Literary Marauders: Reading for the Future

29 Apr Literary Marauders: Reading for the Future

The Common Library has received its integral edition in Croatia, published by Fraktura. On this occasion we share with you the preface written by the edition’s editors Vladimir Arsenijević and Igor Štiks which was also published by Fraktura Magazine (in BCMS, the common language). On Monday, May 2, starting at 8 pm, a panel discussion titled “U središtu interesa: Zajednička čitaonica” (In the centre of interest: The Common Library) will be held in Zagreb in which the editors Vladimir Arsenijević and Igor Štiks will participate.

Starting from the basic premise that literature enables us to get to know ourselves and the world around us better, we wondered how to approach the unavoidable problems of our time as well as specific issues of our own region through the medium of literary works. The result is the Common Library edition as an incentive for individual readings and public discussions based on the texts of writers who have written or are writing in any of the equal variants of the common language and regardless of whether they have called it Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian or Serbian, or they use or have used another name for it.

Their work has created and continues to create a common literary treasury to which access is possible without language difficulties and translation and which remains open to all regardless of political changes within the very geographical area covered by the common language. In this treasury we find and rethink the relevant texts on the open dilemmas of today, and these works, from the recent or distant past, are accompanied by the answers of contemporary authors. In this way, the Common Library also serves as a glossary of sorts that allows us not only to find our way more easily when encountering current phenomena, but also provides a supreme literary pleasure.

Inspired by the public results of the Languages ​​and Nationalisms project, as well as the consequent Declaration on the Common Language, the Common Library aims to show, in the literary field, all the diversity and richness of four equal, standard variants of our polycentric language. It has created, and continues to create, one great European literature within which books and their writers move freely without passports, without checking one’s origins and without the imposition of exclusive ownership.

Although our language lacks a singular, widely accepted name, as is usually the case with languages, we believe that this quirkiness only presents an additional challenge and a call to constantly uncover this unnamed language in all its standard and dialectal forms, artistic interventions, literature, philosophy, music and popular culture, as well as through regional permeations, international influences and its historical development.

Originally, the book that is now in your hands was published as a series of nine separate booklets by the KROKODIL Association, which were distributed free of charge, independently of bookstores and distribution chains, mainly at the events in the KROKODIL Center for Contemporary Literature in Belgrade where the booklets were read, discussed and, in collaboration with the DAH Theater, staged.

The first book of the Common Library edition, titled “Yugoslavia”, was published in 2019 and included essays by Predrag Matvejević and Vladimir Arsenijević dedicated to the issues of disintegration of the common state and various dynamics of the post-Yugoslav reality. In the next two years, we completed the Common Library edition in the form of a box set. We have decided to unite all eighteen texts between the same covers for this, Croatian edition. Thus, in front of you are nine essayistic-prose-poetic doublets divided and marked by themes as relevant today as ever. In addition to the already mentioned “Yugoslavia”, there are also “Europe”, “Identity”, “Anti/Fascism”, “Exile”, “Society”, “City”, “Maladjustment”, and “Youth”. Authors of the essays range from indisputable classics such as Miroslav Krleža, Danilo Kiš, Bogdan Bogdanović, Daša Drndić and Mirko Kovač; contemporary authors – Andrej Nikolaidis or Igor Štiks, for example – those who live and create outside the region or even in other languages, such as Dubravka Ugrešić, Rada Iveković, Boris Buden or Aleksandar Hemon; and all the way to the youngest authors such as Lana Bastašić. Some, such as Semezdin Mehmedinović, represent returnees from the “big wide world” to the space of their own language, and many, due to the war and post-war conditions, share the fate of regional nomads such as Svetlana Slapšak or Dragan Markovina. They are continuously questioning the emerging and ever-harder boundaries that they manage to cross easily and elegantly, with the help of precisely what we believe is impossible to demarcate, and that is living language. Then again, some, such as Borka Pavićević and Vladimir Arsenijević, have continued to defiantly water the flowers in their own garden despite the inner exile, Sisyphean struggle, threats and loneliness.

This exciting mix of voices resulted in exactly what we had hoped for at the beginning of this project, a kind of linguistic and artistic polyphony that convincingly proves that even though, due to the unfortunate historical circumstances we found ourselves divided in several different countries, and many of us in the diaspora, we do not represent strangers to each other. As we have mentioned, there are no passports in literature. They only exist in the minds of creators of literary competitions and festivals, ministry officials concerned about their positions, literary officials and commissioners, as well as academic opportunists, many of whom are convinced that the writer’s descent determines literary affiliation. Needless to say we strongly oppose such sorting, selection, persecution and silencing of both books and their authors. The bonds that exist between us, and which rest on the common “social property” of not only language but also great literary heritage, are much stronger than the destructive forces that have produced more evil in the past few decades than we could have ever imagined. This is an expression of the tenacity of our optimism and firm belief that the bonds thanks to which one prominent literary force is developing in the south of Europe will continue to thrive.

In spite of everything.

The guiding principle that inspired us and stayed with us during the whole work on this project is the need to actively combat the claustrophobic narrowness of the concept of national literature. At a time when, at least as far as literary practitioners are concerned, the national identification is imposed as a widely accepted determinant and when it is practically impossible to present oneself in any other way on some of the most important platforms for international literary and publishing communication, such as literary fairs in Leipzig or Frankfurt, with this project we are strongly advocating for a more inclusive, larger and incomparably more exciting literature – the common language literature, no matter what someone may call it. That such a thing is neither unheard of nor impossible is convincingly shown by well-known examples of Latin American or Francophone literature, but also by the recent appearance of writers from the German-speaking areas at the Belgrade Book Fair when authors from Austria, Liechtenstein, Germany and Switzerland readily gave up all potential national rivalries and in return embraced what unites them most strongly and presented their work as part of one singular literature under the slogan: “Four countries – one language”.

The Common Library edition should by no means be understood as a nostalgic and subsequently constructed testimony of a better past, just another of the many products of retroactive utopia, but, on the contrary, as a pledge for a better, more open, fairer, more peaceful and therefore brighter regional future. We are deeply convinced – and we believe that you will also be after reading this book – that literature has a key role to play in this plot about a different future. We invite readers who speak, use, create and live in the common language and to whom it only belongs wherever they may be, to an adventure of reading, discovering, exploring and rethinking.

Authors: Vladimir Arsenijević and Igor Štiks