Sreten Ugričić is known on the Serbian literary scene as an author with a specific writing style, skillfully combining elements of fiction and non-fiction. Ugričić’s writing is characterized also by postmodern play with language and form. He is also considered as one of our most socially engaged writers. This latest novel published by Laguna reflects the commitment to contemplate what is Serbia in actual fact, after all the things it experienced. Ugričić’s vocabulary is impeccable and a real treat for the readers (despite all the radical pain, well-nigh desperation packed into the three hundred pages). As set out on the book’s covers, it is "quite another matter how Serbian public that continually refuses to reflect on Serbia would receive such an uncompromising book about Serbia from an author who also happens to be head of a very important national institution - the National Library of Serbia".
 This book, like the other ones preceding it also has some elements of astronomy… Why?
– I am an astronomer by the virtue of the fact that I live in Serbia. But, if the saying that Serbs are a heavenly people is true, then we have no history but astronomy. I dwell on our nation, its future, and this, in a way is astronomy.
The year in which the plot of your novel is set is 2014. Why have you chosen precisely that year?
– The novel is set in the year 2014, in a very near future that is almost our present. But metaphorically, it represents our not so distant past. The timeframe of the plot is a full one hundred years, actually from the assassination in Sajarevo. The following one hundred years actually represent a continual celebration of this event.
Why is this event so important to you?
– This is one of the central events of (our) national mythology. It is a reincarnation of the event of the year 1389, while Princip is a reincarnation of Obilić. In this novel I attempted to re-examine all the novelesque and complex features of the basic principles of our national being such as the heroes that existed or those that did not exist; those that are and those that are not. I don’t know whether you are aware of the fact that in our historiography there is not a single concrete note about the existence of a knight called Obilić. There is no concrete trace of existence of any such hero. So, he does exist and at the same time he does not exist – while being permanently reincarnated. The other motives include: Latin or Cyrillic script, or those motives of involving persistent bias such as, for instance, the attitude towards the Russians that is much too emotional, then also the attitude towards religion, the status of the Church and the Patriarch in our community that is implanted in our national mythology.
Many other nations also have the myth about the unknown warrior hero … What made you decide to take it up?
– Most of the motives, of course, were taken from without. The myth of the unknown warrior hero as well. That is why the subtitle of the novel has the word non-fiction, although I have in actual fact not invented anything. Most of this information I hear every day on the radio, TV, in talking to neighbors, friends, it’s what we learn at school. So, I invented nothing. The unknown hero exists in national myths. Most nations know this myth. The unknown hero comes from the people and while, retaining anonymity, sacrifices himself for his people and nation. But, in this case, this myth is reversed, for the precise reason that the hero fights against such and similar mythologies, because the regime rules precisely thanks to such and similar myths.
 In the interesting collage that your work is, you also touch upon the phenomenon of telepathy?
– The unknown hero and the principle heroine have their own telepathic relations regarding the regime. Most people believe no such thing as telepathy exists and that there is no such form of communication, at least not in an evidenced form. But those who have at least once in their life been in love know that telepathy is very possible. This relation is in many ways a telepathic relation. The very act of reading involves a telepathic relation. Every communication bears this feature of being alternative in relation to what represents the dominant. Infatuation bears elements of telepathic communication. These are all metaphors that these motives cover. Also, prayer is a form of telepathy, and relation to God is telepathy as well. This grace has been given to one to pray with candor and this is in no way something fictional, something warranting proving.
Among the more difficult questions that you purport to provide an answer to is the ever painful question of identity?
– Every identity is fiction. It is always some sort of metaphor. Embracing any identity has ever and solely served to position you within a certain framework, so that you could find your place and purpose, on the one hand, and to enable this framework to replicate, on the other. As frameworks contain different levels, we then move from orbit to another, from one identity to another. The biggest mistake would be to believe our identities are something solid, something real, something natural and ever existing. If we fail to ponder deeper, then we for the most part think that some things - such as language - are forever, that they outlive man’s lifespan. During our lifetime, we can change several countries and citizenships, and languages are thus born and disappear and transform before our own eyes. The main warning in this context would be not to succumb to manipulation, to the illusion. The sole identity that I would accept, if I had to (choose one), would be the identity of responsibility.
Why responsibility?
– Because responsibility is the other side of freedom. Only he who is free can be responsible. This means that if you don’t act responsibly you are doing away with your own freedom. By dwelling in these identities being off ered you, each one in one’s own milieu, you in fact renounce freedom. This is why I would accept as the only one identity possible for me – the identity of responsibility. People are not facts, but human beings. Given time, facts become very susceptible to change. The things that one hundred years ago or fi ve hundred years ago were facts, are not so today. It is madness to believe that you have been assigned an identity as a matter of natural necessity.
In your latest book, as well as in your works that preceded it, you skillfully juggle with genres. The novel is full of nonfi ctional examples that assert a play occurring between different genres and our real life. One of your earlier books had Yugoslavia as its subject matter?
– One of the poetical means I favor deploying is repetition. That novel, written in the late 1980s, has a sentence: "Yugoslavia is a wonderful country. Too bad it is no longer". At the time, in the late 1980s, whoever wanted to see could have discerned that that country was no longer. This sentence, as provocative or self-chauvinistic as it may have been, was very true. It served me as a kind of leitmotif for this latest book as well.
The novel has a number of levels. Among others, it may be read also as a love story or, more accurately, as a novel about love?
– I believed I was writing about this book with some restraint and in an abstract way. However, judging from the reactions of readers that have come to me, this is a text packed with emotion that manages to hurdle obstacles and convincingly convey this message. I consider this an asset to the book, to the text. What is important is that love is actually here the main ingredient that is central to the entire plot. Love is like art, and only here we can feel as if we are not elsewhere, that we have not lost our way, that we are among our own and that we understand each other well.
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In Sreten Ugričić’s biography, it is written:
"Writer, philosopher, conceptual artist, astronomer, director of the National Library of Serbia. Lives abroad. Life is another country. Art is homeland."
Books: Upoznavanje s Veštinom (Getting to Know the Craft), stories about women and metaphysics, 1985; Neponovljivo (Unrepeatable), four Gospels of postmodernist Romanticism with commentaries, 1987; Maja and Me and Maja, a novel about growing up, 1993; Stance (Stanzas), co-authored with Branislav Dimitrijević), a monograph about painter Mileta Prodanović, 1996; Infinitiv (The Infinitive), a study about an invented contemporary American philosopher, 1997; Bog jezika i druge priče (The God of Language and Other Stories), stories about little and big Christ, 2000; Večeras u Emausu (Tonight at Emmaus), selected stories, 2003; Razlozi za Oproštaj (Reasons for Absolution), three essays (lecture delivered in Vukovar), 2006; Uvod u Astronomiju (Introduction to Astronomy), treatises on the position of imagination and responsibility in Serbia, 2006. | |
