Virbrevis

Can you tell me a bit in your own words about where you're from and where you grew up?

I was born in Belgrade, I grew up in the suburbs of Belgrade. I'm deeply attached, in terms of identity, to the city, to its history and culture, much like my parents. I would describe myself as very much rooted in Belgrade, my family having changed locations numerous times, within the city and also outside in some cases, but we've always had a particular attachment to this city above all else, geographically speaking.

What do you think of Belgrade then? Do you like it as a city and a place to grow up?

Belgrade has gone through massive changes over the years, over the course of my life alone, let alone during the lives of my ancestors. It used to be the very center, the core of Yugoslavia, a large, multinational state which, for its time, had an outsized influence on the world stage. Now, though still a big city, it's the capital of a much smaller country, and I think one can easily feel it. 

I think the outside context, the context of the whole organism that is the country, influences Belgrade also, and the city has therefore gone through many changes, some of them good, some of them quite bad, a consequence of political decisions. I think what I like about Belgrade, and about growing up in Belgrade, is what I like about any other major European city, which is the sense of history, and a cosmopolitanism which you simply can't find in a smaller town. The city was built by various nationalities, not just Serbs.

Are you drawn to any other major European cities then, if they'd have the same historical and cosmopolitan appeal? Or are you content to stay in Belgrade in the future?

Well, when it comes to Belgrade, what makes it stand out is that it was the inflection point of numerous great civilizations. Cities like Prague and Paris, both of which I admire, grew up mostly within a singular context. Everywhere in Prague, you can feel the Austrian, Central European influence, in the architecture, in the way the streets are shaped, in the public squares and the spirit of the city, and so on. 

Belgrade, however, is a hodgepodge of different influences, and it has such a complicated history. You can feel the city's various occupations and its wounds just walking down almost any street. The city spent centuries under the Turks, and you can see the Ottoman influence in the city's central parts, the eastern bank of the Sava. Then, it was free, and it returned to European influences. On the western side, in Zemun, you feel like you're in any other Austro-Hungarian town, the exact kind of street layout common in their towns, with a main street and buildings with Baroque motifs. And then you have the historical influences - New Belgrade, built under communism, in Brutalist architecture. And then you have scars across the city due to the city's six times being bombarded, most recently in 1999.

Very few cities in Europe, I think, boast such a fascinating history. It has its own appeal, like any other city does. I am temperamentally closest to Western influences, so Paris, Prague, Vienna and the like feel spiritually closest to me, and I would feel at home there the most, as I do with such elements here already.

So, where do you think Belgrade - and Serbia - sits in respect to these different civilisations now? It feels to me as if Serbia is still at the crossroads of East and West, now between Russia and Europe. Where do you think Serbia's place is culturally and politically?

I think it's fair to describe Belgrade and Serbia as quite the basketcase on the European and world stage. I think, at first glance, it feels like any other place in Europe, but then you dig deeper, and you look at the Serbian mindset, and I think you find that we have always resisted easy definition. 

Serbia is nowadays portrayed, in some media, as a Russian offspring, but as a matter of fact, while there has always been a cultural and religious affinity, we spent most of the 20th century estranged from Russia, and culturally-speaking there was very much an affinity for America, for Coca-Cola, for blue jeans and rock music and so on. We have always I think been both that kind of ordinary European, Western-looking Serbia, and a Serbia that very much has its own, how should I put it, parochial, inward-looking ways. I think that tension exists elsewhere, but with Serbia it's especially palpable, because, to this day, our national identity actually isn't all that clear. We spent half the 20th century as socialist Yugoslavs advocating non-alignment, and now we're post-socialist Serbs gravitating at once both westwards and eastwards and nowhere in particular. I view Serbia as a culturally European country, and perhaps that influences my direction politically, though I'm not very concerned with it on a personal level. I believe political alignments of any kind are really ephemeral, that there isn't really an end to history.

Do you personally feel any connection to a sense of wider European identity?

In terms of identity, I have always felt myself to be myself first and foremost. On a personal level, what I dislike most is when people subordinate their individual identities to some social identity, whether it's for a national identity, or a generational identity, or an ideological one. I believe the end result, ultimately, is the suspension of thought, the disappearance of the individual. But I have always felt myself connected to Europe, on a deep level, just as I feel connected to Serbia, within Europe, on a deep level. I believe both connections go much deeper than merely blood and soil, because I am what I am and wouldn't have been the same had I just been born elsewhere, you know, a hundred kilometers to the west or to the east, or even elsewhere within my own country, or my own city. To have brought up individuality might seem like a digression of mine, but really, I feel any person's identity is grounded at once in himself and in all the layers that lead up to humanity as a whole, from the family, to the city, to country, to broader civilizational context, and yes, I see myself connected to the European one and the European line in history.

In that case, could you tell me more about your individual circumstances? Are you working or studying, for instance?

Well, I'm doing both. Right now my studies are kind of on hold for various reasons, personal and non-personal, so I'm working at a major bookstore in the city center. I encounter lots of people, from all over the world, during the average workday. Working at a major bookstore, in a major national capital, is really good for cultivating a more global mindset, with the way it brings you into contact with so many people through mere circumstance.

And what is it that you're studying?

English language, literature and culture.

Why did you choose that subject?

I've had a lifelong fascination with American and British culture, as I saw them, the aspects that I saw. My fascination with it has spanned various areas, including history and philosophy, where I from a young age admired the noble but imperfectly executed American credo and thinkers such as Emerson and Thoreau, through to music, with my love for jazz and rock, and literature, with great writers such as Orwell and Keats and Salinger, to name a thematically and temporally diverse few.

The English language itself, which I speak well though I butcher it on occasion, has been the object of enduring fascination to me, for much the same reasons as outlined by Borges, when he spoke in praise of its diversity in vocabulary, its many colors and nuances, its grammatical possibilities that are inconceivable in my language ('spongeworthy' from Seinfeld comes to mind, you can't translate that into Serbian!). So studying English language, literature and culture has, really, been a continuation of a fascination that began when I was very little.

Could you ever see yourself moving to Britain or America then?

Well, in some ways, my fascination with them has worn out, because they, like most cultures nowadays, have degraded too much into triviality for my taste. The same process is going everywhere, of a sort of cultural degradation, of, I think, the loss of depth and the spread of shallow understandings of everything, the spread of convenience and cheap entertainment, and a materialist, utilitarian philosophy that is not quite to my taste. I think America especially has become a culture of trivialities. I want to experience the world, really, and I think I'd move anywhere, at least for some time, right now if I could, to try things out, to see if some of my preconceptions are wrong, too. But on the whole, I find myself most comfortable in continental Europe at this point of time, perhaps France is closer to a beacon for me, although, really, any problems that bother me in America or Britain at the moment, they're nascent, to some degree, virtually everywhere in Europe as well, including in my country.

Why do you think France and continental Europe appeals to you more?

There appears to be a greater sense of history in continental Europe than in the very young America. This makes the difference to me. I think continental Europe has learned to see history not as something they shape, but as a burden, and has become exhausted from its history, as Cioran believed. Kundera once noted that the British, French and Russian anthems are thumping and speak of glory, while anthems like that of Poland, for instance, start with simply: "Poland has not yet perished".

I think history has weighed down on Europe (and, unlike Kundera, I include France and Russia, because, despite their size, their respective empires have been demolished badly over the past century) more than it has on America, which views itself as in control of history. Optimism for the future seems to me like their domain. Europe, at this point, I identify with pessimism and skepticism in infinite progress, and awareness of how ephemeral and uncertain life is (hence why some 'pessimistic' philosophies have sprung and become popular here, rather than across the pond). America feels too deluded about eternal splendor and 'manifest destiny' to me, compared to Europe, which had its glory days and then went downhill.

Very interesting point. Would I be wrong to draw a connection between that sense of being burdened by history and the recent past of Serbia and the Balkans? You're part of the first generation to grow up in a post-Yugoslav Serbia, after all. How do you think that has impacted your sense of cultural and national identity?

I believe there's something to it. As I mentioned earlier, individuals are shaped by their contexts, their backgrounds, what they do with the circumstances they have before them, and so on and so forth. I am somehow always aware of the fact that, just two years before I was born, this country was at war, and that lots of horrific things were happening, and being done in my people's name, not far away from where I live, and that some people had horrible ideas and horrible intentions in this very society. I think it is hard not to be affected by it. When you live in Sweden, you take it for granted that your country hasn't been at war since the Congress of Vienna over two centuries ago, and you can't imagine war, which is the greatest calamity that a society can experience. Somehow, I am always aware of the turbulent history of this region, and I am always aware that my life is just this one little life, that it can easily be taken away, and that I have no control over whether it will or won't be. In my specific case, it has heightened my sense of individualism. I think individualism comes when one either defines their own values and chases their own goals in life, in direct defiance of societal expectations, or adopts, very simply, a cynical attitude, of pessimism towards 'grand marches' (to borrow again from Kundera), the realization that much of life is, really, about luck and circumstances beyond your control. So the volatility of this society has really impacted my thought and my conception of the self.

What do you think the deepest cultural legacy of those wars has been in your society?

The omnipresence of nationalist motifs, which has become a scourge we cannot get rid of. I think nationalism has really poisoned the nation, including many of our young people, and when a nation as small as ours becomes so insular, narrow-minded and withdrawn, and filled with bitterness and spite, I think it can only be a recipe for disaster. I don't mean necessarily mean war or genocide. I mean simply the poisoning of the spirit, it kills the spirit both of an individual and of a society. Danilo Kiš, one of our great writers, said it best (I tried to translate, roughly): ''Nationalism is, above all else, paranoia. Collective and individual paranoia. As collective paranoia, it is the consequence of envy and fear, and above all a consequence of the loss of individual consciousness.'' This is a problem we still haven't solved, after so many decades, and I believe that this country and this region might not move beyond it for a very long time. When a person thinks with nationalist slogans more than with their own thoughts, there is a massive problem.

Do you think that view is shared elsewhere in the region in your generation? Would you, for example, find yourself in agreement with most young Bosniaks, Croats, or Albanians about the need to overcome nationalism? Or are you in the minority?

I am personally pessimistic about younger generations, and I don't see much hope that they will be any better than the older ones. I think that despite the Internet, and despite the 'global village' it is said we live in, there is still too much parochialism in this region, what in the UK you'd call the 'Little England' mentality, and I think it's present even with young people. And when I look around the region, and see a tenth of Croatia attending a Thompson concert, who has peddled in a lot of vicious hate, I don't see things getting much better. I'm not all that certain that the majority of young people anywhere in the region are sufficiently free of nationalism. I think there's a whole spectrum between full nationalism and no nationalism, too. Somebody can seem like a liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan person, and then you find out they have some of the same poisonous attitudes as everybody else, that they believe bits and pieces of the same propaganda everybody else has been drinking.

With that in mind, what are your reflections on the project of Yugoslavia itself as someone who has grown up only after its momentous collapse?

A noble idea, but doomed from the very start. I think it came at a too late point in history; Germany had unified over 40 years before Yugoslavia formed, as had Italy, and both of them had solid cultural foundations in place before their formation. The Yugoslav identity came too late, when separate national identities had already crystallized, and then, when Yugoslavia was formed, though there appeared to have been good will on part of all the nations, ultimately it was botched in execution. And then, in my view, to re-establish Yugoslavia after World War Two, after the genocide that had occurred, might have been a mistake. I think, without proper reflection on that chapter of history, things were never going to work out well, and when Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s, it was ultimately due to Croatia's lingering separatist aspirations and the Serbs' fear of a second Ustaše regime. Again, a noble idea, one that I wish could have ultimately been preserved, but unfortunately wasn't, due to a combination of the mentality of people in this region, our incompetent ruling classes, and historical bad luck.

What do you see as the best path forwards for regional cooperation and reconciliation in the future? What model might be a better fit for the region?

Nothing will get better unless we, as individuals, want to become better. Unfortunately in this case, but we are part of the world, and some of the same trends dragging us down here are in fact global trends. It is hard to hate your neighbor on account of their nationality if you are a well-adjusted person. When it comes to the ruling class, they should be doing more to bring us together rather than divide us, but their whole business model depends on us being separate and bickering. I don't think it's possible to talk of models there, really. It is I believe as individuals that we can make a difference. If we actively choose to reject poisonous ideas and treat each other as humans above all else, then I think society can become better. But I think this is difficult in the age of politicians who adhere to the maxim of 'divide et impera', and certainly difficulty with all the algorithms that appeal to people's worst instincts.

Moving away from politics then, what is it about writing that appeals to you?

I think that writing is an attempt to make sense of yourself and the world. Writing is an attempt to get to know oneself better, and to investigate human existence. Writing appeals to me because I have always been an introvert who doesn't get to talk all that much in real life, though I am filled with thoughts and emotions I am always aching to express. And so, writing gives me the proper outlet, and the fact that it's such a solitary activity appeals to me. What's more, I like the absolute liberty of creative and confessional writing. Unlike in, say, academic writing, you are not constrained by the limits of the material world. In academic writing, you have to constantly justify everything you say with peer-reviewed sources. I believe the truth can be found through probing the depths of one's own self, that there is some sort of deeply personal, yet actually existing truth we carry deep within ourselves, and I think it comes out in moments of deep introspection. Oscar Wilde once said, ''The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.'' In this age where everybody knows disconnected tidbits of information that are great for a game show but say nothing about the human condition, I think writing represents a highly intimate search for real truth, an attempt to eke some sense out of a senseless world.

You mentioned a linguistic element to it before. What do you think are the differences between writing in English and Serbian, and which do you prefer?

I strongly prefer writing in English to writing in Serbian, though I sometimes struggle when writing in English because Serbian is better for conveying a certain feeling. This is difficult for me to do in English, especially as I tend to be overly concerned with syntactic correctness and somehow never work it out right. The main reason I prefer English is because it is much better for the expression of abstract thought compared to Serbian. What in Serbian would sound stilted and overly scientific might seem perfectly fine in English, at least from my point of view. I think Serbian is great for raw feelings, but English is much better for the expression of thought, and likewise, it appears to me, with Romance languages.

Last question. Could you tell me about one artist from your culture who you particularly like, why you like them, and anything that makes them stand out as being uniquely embedded in that culture? A musician, painter, photographer, writer, anything you like.

Among Serbian artists I greatly admire those who have, in one way or another, defied the spirit of their times both on a national level and on a global level. Among them I would place the writers Danilo Kiš, whom I mentioned earlier, and Borislav Pekić, both of whom remain memorable for their numerous writings in opposition to ideologues. I also admire musicians with a defiant streak, like Đorđe Balašević, who was a major anti-war voice during the 1990s. I don't know what 'uniquely embedded' would really be. Ultimately I believe that artists have very rarely changed the world, including their own nations. In the end, an artist's legacy is his or her quite helpful attempt to make sense of existence for those of us who are perpetually unsatisfied, who are hungry for more and know this trivial world offers little possibility of acquiring it. So, I suppose those are individuals I would single out.