Assistant professor at the Orthodox Theological Faculty of the University of Belgrade, Vukašin Milićević, recently published his debut novel "Resurrection" in which he deals with the influence of the combination of politics, part of the church and organized crime on the life of an individual who is trying to, in today's Serbia, "live his life with a clean face and undefiled hands".
Milićević, whom the then patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) Irinej, suspended from his priestly duties four years ago after appearing on the show "Impression of the Week" and banned from appearing in public for "verbal offense" and disobeying his provision that "everyone who wears the mantle, he can't go to the media without his approval," he spoke to Genzia Beta about the motives that inspired him to write the novel.
"I probably won't be wrong if I say that I was led to the idea of writing a novel by a deep inner need to express myself more completely. Fiction provides that opportunity because it puts you in a position of absolute freedom and responsibility in relation to the text. Again, where does the need to express myself come from? Simply , I believe that being human means feeling the responsibility to be free, and that is not possible without expressing yourself, that is, communicating yourself to others," explains Milićević.
He says that one of his main goals in writing was the idea of dealing with a fundamentally eternal theme - elemental humanity.
"The main nationalist mantra is that of uniqueness. My desire was to show that what we have been in as a society for decades is only a small modification of a long-told story in which the main theme is elementary humanity, and it does not exist without consistency, courage, empathy and honesty, and that these principles are valid despite our personal failures and the general hopelessness of the 'moment' we live in," Milićević said.
The priests in his book are characterized by a renegade spirit - they distance themselves from the official Church and ignore its hierarchical rules, preaching the faith in a way that they themselves consider correct.
"If the hierarchy and the 'rules' that it determines, and especially its practice, are nothing but a denial of the spirit and the obvious sense of what it should preach and what it should serve. Again, this is a story told a long time ago, and the book in which it is in is called the New Testament," he added.
Milićević assessed that we live in "savage capitalism" established "under the guise of fighting for national interests."
"Savage capitalism, which is established under the guise of fighting for some national interests and persistently calling for national unity, actually resembles some kind of monstrous mixture of capitalism and feudalism, so that property relations, power relations, are also personal possession relations. It is easy to pretend that market when you have the conscience of the people. That's why it often happens that anyone who doesn't play according to the script becomes a problem, regardless of what an 'ordinary' person they may be".
The interlocutor of the Beta Agency believes that it can be fought against by diverting attention from national interests to social ones.
"The antidote would therefore have to be a bold shift of attention from so-called national to social issues. I say 'so-called' national, since there is an essential difference between national and nationalist, while in our country precisely nationalist has long been successfully sold as national, and that leads only and exclusively into truly national ruin," says the writer.
About Milićević's prose debut published by Laguna, the reviewers of the book, writer Svetislav Basara and Vladika Grigorije, spoke very positively, which he says is impressive, but even more binding.
"We are talking about two people for whom I have not only great respect, but also love," concludes Milićević.
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