Pworld's best, a new book from a large edition Conversations in Paris, will delight fans and admirers of the author's significant and valuable achievements Branke BogavacHer interlocutors are famous, representative writers of the era: Jorge Amado, Francis Ponzh, Andrei Bitov, Nikolae Breban, Antonio Tabuki, Anatoly Rybakov, Frederic Begbede, Fernando Arabal, Ernesto Sabato, Andrei Sinyavsky, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Janusz Glowacki, Vasil Vasilikos, Olzhas Suleymenov, Paul Auster, Viktor Yerofeyev, Atik Rahimi, Vladimir Kornilov, Adam Zagaevsky, Michel Bitor, Gennady Aighi, Efim Etkind, Gjergj Konrad. These interviews represent a precious testimony of a time, containing the essence of aesthetic, ethical, philosophical and poetic thought of the twentieth century and emanating the unadulterated glow of authenticity, direct encounters and live communication in which they were created. There are fewer and fewer such creations that belong to this genre - therefore Branka's interviews seem like unique, fine "handicrafts", with human gift, skill and dedication woven into them.
The conversations were held in the last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first century, mostly in the "capital of world literature" - Paris, but some meetings were also held in the south of France (Tabuki), Budapest (Konrad), Belgrade (Kornilov), and Montenegro (Januš Glowacki).
Depending on the topic and the interlocutor, Branka Bogavac's interviews, from one moment and occasion, turn into real little autobiographies of creators, into metatextual comments, axiological considerations and critical judgments, into polemics, memoirs, but above all - each of these precious gifts represents a dialogical literary essay. In the book Writers of the world The reader is completely immersed in literature, regardless of the journalistic framework. The interviewer is a competent reader, a highly qualified expert in the field of literature and linguistics, with extensive professional experience in journalism and journalism, so that the seriousness of the approach, dedication to the interlocutor, and dedication to the journalistic task that results in a dialogue as a (meta)literary fact - are always unquestionable.
The interlocutors are given space to communicate and comment on individual authorial poetics, and this often includes considering the broader picture of the world, reflecting on reality and the historical moment that made a certain artistic choice necessary or justified. The course of the conversation naturally leaves room for introspection and reflection, commenting on the social circumstances in which the writing and/or publishing of a work often entailed certain, not always positive, consequences. On the other hand, paradoxically, according to the mysterious laws that life itself sets, all these circumstances also have the “consequence” of creating a masterpiece.
About “conversation architecture”
Bogavac is an interviewer with an exceptional talent for leading conversations, not only because she always asks excellent questions, but also because of her distinctive style that implies immediacy and unobtrusiveness in the conversation, which she skillfully manages with her personality and attitude, comments, remarks and carefully selected quotes, and sometimes, although very rarely - with completely spontaneous "interjections", if this is in the function of the dialogue. She never emphasizes her own authorial position: it is the guest who needs to express himself, open up, talk about his work, the circumstances in which it was created, about (non)engagement, about the author's and the poetics of the era, about life and literature in general.
We will illustrate this in a special review of two interviews from this book.
Horhe Amado, a humanist, a democrat, proud of his racially mixed, “multi-colored” Brazil, explains how he went from being a proscribed, strictly forbidden author to a celebrated Brazilian and world writer, one of the most beloved and closest to his people, and why he consistently refused any opportunity to participate in government at any level and, finally, why a writer in his country is often a greater authority than a politician. In answers that contain elements of memoir prose, Amado illustrates his views with examples from life. One of the most memorable is the case of a former railway worker whom he met after the war as a fierce fighter for people's rights and social equality, who then became a union official and quickly advanced in his career. A meeting ten years later brings a disappointing realization: “that man no longer had anything to do with what he was”, “he no longer defended anyone or anything”, even the small power he gained made him forget all his former principles and ideals. He was ready to do anything to preserve that power. And his former ideas no longer had any significance. Noting that he knows of many more such examples, Amado concludes: “Power has such a power of corruption that it corrupts even the purest characters, it nullifies all loyalty, be it to the homeland, to life, to the fight for hope, power degrades everything, power corrupts, power liquidates the man in man.”
It builds on the stated views and refers to the book Tokaja Grande, the topic of ideology. Jorge Amado does not believe in them, because everything is run by the authorities, they do not solve problems, they do not bring happiness to man, “as some idealists thought at the beginning”. In response to the part of the question in which Bogavac quotes a sentence from the aforementioned book (“Ideologies have created and Hitler i Stalin”), Amado reminds us of the fact that both fascism and communism were once leftist ideologies (“and let’s see what they degenerated into”). What the distinguished guest of this interview firmly believes in is friendship, and the question in which the interviewer mentions Two Deaths of Kinkas - directs the conversation towards this topic as well. Amado's response summarizes the thematic framework and the striking presentation of the literary hero Kinkas, who leaves his middle class and "miserable petty bourgeois life without a horizon", where everything is apparent, false and grotesque, in order to "join the people, become a man of the people", even if a vagabond, but the master of his own destiny, part of a world "where friendship plays a huge role". With these words, the author largely paints his own portrait. Amado also presents himself as a man of the people, and the parts of the interview in which he also talks about his personal life, about his private personality - complete the memoir and autobiographical narrative, with a kind of gradation of values - from those suspicious, deceptive, empty and false, to the brightest, reliable and true. The once banned, "subversive" writer, later a seven-time Nobel Prize candidate and honorary doctor of universities around the world - emphasizes love and friendship as the greatest values in his life. Along with literature, of course, whose nature is already “subversive.” Amado was a proven fighter for the dignity of the “little man,” as this interview confirms.
Francis Ponge is one of the most interesting and original poets and thinkers, whose “quiet revolution” takes place in language itself as a Saussurean system, between the sign and the signified, in the linguistic code. “The Taste of Disagreement”, a title ingeniously derived from Ponge’s responses, represents that strong position of the text that discreetly announces a certain tonality and forms a fine aura around the reader’s horizon of expectations. And this conversation is precisely one of those texts that has the power to move the boundaries of that horizon.
With her developed strategy of asking the right questions at the right moment, the author becomes an “architect of conversation” who expertly directs and redirects the flow of the story, all the while subtly maintaining the necessary tension between questions and answers. In this way, the interviewer maintains increased attention, tense anticipation of the reader who closely follows the conversation from the introduction to the starting point, a kind of point. Because, as has already been noted in theoretical and analytical approaches to this genre - in addition to documentary nature, which in itself does not have to diminish literary nature, the interview is also characterized by a kind of dramatic tension, and this is another quality that brings it closer to literature. Especially - if the interlocutors are writers. Indeed, there are literary-publicistic creations made up of questions and answers in which certain parts of the conversation correspond to the classic stages of the dramatic plot, from the introduction to the denouement. In the book Writers of the world This interview is one of them, among others.
Ponž, Branka's oldest interlocutor, who witnessed the change of eras and remembers what the world looked like before World War I, who knew Valeria, Cocteau, Galimara... - he writes as if in stone, with a precise hand and with his "deep taste" of a connoisseur, creator, meticulous researcher and philosopher of language - his own disapproval. We arrive at that revolutionary note gradually, after the introductory part presents and explains Ponž's "objectivism", the world of objects inseparable from the world of language, which this artist transforms into poetry.
The interviewer's statement, expressed in the context of one question with the sentence - "You are a still life painter with words" - slowly directs the course of the conversation. Ponž talks about how one should "love words" and choose only the right ones, those that correspond to what one wants to express, and not settle for anything less. "You should reject inadequate expressions for communicating your emotions." Rejection is a choice that speaks of a deep taste for words. This rejection, the disapproval associated with taste, sets the premise from which the main ideas of the conversation will develop.
Through the questions he will ask in the following, Bogavac slowly invites and calls upon Ponzo's friends and admirers - writers, philosophers, and artists who marked the era. We, Brac, Picasso, Sartre, Morijak... they symbolically join this broad dialogue that becomes increasingly interesting and intriguing, through the reminder of what they said about Francis Ponz - and the selection of quotes is anthological and always functional. The slight increase in tension between questions and answers now intensifies and the interview "grows", moving towards its culmination as Ponz elaborates and explains his own understanding of the revolutionary and subversive nature of literature, but not through the world of ideas and explanations, but rather of the linguistic signs themselves that announce and abolish, name and create objects, separating them "from the previous chaos". Mastering language means creating a world, and therein lies the responsibility and revolutionary nature, power and significance of the poet. But he also speaks of real ideologies (communism) and the movements associated with them (surrealism), to which he belonged in his youth and later rejected them. Like Amado, Ponz does not believe in ideologies, but he believes in the subversive potential of words, in the action in language, in the resistance to "newspeak" as the language of ideology, "because the language of ideology addresses human freedom." He talks about ideas that grow old with time, that we don't even need: "We just need to express ourselves."
A kind of culmination and conclusion in this sense is the sentence: "I have always been a patriot of the French language."
Lighter and softer tones are present as a thread throughout the conversation, in passages with elements of autobiography and memoir prose, and most notably in the final part of the interview.
Friendship is also a theme - and this is another parallel with Amada. Ponge agrees to talk about personalities he knew well. For example - about the friendship between Picasso and Braque, about how Picasso, contrary to the conventional idea of him, formed on the basis of the statements of some contemporaries - knew how to be a noble and sensitive man and a sincere friend. The thought of this genius was "like lightning" and immediately transformed into the visual. And Georges Braque was the finest and deepest thinker among painters. (Certainly, in the still lifes in the paintings of these founders of Cubism there is something reminiscent of Ponge's artistic concepts and poetry.)
Surrealists have long ceased to interest him as much as the communists and socialists of old, but many of them have remained his friends. There were also some in Belgrade, which he visited “in the year when the first man flew into space”. Memories of Yugoslavia, the unique scenes and atmosphere, the beauty and specificities of its republics, fill the last pages of the interview. He also mentions people who knew French, and there were more of them than he expected.
However, one of the places in the interview that remains "in the air" long after reading is the following: "What are the temptations that a writer must not succumb to? - Among the most dangerous is that of letting oneself slide into an ideology..."
Francis Ponz's disapproval refers to inappropriate words, those that his taste rejects because they do not express his thoughts and emotions in the right way, to ideologies, because their side is war, but also to the spectacles of the surrealists who were otherwise close to him, performances, the negation of everything - because it goes against his upbringing which is "as if from the era of Okay.”; then - to a world without a dictionary, because unnamed things represent chaos (“A dictionary is a sure value.”) Ponž wonders if we still need to be reminded that real works have more potential to change a person than the boots of a conqueror. It is again about taste, the taste of non-conformity, which, we will repeat, is also the title, masterfully derived from the conversation as synesthesia and metaphor in unity; it is polysemic and opens up numerous connections with many places in other interviews.
On ideologies and their destructive influence
There is something in common among all the writers Branka Bogavac spoke with, a certain “kinship” by which they are reflected in each other, both as writers and as people. All are humanists, they explore the possibilities not only of writing but also of the existence of a better world, even if “only” through literature - or exclusively in that way - and they do so even after being disappointed in ideologies and ideologists, “failed history” and concepts of the century. As creators, they are torn between literature as art on the one hand, and engaged literature on the other (how to find the right measure in all this - is a dilemma that has tormented and Danila Kiša) - because their need to aesthetically express their world is inseparable from the real world and the times in which they live.
Andrej Bitov, “a man who collides with life”, also thinks about ideologies and their destructive impact on human life, because that is what a writer is, by his definition. In the introductory part of the interview, Branka Bogavac presents him as one of the “initiators of the rebellion (which is very reminiscent of the Czech ‘velvet revolution’) of Soviet writers in 1979 against the aesthetic literary-ideological censorship that held them back in the most stupid way”. Bitov explains why a writer, whose primary role and true commitment is to “translate feelings”, becomes a social worker. An interesting story about events from the times Khrushchev, about rebels who suppressed their own revolt, about how the novel was created Pushkin's home, reflections on the engagement of the Russian intelligentsia, the humanism of a comprehensive worldview - fill the pages of this interview. Branka Bogavac draws attention to the parallel between Raskolnikov Dostoyevsky and heroes Pushkin's home, which Bitov confirms, and also notes that he is connected to this writer by the kinship of “their common world”. The interesting fact that in one of his earlier stories he described a scene that already exists in Dostoevsky, without even knowing it (because, if he had, he would never have written it), also speaks of the aforementioned kinship: “It first infuriates a person, and later it only confirms that we saw the world in the same way or that we saw the same world.”
(Ends next Saturday)
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