Life, Novels

BRATISLAV R. MILANOVIĆ, POET IN THE TIMES OF THE ”SINGING MASS”
All Our Hope
Let us hope that the world will not disappear, that it’s just us worn out, that our rationality is dispersing and our cycle coming to an end. It happened in the past as well. Some unfettered people appeared in Belgrade, insulting with their monstrous presentations about the city, devouring with their greed for money. What scum is Morava rolling, what plastic rags are ivies on the banks of the Timok and the Mlava dressed in? There are still Serbs who care about genuine cultural values, ready to pay the price for it with their quality of life. Not everything will sink into Croesus’ gold

By: Branislav Matić
Photo: Private Archive

Balkan singer, cricket in December, the one who sees small lamps in the darkness. Familiar with ancient future and useless chronicles. On his journeys, a deer appears in the window and doors in a field. A blue medusa in the slopes of light.
Important Serbian poet in the times of the ”singing masses”.
Bratislav R. Milanović (Aleksinac, 1950) in National Review.

Roots tenacious and gnarled. Four threads, four families had to merge so that one man would be born. The families my parents come from have been present in the Aleksinac Morava Valley for more than two hundred years. In those lands, my ancestors shared and created the fate of Serbia, just like all other Serbs did. They participated in the events which drew the geopolitical map of the Balkans: in the First Serbian Uprising they fought in the Battle of Deligrad in 1806, in Serbo-Turkish wars 1876–1878 they participated in the battles on the Đuniš Heights above Vitkovac, in the Krvavac creek in Golo Brdo in Upper Adrovac.
If we step deeper into history, the path my father Radivoje’s family, Jevtić and Simonović, took to the Aleksinac Morava Valley, to Vitkovac, would take us (according to the family legend) to Metohija, to the vicinity of Peć. It is uncertain when exactly my father’s ancestors settled in the place that keeps historical data about them, but it is certain that they have been there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The family of my mother Koviljka ran from Tupižnica in 1813, from burned Hayduk-Veljko’s Lenovac, led by a Milenko, after whom they got their surname and carried it more than two centuries. The Milenković family settled near Aleksinac, on the left bank of the Morava. All male members of the family were mobilized during the Balkan wars and the Great War. Most of them returned, but the bones of some are laying in Zeytinlik and scattered across Serbia. (...)
If we go further into the past, traces are lost.
My father’s family’s last name was Jevtić. It is the same today. My father Radivoje was the only one with the surname Milanović, after his grandfather Milan who disappeared in 1918.
Radivoje completed the Junior Military Academy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the 59th class. As lieutenant, he defended the Yugoslav-Hungarian border in Bajmok in 1941. After the war, he refused to be reactivated in the new army, because, according to his words, ”officers take a vow only once”… He worked as a bookkeeper his entire life in different places in Serbia, prepared students for makeup exams and entrance examinations in Serbian, French and German languages and mathematics with great energy. He educated generations of engineers, economists, doctors, professors… He died in the time of greatest misery that struck Serbia in the twentieth century, in 1994, with billions of worthless banknotes in his wallet, left from his otherwise low, unspent pension…
Painful are family stories of a nation which couldn’t find peace ever since its beginnings.
All our roots are tenacious and gnarled.

Under Stara Planina. We left the Aleksinac Morava Valley early and went to Eastern Serbia through Svrljig Mountains, to Timok Krajina, in the foot of mount Stara Planina, to Avramica miners’ colony not far from Zaječar. In that miners’ colony I experienced a direct encounter with nature, with all its laws of life. Whenever I immerse in thoughts, short films of vivid colors come to life: me wandering around bushy hills with blue lilacs; picking wild strawberries and colorful mushrooms in the glades, most of which my Slovenian neighbors later throw away, since there are more life threatening than edible ones among them; looking for red cranberries, black and red hawthorn and wild pears in late autumn on the edges of young oak trees; entering the warm, single-story miners’ homes; going down to their cellars that fill with water in times of great rains or when the snow is melting; entering sheds full of chopped, neatly arranged wood; standing confused above the hens strangled by skunks and weasels in those sheds; participating in celebrations of joyful holidays in the hall of the restaurant decorated with crepe paper; watching through a window incrusted with icy patterns people taking out a dead body on a hospital stretcher covered with a bloody sheet after an accidental fratricide; entering the room of our miners’ apartment, finding the quadruple hero from Kaimaktsalan, grandpa Ljuba who had a stroke, laying on the floor, unable to return to the bed he fell from, crying…

Chosen homeland. If it’s true that man is formed in their childhood, then an artist, a poet is also formed in them at the same time. An entirely new poetics is conceived and starts flourishing in them, which will continue maturing for years and becoming more and more their own, until it ends its maturing only when the light goes out.
For a similar occasion, Miloš Crnjanski said that ”homeland is what you choose”. My chosen homeland, without even anticipating it, were first the slopes of mount Stara Planina, where I sometimes felt tucked and cozy, and at times as master.
Wherever I went, I longingly returned to that area which offered freedom to my imagination and adopted my imagined worlds. It was the corner of my chosen homeland.

Morava-Timok dyptichon. Only later I realized that true homeland is something else: that it is the place where spirits of ancestors dwell, who left us visible or barely visible signs about their existence and that there are some mysterious connections between them and me. Such connections appear when there is a need for them. I asked myself, for example, why I, a Morava man in all aspects, feel such a strong bond with Timok Krajina. Then I discovered that half of my being is related with my unknown ancestors from Lenovac, those who stayed there after 1813, after Milenko took his family to the bank of the Morava… Those who stayed, spread around Timočka Krajina.
I spent my late childhood and early youth in Knjaževac. All my first loves are still living in that city, in a virtual space existing only in my memory, beyond all times and oblivions. I read my first serious books and I wrote my first poems there. It is where the first fevers of boyhood loves shook me, it is where sweet melancholy took me over while listening to Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava and at the same time thinking about the hot summer and green waters of the Timok. From there, through Aleksinac, I set off to Belgrade in the summer of 1968. When I returned six years later as a mature young man, I started shaking while looking at the city on Tresibaba. Not metaphorically! Really shaking!
My other half is connected to the Morava Valley. My night dreams often pick the old houses of my ancestors for their stage, which I had seen in the past, saw them once or never saw them at all. And the older I get, it happens more often.
The evil bombing of Aleksinac in 1999 struck me as thunder. When I saw the pictures of the destroyed city on TV – I couldn’t breathe. Jovan Arežina, who was next to me at that moment, asked me if someone close died. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t speak. Until that moment I didn’t know that my connections with the city I was born in and around which the spirits of my ancestors are wandering, were so strong. I didn’t know it until my city was so severely wounded. At that time, like a suppressed scream, the poem ”Triptychon for Aleksinac” burst out of me. Whenever I recite that poem, at the end, my throat becomes dry and my eye fills with tears. I’ve never managed to conquer it, although it will soon be twenty-five years since that event… Such poems emerge in specific emotional states. They cannot be constructed. Any dishonesty can be felt in them.
Places we loved in our childhood and youth remain our homelands forever.

Entire life. While watching from the Zemun Quay, the Kalemegdan Ridge above the Confluence really seems like a white ship with several decks. That is how I experience it whenever I have the opportunity to watch down the Danube towards Belgrade.
Ever since my early childhood, Belgrade has been my city. Perhaps because I started visiting it so early, because my closest family was in it. And because already at the age of ten, I was connected to Belgrade with my life. I was brought to Belgrade to survive. When I was ten, my life was hanging in the balance and the only place I could be saved was the children surgery clinic in Tiršova, Belgrade. I spent three years, with longer pauses, in its infirmaries, clinics and policlinics. During that time, I got to know Stari Grad, Upper Dorćol. My grandmother Zora, father’s aunt, reputable owner of a pre-war restaurant ”Golden Carp”, who wanted to adopt me, lived there. She didn’t have children.
When I came to study at nearly eighteen, I actually returned back to her. ”I returned to the city of mine, someone’s / familiar to the bones, to the tears of swollen children’s glands”…
The streets were familiar. As well as Kalemegdan, enchanting Skadarlija where Rale Damjanović irresistibly charmingly recited poetry from the windows of Đura’s houses, and Zetska street, the summer stage where Nušić’s single act dramas were performed every evening. Kolarac, where first-class movies were shown: The Sound of Music, Bondarchuk’s unsurpassable War and Peace… Literary evenings in Dom Omladine, in the Club in Rajićeva Street led by Peđa Nešković, where Duško Novaković and I recited our poetry for the first time in Belgrade…
That Belgrade was somehow warmer, more intimate, more open, with a big heart. It accepted everyone who’d come to it and was ready to do something to everyone who showed just a bit of love.
The world was opening. Belgrade was also opening. In just a few years, since 1967, important musical, film and multimedia events were initiated: Bitef, Bemus, where Herbert von Karajan conducted, Fest, Belgrade Newport Jazz Festival, where Satchmo and Dizzy Gillespie performed… Festival of Extended Media (performance). A bit earlier, in the autumn of 1964, the Association of Writers of Serbia initiated the Belgrade International Meetings of Writers, attended by Ernesto Cardenal, Saul Bellow, Tadeuz Ruzevich, Edoardo Sanguineti…
Belgrade was an intimate, warm world capital.
When I count everything I’ve written up to now, I have a few poems about my hometown and all the rest are about Belgrade. Belgrade is my entire life. And my inspiration. An important spot in it is Francuska 7, where many things were going on. Some people related to that house, like me, were more than friends. Almost family. I have several such friends today as well. Lately I have been more connected with the Serbian Literary Cooperative. I like the peace, wisdom of the portraits watching me from the walls and my collocutors’ brains. And finally, the area around Tašmajdan, Slavija and Kalenić, or to be exact Vračar, is the place where everything important to me happened. Entire life.

Plastic surgery of the city. It seems there are many people in Belgrade today who don’t love it, don’t respect its identity and destroy it recklessly. They are there just to ruthlessly utilize it… There are many of those who don’t want to adapt to Belgrade, but want to adapt the city to their arrogant habits. Some rampant people appeared… They are devouring Belgrade and making it what it has never been before: a brutal monster that swallows people. Belgrade will recover when those violent people suppress their greed. They are insulting it with their hideous presentations about the city. They don’t follow its urbanistic interest, only their own greed for money.
Belgrade is losing its refinedness, sophistication, nice manners…
And its openheartedness doesn’t deserve that ugly plastic surgery.

We don’t understand it anymore. Serbia – is dying! For the past fifty years I’ve been traveling through Serbia, I’ve seen it in different phases. I’ve seen the self-indulged, cruel Serbia blinded by ideology and wealth, gullible Serbia ready to trust everyone else but its own people, Serbia that forgot to look back to the wisdom and caution of ancestors…
Serbia is now paying the price of its frivolity: old people are dying and the young and capable are leaving, never to return. The less capable are also leaving, those who would rather clean toilets around the world than cultivate their land, because the newly arrived traders purchase the products of that land for one price and sell it for five times more.
Serbia used to be a garden of Eden and now it’s just a dump. Its famous rivers are now collectors into which Serbs discharge polluted waters and throw poisonous waste. How sad Stevan Raičković’s verse: ”Where did the Pek sink to” sounds now. Who will answer the question: whose scum is Morava rolling, what plastic rags are ivies on the banks of the Timok and the Mlava dressed into?
Year after year, I am seeing Serbia more and more empty.
Serbia is a gift of God which we destroyed with our negligence, irresponsibility, ruthlessness, stupidity and ignorance. It was given to us to feed and defend us – but we don’t understand it anymore. Everything else is more important than it, yet it is the only thing we’ve got. Serbia today is the reflection of neglected power and beauty – a future desert.

Croesus’ gold. Modern man is lost and stopped over an abyss in this slope of time. Now it’s up to them to take another step into disaster. The value system is completely destroyed. There is nothing invaluable anymore. Everything can be measured with money. Time is money too. That statement made up by bankers accelerated everything to mad proportions. The former assumption that man will have more time for themselves with the development of civilization sounds so naive today.
The number of readers of books is decreasing, because there is no more time for it. The number of pages is decreasing because nobody wants to read voluminous books. Theatrical plays, music compositions are becoming shorter. No one has time for anything anymore, and creating high culture and enjoying it requests leisure. Thus, high art is dying and being replaced by reality show which doesn’t request time for production or interpretation, since the meaning is direct. We have reality plays, movies, video clips… Money is easily granted for financing such programs.
It’s even more drastic in Serbia. Investing money in high culture is almost entirely canceled, using the famous excuse: who would be interested in it? How come the one stating that culture killing syntagm knows who is interested in what? How did he come to such capital knowledge? Our government determined only 0,16 percent of the budget for culture. The least in the history of budgets anywhere in the world. Yet, ”we have never done better”, say those who keep the keys to the joint money safes. And they’re not letting go of them. Soon they will start yelling because of my statement: who am I to point a finger at them!? Who are you not to point my finger at you?
There are still Serbs who care about genuine cultural values. There is a minority still ready to pay the work they do, and the work they have done, with their quality of life. Yes, there is the ”enormous minority” which will preserve ”the seed everything will sprout from”. I don’t want to mark myself as important, but those are You and I and our friends who have illusions of ”cherries in China” and in Stražilovo, and our dead friends who bequeathed us not to give up, as well as to remind the plunderers of our joint money how rich Croesus was, a long time ago, later convicted to drown in melted gold robbed from everyone.

Revolutionaries and guardians. In the past times, there were also more people who wrote poems than poets. Today the discipline has many supporters thanks to digital media, where you can write and publish without any editor’s evaluation. I sometimes joke and say that Serbia has more poets than inhabitants. You are your own editor and there are no obstacles for you to evaluate yourself as a genius without anyone having the right to give their opinion about your writing. Who are you to evaluate my work? This is the most frequent question asked by those who don’t have a critical attitude towards their work. So, let them write, if it’s going well according to them and badly according to the general opinion. I’m on their side. Better to do that than shoot guns. At least they’re doing something that makes them happy. Troubles start when they become unhappy for being unaccepted and begin accusing you of closing doors to them, organizing in clans to prevent them, ”geniuses” to prove themselves, in order to preserve your position. It slowly turns into monomania. Illness. What social positions can poetry bring anyway?
Poetry has always, in one way or another, been a mirror of its epoque. It has always expressed the general spirit of the time. Today is the same. However much it uses contemporary props, terminology and form, there are archetypes, old myths radiating in different ways, dwelling deep inside of it. Talented poets will know how to shape it, just as they will feel the language of time to express it. Thus, they will always, naturally, know how to preserve both esthetical and ethical principles.
Every time has its reflection in poetry, just as it has its poets, both revolutionaries and guardians of tradition.

Pendulum of the world. I believe that, after we disappear, our bad habits will disappear as well and that the world in its physical and intellectual beauty will be renewed on another basis. Who knows how many times it has already happened. How many times we, as a civilization, stumbled upon things which excite us with their elusiveness. For example, the unexplainable pyramids! What if they are parts of some former civilizational cycles that ended? We have the right to hope that we will not be killers of mankind, that we are only exhausted, that our rationality is disappearing… and that our cycle is coming to an end. And there rests all our hope that the world will not disappear.

Travels. I am one of those people who love to travel. While I was younger, there was no need to ask me twice to go somewhere. Travels always have the charm of discovering and revealing. Getting to know landscapes, people, their traditions, looking for similarities and differences. Discovering the fascinating creations of nature. I have traveled entire former Yugoslavia and a part of Europe. There are only a few places I haven’t visited in Serbia.
I love travels that offer small, almost ordinary revelations: frightened deer in the field, upright sunflower heads, a buzzard eagle flickering above the just harvested wheat. Thus, the secrets of life are revealed everywhere around us.
I loved to travel by train, watching the field turning around it as if around an axis.
In foreign cities I like to visit green markets where life is flourishing, where depths of the sea are shown on the stands, and the colorful, seedy power of earth in enormous baskets. From such journeys I most often bring verses, where I revive the scenes from living and destroyed cities, storms and sunsets, deep breathing of the sea…
Traveling is writing a poem or a book, it’s all the same.

Workshop. I write with my hand. Or at least I start writing with my hand. That is why I have numerous pencils, graphite, pens, those with gel… And two fountain pens, one with black and one with blue ink. Tadeuz Ruzevich once asked me why I was writing by hand, it’s outdated, why don’t I type on a typewriter. I know it was a joke. Because, I said, the thought is going from my head through my hand to the paper. It flows directly. No, he said pointing at my fountain pen: it’s plastic, isolator! And we both laughed.
I don’t know how many notebooks I have, full of writings or those with only something started, those where nothing is still written and never will be. Later I type on the computer and change things while typing… Later, I write again what I have typed into a clean notebook. It returns me to the world I was writing about. I love to sit at my desk, which I bought from Branko’s award. It is a small desk which, as I’m writing, turns into a vast field. I don’t write regularly, but when I start, I sometimes sit at the desk for hours, like now, and don’t feel tired. Then I don’t stop until I finish.

The Smile of Ivan V. Lalić. I learned from many writers. From almost all the ones I’ve read. Each of them revealed a secret to me. However, I learned most from Stevan Raičković and Ivan V. Lalić. Stevan was the first I read in my youth. That is how he signed the Stone Lullaby, the one printed by the Serbian Literary Cooperative in the ”Small Library”. The greatest praise was from Ivan V. Lalić, when he told me that, for a long time, he had been wishing to write a poem such as my ”St. George at Zojkić”. I was standing on the stairs of the Association of Writers watching him in disbelief. ”Really”, he said. ”It’s true.” He smiled and left.
I have constantly been reading poets, ever since I was fifteen. I am doing it now too. That is how we talk to each other.

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In Short
Bratislav R. Milanović (Aleksinac, 1950). Poet, narrator, critic, translator, editor. Worked in Radio Belgrade, was art director of the International Meetings of Poets in Belgrade, lived in France for several years. (…) He published twenty editions of poetry books, two books of prose, several translations from French and Italian (Alberto Princis, Pierdomenico Baccalario…), theatrical and radio-drama texts. He is winner of a series of the most reputable literary awards in Serbia. He lives in Belgrade. Editor in chief of ”Literary Papers”.

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Rare and Bold Examples
Our cities today don’t have the people who would maintain the spirit and intellectual level of the environment. Or at least not enough. If we exclude Novi Sad, Kragujevac and Niš, there are only a few cities who have a complete life: Kraljevo, Čačak, Zaječar, Negotin, Vranje. There are bold examples in smaller cities: Požarevac, Požega, Novi Pazar, Knjaževac, Aleksinac. Although, individuals can do a lot: Tomislav Mijović was the soul of Zaječar, Radovan Beli Marković of Lajkovac, Dragan Jovanović Danilov and Petar Matović did many important things for Požega, Slobodan Stojanović and Milisav Milenković for Požarevac, Dane Stojiljković, Dragan Barjaktarević and Dragan Ognjanović for Prokuplje. However, those environments don’t have a cultural atmosphere throughout the year...

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The Kraljevo Case
Small cities in Serbia need to be returned amateur theaters, orchestras and choirs, galleries, where talented individuals from their environment would be able to present themselves. Talented people create the opportunity for affirmation of both themselves and others. There are such examples. Writers from Kraljevo, for several decades, kept upgrading the poetry library ”Stefan the First-Crowned” until they created the ”Decree” edition. It publishes the best books of poetry in Serbia at the time big publishers – ”Prosveta”, ”Nolit”, BIGZ and ”Rad” – became ”the glorious, sad past”. The Kraljevo poetry circle is the best example of cultural self-awareness in Serbia. Both them and the Kraljevo city authorities.

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Destruction through Language
Language is very distracted in Serbia today. Impoverishment and deterioration of the language comes mostly from the media, where people without elementary linguistic education are talking. (…) The most dangerous are political influences on the language. Upgrading linguistic rules about gender equality reminds me of Michurin’s ”grafting wheat to twitchgrass”… That is called destroying the national corpus through language. The Atlantic lobby imposed us atomization of language, so that Serbian has competitors in Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. However, I didn’t notice English separating into American, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, or German separating into Swiss and Austrian. The funniest thing is that those little languages, when put together, are benevolently called ”our common language”. So, they admit it is one language, they just don’t admit it’s called Serbian. Those little languages are followed by erasing Cyrillic, which is the basis of Serbian authentic culture. That is part of the political program as well.
Besides all the groups and individuals who are spoiling the language, the biggest violence over language in Serbia is performed by – the state. If we left it to linguistic experts, our language in public would become decent again.