dying, you traveled to all the ex-Yugoslav republics. You and your friends and comrades were persecuted, blackmailed, silenced, you did not back down, you did not get scared or back down...
I traveled a lot during those war years. I broke three important rules of civilians in war: Don't move around much, don't make new acquaintances, and don't talk much. I traveled 12 times, using all possible and impossible means of transportation, through the country that was falling apart before my eyes, made lasting friendships, wrote valuable testimonies, and spoke to all the media that wanted to hear. I stayed in Belgrade in the winter and Dubrovnik in the summer. In Belgrade, we founded the Civil Resistance Movement, and carried out the now legendary actions Black Flower and The Last Bell, among other things. I kept notes and collected documentation about our actions. Some of those notes are in the book Such are the times..
Of course, life took its course and direction, and many important and minor things were not recorded.
There were many people in Belgrade who protested against the wars, who spoke out publicly. There were also those who remained silent, advocates of war and, of course, war profiteers.
In Montenegro, the new generations don't know what their fathers did in the 1990s.
Human Rights Action and Empty Space with Petar Pejaković and with Teom Gorjanc Prelevic at the head they began to collect testimonies. For the first time in 30 years, some people spoke out, some didn't want to. Over thirty testimonies. And when asked why they were silent, they all replied that they were ashamed of their participation in the madness of the attack on the City. Some by their full names, some by their initials, they spoke openly, bravely, about the attack on Dubrovnik, about the misconceptions, about the news that arrived that the Ustashas were moving towards Montenegro, about the destruction, the looting, the atrocities and the shame about it all. From that came the play Death in Dubrovnik produced by the Drama Studio Prazan prostor and directed by Petar Pejaković.
What a play! Young people, actors, play their fathers, grandfathers, uncles. Young people who didn't know what was happening in those nineties, some weren't even born. Young people who are ashamed in the name of their fathers, carrying the burden of their sins, it seemed to me, while I was watching the play. I saw the play in Belgrade. I don't believe I'll see something so strong, so good, so lifelike soon.
The play won an award at the Marulić Days in Split for the best play overall and for the best dramaturgy.
And what is most important, not only to me, is that it was performed this year in Dubrovnik, where it received a standing ovation from the audience.
Now about your painting, recent exhibitions and those to come. What are you doing today?
It was hard for me to work after Milan's death. I was no longer the same person, I couldn't go back to my old work, and every new beginning was difficult for me. Impossible. I forced myself. I made a series of paintings and drawings. Bad ones, mostly.
On the eve of the war, I was working on a new series of works and realized that my works were losing color. The day before Milan's death, he came into my studio, looked at the new work and asked me: What are you going to call it? A widow, I answered. I don't like the name., said Milan. The work is not finished.
Sometimes I wrote a note.
I thought that when the book came out, I would have a break (I worked on it for two years), but I was wrong. People call me every day, well-intentioned and not, and some of them tell me about their war experiences. I interrupt the latter with a merciless sentence: I wrote my book, you write yours!
I'm returning to my painting, I have a lot of work ahead of me.
See more:
Download the app and follow the news
FOLLOW US ON
