Dusan
Velickovic, born 1947, writer, translator and publisher. Lives in
Belgrade. Founder and editor-in-chief of the publishing house Alexandria
Press and of the international magazine Biblioteka
Alexandria devoted to books as the magazine's main subject of interest.
From 1993 to 1997 he was the editor-in-chief of NIN weekly magazine in
Beograd too. He published two books, Images
of Doubt and Amor
Mundi, and many stories and essays as well. The book Amor Mundi,
and the stories "Internationale", "Letter to Friedrich Nauman"
and "Men in Black"
have been translated and published in several foreign languages.
You are a writer, publisher, editor of a magazine. Isn't it quite some courage in the conditions that are not, or are to a very small degree, favorable for what you are doing?
Conditions were never, not in any place, very favorable for non-commercial writing and publishing. Those are risky and uncertain jobs even in the most developed countries. I have friends among writers and publishers both in Europe and in America, and I know that their problems essentially do not differ, or not much, from the problems that I or my colleagues have here. I am not speaking, of course, about the size of the market, or amounts of money paid to authors; I am saying that, in a very similar fashion, things are not easy. A man can really ask himself what motivates some people, with such a multitude of potentially profitable businesses all around, to devote themselves to something that never, ever, anywhere, has truly good conditions for success.
Actually, I think it does not take much courage to be a writer or publisher, no matter what the conditions for such work may be. True courage is needed for something entirely else. It takes courage to be independent, to endure with your own view of the world, and to raise that world-view at least a little, for one nuance, above the political, social and ethnic cliches. Courage is, therefore, needed only for creative provocation.
The publishing house Alexandria Press and the magazine Biblioteka Alexandria are, both of them, true fresh breeze in the cultural life in these parts of the world. Which is the orientation of the project you are working at?
What makes the difference between this project and others is its international character. To begin with, Biblioteka Alexandria is the first true international book-review magazine in Serbia. The magazine has cooperation contracts with a number of most prominent magazines and publishers worldwide. This cooperation is particularly good with one of the most highly respected American non-governmental magazines Foreign Policy, so that, for instance, some exclusive new contributions, completely new texts of Llosa or Fukuyama were printed first here, in our magazine, and only then in English, in other countries. Besides, Biblioteka Alexandria has a regularly-published electronic bi-lingual edition on the Internet address www.alexandria-press.com. This concept has been partly motivated by political reasons, because the magazine and the publishing house were born in the conditions of repression and isolation, so that the entire project was a sort of small, individual Resistance. But the main reason for this concept was the belief that it was possible, and absolutely essential, to overcome two attitudes dominant in our, Serbian culture. One is the provincial attitude manifested as uncritical admiration and awe for all and everything that comes in from abroad, and the other is the stupidly egocentric attitude that we are, in essence, the best, the smartest and the most beautiful. In that sense, Alexandria is an attempt to be a natural part of the world, and part of the best and most interesting new creativity in the world right now.
What have you achieved so far? What will be your future direction?
The publishing house Alexandria Press, founded 30th September 1999 under the sponsorship of the weekly magazine Vreme, has published, so far, six pocket-books, among them one classic of the world literature Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle, and several works by young and talented Serbian alternative writers such as Slobodan Ilic and Dusko Paunkovic. This is one of the directions that we will continue to take, and in fact we are already preparing the first novels of two also young, outstandingly talented writers, Vule Zuric and Sasa Radojevic. At this moment the first novel of Nebojsa Kandic, Genius's Hell or Female Body, is in print, a very short and very odd novel that has been circulating for some time now in manuscript through Belgrade as a sort of underground bestseller. Also Thomas Bernhardt's masterpiece, his short novel Concrete, is forthcoming as well as the Danish writer Jens-Martin Ericksen's novel Winter at Dawn, inspired by events in Srebrenica.
Axexandria Press has recently published an anthology of love letters of world writers, titled The Angel Behind the Mirror, the most complete such anthology that ever has appeared in Serbian language; thus we have started work on a series of books that ought to be compendiums of a special sort.
Your prose deals with contemporary themes and dilemmas. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the foreign publishers are interested in them?
I prefer to think of myself as someone who writes of human destinies. I am more interested in destiny than psychology. Psychology somehow flows all by itself from destiny: in fact, without destiny there would be no psychology. Similarly, I am more interested in the story itself, than in any sort of experiment with language or form. When you have that kind of inclination, then you almost inevitably arrive at, as you said it, contemporary themes and dilemmas. I was, for instance, interested in the destinies of Lenin, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Koestler or Hannah Arendt, and in some great ideas and ideologies, and whenever I wrote about these I always realized that in the end I arrived at this, our time, or, more precisely, at myself. Most of my stories I published in foreign magazines. It probably mean that the stories contain something easily understood in other cultural contexts too. I think personal angle always lends universal interest. I suppose that is the reason why my book Amor Mundi, a collection of short stories about the days of martial law in Beograd, was translated into several languages. I wrote it exactly so, more as a book about myself and less about political or social circumstances.
Sometimes we ascribe to the intellectual enormous, almost magic power. Where is intellectual today, and what is his real role?
I think that exceptional power or some special importance are less and less ascribed to intellectuals, these days. The era of the so-called great, independent intellectual is gone. In the second half of the 20th century they used to build their position in the framework of the 68's political context and in the milieu of Soviet dissidents. None of that exists today, so room does not exist for influence such as Habermas had, or Kolakowsky, Sartre, the Praxis Group, or Heinrich Bell. Only one person remains, Noam Chomsky, precisely as evidence that there are no independent intellectuals any more. Hardly anyone takes Chomsky's overproduction of texts seriously any more, although Chomsky is no less Chomsky today than he was before. Today the intellectuals are incorporated into the systems of State and society, they are clerks within advisory or research teams.
How do you view the cultural ties of Serbia and Montenegro? Today, when all other connections between them are thin and shaky?
I do not believe they are shaky. I think that these new political circumstances (specifically, the debates about Montenegrin independence) are producing a wrong impression, really they are a sort of a transitional period in which many things are viewed from the standpoints of prejudice and ignorance. So, this is not a matter of cultural ties. Cultural interest and mutual cultural contacts are a simple reality. The issue is, whether Montenegro will be an independent state, when and how. There was I time when I thought that this fragmentation, this crumbling of the Balkan territory, was stupid. Today, on the contrary, I think it is the best way for all of us who feel ourselves to be a part of the world. If someone asked me about it, I would say: give me a European Montenegro and a European Serbia, let them be as independent as they want, just let them be independent in a European way, without borders and customs payments, without suspiciousness and isolation. About the so-called cultural connections I have no worry, because they will develop anyway, depending mainly on our individual abilities and creativity. Once Montenegro and Serbia are finally European countries, they will still have the privilege they enjoy today -- to be so close and so similar and so different.
"Pobjeda", 15th September 2001
Translated by dr Aleksandar B. Nedeljkovic
