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Alexander
Alexander B. Nedelkovich, Dr. Sci. Lit., is a happy man, because throughout his life he fought, by all the strategies and means available, for the downfall of the communist dictatorship in Serbia, and now he believes this has been achieved, so that his greatest dream has been fulfilled within his lifetime, and that is seldom given to a human being. “Two scenes”, says a Serb writer Goran Skrobonya in his text about the night of 5th October 2000 when the regime in Beograd fell, “remain sharply etched in my memory: while we were walking along the (central) street, horrendous screeching noise overtook us – some guys in a jeep were pulling a police patrol car from which the tyres were burned off, so that the remains of the wheels were dragged over the asphalt in showers of sparks; and then I saw, on top of one car, with some flag or poster in hand, Dr. Aca Nedelkovich, in his eternal pauper’s raincoat of olive-gray color, with an expression of a man who won the main prize on the lottery only after he had lost even his last hope of ever winning it.” A participant in more than one hundred mass demonstrations and fights with the communist police, including the riots on 9th March 1991, this otherwise peaceful and quiet (and poor) teacher of English in a gymnasium (grammar school) in Beograd is trying now, in peace, to build up some additional aspects of his scientific and literary career. His doctoral dissertation in literary studies, defended successfully in October 1994 at the Philological Faculty in Beograd (Belgrade) you may copy for free from the web-site under the link “doktorati – doctoral dissertations” where it is given entire, in Serbian and also in English; it has been placed there without omitting endnotes and literature, in fact without omitting a single letter, exactly the whole text (400 typed pages, but given as a single document in Word, zipped to only about 300 KB). This is Nedelkovich’s quiet, almost inaudible way of protesting the fact that in Serbia many doctors of science are carefully hiding their dissertation from public scrutiny, even saying they don’t have access to any copy of it anywhere, so as to conceal how empty of meaning and how scientifically useless their dissertation is. (His is about the alternative-history, or counter-factual, American and British science-fiction novels, those showing what history could have been if some key event had turned out differently, for instance, what the world would be today if Adolf Hitler had won the Second World War.) Nedelkovich has, sort of along-the-way, also translated some seventy books, among them several books of popularized science, from the fields and disciplines which particularly interest him, such as cosmology and physics, and particularly quantum physics and theory of chaos; besides, he translates for “Alexandria”, “Knyizhevna rech” (which means “Literary Word”) and other magazines. He lives in Beograd (“more accurately, I am resting in Beograd, as I have already achieved the main thing”) with his wife and two grown-up sons. He was born in October 1950 in Beograd.
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