Lyre

KRSTIVOJE ILIĆ (1938–2022) AND HIS ELEGY ABOUT THE WORLD, FROM TOPS TO THE BOTTOM
Praises and Ascensions
This Orpheus of Cer-Tamnava and Mačva, elegist of the suburbs and casemates, palaces and churches, lyrical chronicle writer of ”God’s people” and muses from brothels, poet of swans above Vila-Leska and royal epitaphs, spent his life singing only to poetry. Poems were a festivity and justification, whip and compassion, perhaps even the only acceptable way to stay there. Thus Krstivoje, boy and puzzler, football player and boxer, great poet, carried his cross to the ultimate point, after which only silence roars

By: Dragan Lakićević

Vila-Leska, Brdarica, Draginje, Posavotamnava, Koceljeva, Šabac, Belgrade – this was a group homeland of citizen-wanderer Krstivoje Ilić (1938–2022). The homeland of poet Krstivoje was, however, entire poetry: he considered poets as gods, both ancient and international, such as Propertius, Villon, Rilke, Hölderlin, and ours: Vojislav, Crnjanski, Raičković, Miljković, Ivan V. Lalić… He addressed himself with the verses of his great contemporary lyricist, who ”accepted” his first book in ”Prosveta” in 1973: ”Let us stop for a moment, poem! / Have we lived, we have! // The most wonderful hours / When poplars are bathing in gold // In light fog, in foam – / You have sadly brought to me.”
People used to say that he won the first respectable poetry award under a codename because the jury was convinced that the poems from the ”Discord in the Rose’s Ear” were written by Raičković.
He had the soul of a dreamer poet, which bathed in seasons of the year, especially the glow of early autumn, with colors of red and gold, when everything is ripening in gardens and green markets of Serbia, sufficient both for ants and god’s man. He was able to admire both poetry and nature, as well as everything human, big and small. He could turn a humble dinner, on a piece of newspaper and ”ultrapas” table in a four-beds room in the Campus, into a real banquet with his praises. He used to call ”royal”, the cheapest local wine, ”the best royal”, and toasted the ”hungry geniuses” on the bottom floor of the Campus as if he were at the Kosovo Dinner.
Once, in Manojlo’s ”Pinki” children’s library in Njegoševa 43, he admired the scent of juices from the heart of the watermelon. I gave a banknote to the ”poet-peasant”, wonderful friend and dark lyricist Zoran Vučić from Bučum near Svrljig – he was secretary of the Raskovnik magazine – to go to the Kalenić green market and bring the biggest watermelon. Zoran left and Krle said:
– You, boy, really think that he’ll ever return with that much money! He, my boy, is already heading towards Miroč and Tresibaba.
Krle knew that Bučum (that’s how he called Vučić, after his home village) will bring the watermelon, but imagination had a different language, the language of poetic gift and image. A hidden heretic and felon were in it, similar to Yesenin: ”If I weren’t a poet, me among everyone / I’d be a villain and famous thief…” He liked characters who spent time in prison and generally those from ”Cowboy movies” and hiding places of hayduks in winters.
Once, in publishing zest, knowing Krstivoje and his life, I asked him if he could write a series of poems-portraits about his acquaintances from prison. And there he was, in late summer, with a collection of poems Elegies from the Casemate for the ”Road Signs” edition.

GREAT POET

He was a great poet – both publishers and interpreters admitted it ever since his book of poetry Discord in the Rose’s Ear. His poetry was populated with a world that levitates and trembles, with the fluid and elusive, yet radiating, glowing, throbbing. The same being was permeating the universe and the dusk above fields and forests, as well as man marked by life and death. He listened to everything refined and subtle which relates or confronts man with nature and God. Death was one of the great Krstivoje’s subjects – secret and point. He was moving around that point from the very beginning – lyrical, metaphysical, beyond reason. He studied transitions between good and evil, life and death.
On the other side, he was interested in the suburban bottom: people from the margins of communities and poetry, the world living on the banks, in hallways, at the peripheries of the city and life. He wrote Elegies from the Suburbs early, a collection of lyrical ballads about his ”god’s men”, on the borders of cities, small and big, and on the edges of time which separated there - village and city, settlement and desert, old and new, age of joy and suffering, times that cannot be separated. The elegies sang about his unusual heroes, their pledges and zests, spites and crafts. Crafts were both vices and vows, ascensions and falls… Everything was poetic in it, both when he invented them and when he really knew them. Beggar Savatije, Stonemason Teofil, violin player Živkula Kaurić, gypsy lord; Andreja Car, brickyard stoker; Bora Šaran, Danube fisherman; retired alcoholic Avram; Dule Trećak, famous pickpocket; Lika Madžar, merry-go-round owner; and others, including some real people. Even when he invented them, he did it to help them and find, at least in himself, compassion for them – from his poetic and aristocratic heights.
The intonation of Krstivoje’s elegies, long distiches, seem to invoke the pathos of classical versification and music of ancient elegies, including those written by his famous surname-sake Vojislav (whom he dedicated his early poem ”Birth of an Elegy”, 1965). The ceremonial tone was entirely opposite from the miserable life of people from the bottom:

We lived like brothers, in love and concord,
although we on two and you on just one foot!
Forgive me for all the days you haven’t received anything from me,
trust me, I didn’t have anything then either!
You knew dreamers and lost people, and often
in your misery, you used to offer me with something!
When they recognize you in the street, and say hello,
you like to reply to each of them with: a v e!

Each of his ”elegies from the suburbs” had a feature of the poet’s self-portrait. The souls of the homeless and dreamers were best depicted by the homeless and dreamer himself:

You know how life is in this suburb, on the bank,
we tasted a bit of your brandy, a bit of your woman!
It’s spring now, we’re sleeping under trees, on the grass,
Stars traveling above us, ants traveling under us!

God’s people often have a visible or invisible patron, a guardian angel. It seems that Krstivoje occasionally had them as well. Some of the last patrons of the poet were his friends from the Šabac Theater – they took care of him, drove him, recited his poems.
He had and mentioned his mother Zagorka, but he was essentially homeless. Radovan Popović’s Literary Topography of Belgrade mentions three addresses he lived at, or perhaps just spent nights. I believe there were thirty-three, not including campuses, staying or spending nights in known or unknown apartments…
Knowing, at the time, that I had a mother who lived alone, he told me:
– I’d really like, boy, to have a nice talk with your mother. I know that she has a little water heater, a little stove and soup. Logs burning, teapot on the stove, and the two of us sitting and talking about you. I’d like to get to know you. Perhaps a week or two. And there, in her place, I’d write something, for the gods…

POETRY AND FOOTBALL

He had a gift for humor and cynicism, he admired and mocked at the same time. He was fascinated with famous poets and used to find less-known valuables in their verses, but he was equally able to defame contemporaries who didn’t have understanding and mercy for him, especially if they were poets as well:
– He wants to write about demons but thinks that demons are agricultural workers!
He loved football and boxing, games and fans – he participated in chanting and invented slogans for the ”Sever” stands…
– The greatest poet is living in Marakana and his name is Dragan Džajić – ”Zvezda’s” left winger.
Once we were walking by the Sports’ Hall in New Belgrade, near the Students’ Campus, where he was ”illegally” living at the time. Krle peeked into a bush and took out a black men’s umbrella from it.
– Where did you find that umbrella, Krle? – asked Joyce (that’s how we called Jovan Radulović, writer of Golubnjača.)
– I left it there in case of rain. Just imagine, a movie ends in ”Radnički” or a boxing match, we come out of the Hall, and it’s raining outside!
He was a literary hero – I enlisted him in the collection of characters of ”Belgrade Stories” Madman’s Writing, twenty years ago. I just didn’t mention his name. However, he never mentioned the book or the story. Perhaps he just wasn’t talking about it… The hero and story live parallelly… Perhaps he didn’t even know it existed… Others also didn’t recognize him: they either didn’t read or quickly forgot Krstivoje. This memory is against such oblivion… At least in that story, I introduced him to the blue ”Kolo” in the Serbian Literary Cooperative (SKZ), which he longed for, although it shouldn’t have passed him.
Krstivoje sang about kin – personal and family, poetic and national. He dedicated a book to his kin, better to say a lyrical epic Swans above Vila-Leska – a rhetoric dialogue with his father and brother, mostly with the dead. (Vila-Leska hamlet is the poet’s birthplace, a first-class poetic toponym.) The poems are about death and earth, on the stage of a linguistic and topographic image called Vila-Leska. The souls of ancestors are flying over Vila-Leska like swans in Njegoš’s poems: ”Dear Lord, what glorious festivity, / how the souls of ancestors / flew over Cetinje today, / playing in white flocks, / like flocks of wonderful swans / while playing in the serene skies…”
He considered Njegoš a saint of Serbian poetry.
Poetry was a festivity for Krstivoje.
Death is a transition ”into a corner of a rose, / into the garden of the wind…”
Love is the greatest commandment of Ilić’s poetry.
The soul is connected to the voices of ancestors: ”It’s all the same how you separate from the body, and if you are present in anything later, / the moment is to understand the night: listen / to those voices arriving like arrows / from the swamp, voices of ancestors perhaps!”
”Sang on the subject of death, this poetry is all in ceremonial, enthusiastic tone, although without being pathetic and sentimental. Extraordinarily skillfully navigating rhythm, sentence, with a particular sense of proportion and sense for the condensed, Ilić is able to, while thinking about life and death, ascend to the cosmic vision and extraordinary mythical features…” – wrote great editor Milan Komnenić about the Swans above Vila-Leska.

”CHEEKY” AND NATIONAL SUBJECTS

As a master of verse, he was more prone to sonnet. Firstly, because of his love for the classical and its forms of poetic perfection. Secondly because of his studies of the experience of sonnet and his own expression in its quatrains and thirds. He wrote about the best love, contemplative and metaphysical subjects in sonnets, as well as heretic Sonnets for the Courtesans, which were sometimes published in Student to the secret delight and public indignation of readers. He called them ”Sonnets for the Bacchae”. People waited for the new issue of Student to read the sonnets out loud, from balconies. These sonnets were related to the poetry from the book Brothel of Muses, wonderfully translated by Danilo Kiš. Krstivoje sang ”cheeky” poems with famous women from world poetry as heroes: Hera, Aphrodite, Medeia, Phaedra, Beautiful Helen, Cleopatra, wife of Strahinjić Ban, Bitch Vidosava, Damned Jerina, Jeanne Duval, Ana Karenina, Lolita…
He persistently sang about homeland and national subjects, mostly about Kosovo and uprisings, about Mišar. He made his own portraits of Serbian monarchs in his Royal Epitaphs. Similar to reliefs on golden coins, medallions and inscriptions on monuments, he sang, as short as possible, his word and thoughts about monarchs from the Nemanjić dynasty – from Nemanja’s father Zavida to Uroš the Weak.
Both with the versification and orchestration of language, the poet depicts the royal times of the distant past, in which Tihomir, Prince Miroslav, Nemanja, the First-Crowned and others from the holy dynasty, live and speak their epitaphs. Historical data are in the subtext – the sonic monarchial rhetoric is in the foreground, with lyrical reflections of the authorities and individual fates. I once wrote that, with such epigrams, the poet equally cares about both history and religion. Historicalness is often in the shades of irony. ”That historicalness mentions fratricides and saints – ambivalent protagonists of the royal dynasty, and ‘confessions to the god of the sun’ signifies the pre-Christian and early Christian character of the first monarchs.” And further: ”Spiritual and secular, biographic and legendary in Ilić’s poem, intertwines and merges, flows into one another.” – ”In small lyrical monologues of the Nemanjićs, particularly present are St. Sava and Kosovo. They are not speaking through poetry, but through faith. St. Sava is not an earthly ruler – he is a saint and forefather of the St. Sava philosophy. Both his father, brother and nephews speak and think about him as a divinity.”

I mostly remember young Rastko, with a boyish face,
with gentle eyes, blue as the skies,
standing on a hill, listening to the language of birds,
interpreting it to me, in an unreal reality;
as if with another spirit – a lamb and a wolf,
he is multiplying and celebrating everything nature has given!

BOY AND MYSTIFIER

Krstivoje was both a boy and mystifier. He built legends from his experiences. He tried to become famous. Just like Manojle Gavrilović, he used to visit the Jež editorial office – brought them jokes about himself. ”Let people talk about me” – both of them used to say.
He was loved and unloved. One of the editors in Student adored him at the time. He published his invented reports. For example, a dam broke somewhere in the world, water is threatening to wipe away villages and the entire city, and a hardworking teacher is bringing students out from the school, to contain the flood with their textbooks… Another, technical editor, couldn’t stand Krstivoje, but had to ”typeset” his poems. The fee was paid by verse, so he reduced the number of verses, merging two into one… In order to harm him, he deliberately made mistakes in the poems and the poet’s name: Kr Stivoje, Kreštivoje, Hristovije, Krstovije Ili… Krle was not mad – it was part of the glory and surviving on the literary battlefield.
It was a great childhood of our poetry. The boy Krstivoje, much older than us, wanted to grow up and be respected and awarded like Desanka, Raičković, Brana Petrović, Bećković…
When he received the last award ”Responses to Filip Višnjić”, we were sitting at a long kafana table in Aranđelovac, and on the table, as usual, a feast ”for the gods”… From the other end of the table, he approached me and whispered: ”Eat!” Like before, when it meant: eat and drink while there is food – who knows if there will be any tomorrow and when we’ll have a chance again.
In the poem ”Orpheus’ Elegy” he told about Dragoljub Đenadić Đena, forgotten ”poet and bohemian from Mačva”, reflecting himself in Đena now more than ever before:

We are waiting for the time to bring you back from the black soil,
are such poets, such bohemians allowed to die!
Your most wonderful books, which you wrote feverish,
were stopped, half-way, by evil human thoughts!
You were as pure as a star, beyond any clans or campaigns,
and only underground they could be printed!

His last book of poetry Feast of the Cross is subtitled ”Dedications and Ascensions”. The book includes short poems – sometimes epigrams, sometimes epitaphs, toasts and praises – to Serbian poets. They begin with Njegoš, and end with contemporaries, in some cases twenty years younger than Krstivoje (Jagličić and Baković). He sang about some forgotten ones, and his fellow countrymen. The misunderstood ones. He didn’t forget contemporary bishops, Ćosić, Ujević, not even himself! Most of the poems end with a verse or title of that poet, as a point, as a peak or definition of the poet’s life: A night more precious than a century – Njegoš, Vineyards, goodbye dear ones – Branko, Santa Maria della Salute – Laza, Migrations exist, death doesn’t – Crnjanski, You, black waters in whitish foam / and bridges arching over emptiness – Raičković, Singing and dying is the same – Miljković, I don’t have my beloved one now, and her voice I don’t know – Dis, Midnight was shining from it – Zmaj, etc. Krstivoje implies that he is part of them, that his poetry speaks from the same being and language.
”This poetic album of Serbian literature resembles a valuable collection of stamps on letters for eternity, with the seal of an extraordinary poet Krstivoje Ilić” – I wrote for the back cover page of the last collection Feast of the Cross (2021).

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Note
Born in 1938, in Brdarica, Municipality of Koceljeva. He completed elementary school in the nearby Draginje, Middle Commercial and Higher Pedagogy schools in Šabac, studied literature at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. He wrote poems since elementary school; published about twenty books, won awards, was translated. He played football, loved boxing. He passed away in Šabac, on August 22, 2022.

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Collections
Krstivoje Ilić published about twenty books of poetry. We will mention only some: ”Discord in the Rose’s Ear” (1973), ”Swans above Vila-Leska” (1977), ”Hawk at Gunpoint” (1980), ”Elegies from the Suburbs” (1982), ”Objection to Orpheus” (1987), ”Elegies from the Casemate” (1989), ”Autumn Landscapes” (1990), ”Quatrains about Wine” (1992), ”Spring in Draginje” (1994), ”Mišar Elegies” (1995), ”Convocation of the Immortals” (1996), ”Selected and New Poems” (1996), ”In the Final Hour” (2001), ”Elegies above Mountains and Waters” (2003), ”Origin of the Sonnet” (2006), ”Epitaphs of Cer” (2014), ”Feast of the Cross” (2021).

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Children, Drama, Anthology
Krstivoje Ilić published several books of children’s poetry: ”Little Love Poems” (1989), ”Spring in Draginje (chosen poems for children)” (1997), ”Pelen and Melema” (1998), ”Boy from Vila-Leska (selection of love poems for children)” (2002)... In the year 2000, he wrote the drama ”Battle of Mišar”, and in 1996 made a poetic anthology ”Galaxy of the Arilje Angel” (1996).

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Awards
He won many literary awards. We will mention ”Crown of Despot Stefan”, ”Lazar Vučković”, ”Srboljub Mitić”, ”Rade Drainac”, ”Žika Popović”, ”Responses to Filip Višnjić”…