Borislav Pekic
Borislav Pekic (Born in Podgorica, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, February 4, 1930, died in London, United Kingdom, July 2, 1992) was a Serbian and Montenegrin writer. He was born in 1930, to a prominent family in Montenegro, at that time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. From 1945 until his immigration to London in 1971, he lived in Belgrade. He is considered one of the most important Serbian literary figures of the 20th century.
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Early life and novels
Borislav Pekic spent his childhood in different cities of Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia. He graduated from high school in 1945 in Belgrade and shortly afterwards was arrested with the accusation of belonging to the secret association "Yugoslav Democratic Youth" and sentenced to fifteen years of prison. During the time in prison he conceived many of the ideas later developed in his major novels. He was released after five years and in 1953 began studying experimental psychology at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Philosophy, although he never earned a degree.
In 1958 he married Ljiljana Glišic, the niece of Milan Stojadinovic, Prime Minister of Yugoslavia (1935-1939). The same year Pekic wrote his first of over twenty original film scripts for the major film studios in Yugoslavia, among which Dan cetrnaesti ("The Fourteenth Day") represented Yugoslavia at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Their daughter Alexandra is now Baroness von Maltzan (married to Baron von Maltzan) and keeps the blog "All Things Beautiful", which includes some photographs of Pekic.
For years Pekic had been working on several novels and when the first of them, Vreme cuda (1965), came out, it caught the attention of a wide reading audience as well as the critics. In 1976 it was published in English as The Time of Miracles. It was also translated into French in 1986, Polish in 1986, Romanian in 1987 and in Italian in 2004. Pekic's first novel clearly announced two of the most important characteristics of his work: sharp anti-dogmatism and constant scepticism regarding any possible 'progress' mankind has achieved over the course of history.
During the 1968-1969 period, Pekic was one of the editors of Književne novine literary magazine. In 1970 his second novel, Hodocašce Arsenija Njegovana (The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan) was published, in which an echo of the students protests of 1968 in Yugoslavia can be found. Despite his ideological distance from the mainstream opposition movements, the new political climate further complicated his relationship with the authorities, who refused him a passport for some time. The novel, nevertheless, won the NIN award for the best Yugoslav novel of the year. An English translation The Houses of Belgrade appeared in 1978 and it was later published in Polish, Czech and Romanian.
Exile and further work
Following Pekic's immigration to London in 1971, the Yugoslav authorities still considered him persona non grata and for several years they prevented his books from being published in Yugoslavia. Finally, in 1975, Uspenje i sunovrat Ikara Gubelkijana ("The Rise and Fall of Icarus Gubelkian") appeared. It was later translated into Polish in 1980, Hungarian in 1982, Czech in 1985 and French in 1992.
In 1977 he sent the manuscript of Kako upokojiti Vampira ("How to Quiet a Vampire") to an anonymous literary competition. The Association of Yugoslav Publishers recognized it as the best novel of the year and promptly published it. Kako upokojiti Vampira was subsequently translated into Czech in 1980, Polish in 1985, and Italian in 1992, with an English translation finally appearing in 2005. Based in part on Pekic’s own prison experiences, this novel offers an insight into the methods, logic and psychology of a modern totalitarian regime.
Odbrana i poslednji dani ("The Defence and the Last Days", 1977) was published in Polish and Hungarian in 1982, Czech in 1983, French in 1989 and Swedish in 2003. These three novels essentially dealt with contrasting types of collaboration in Yugoslavia at different levels during World War II.
In 1978, after more than two decades of preparation, investigation and study, the first volume of Zlatno runo ("The Golden Fleece", 1978-1986) was published, fully establishing Pekic as one of the most important Serbian authors. In 1987 he received the 'Njegoš award for this work, marking it as one of the most important contemporary prose writings in Yugoslavia. The Golden Fleece prompted comparison by international critics to James Joyce’s Ulysses and its narrative patterns of classical myths, to Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and its long family history and evolution of pre-war society, and to Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point and its inner tensions created through a maze of conflicting perspectives; yet The Golden Fleece was also hailed as unique. One of the novel’s obvious distinctions is its enormous scope and thematic complexity. The Golden Fleece describes the wanderings of generations of the Njegovans, and through them explores the history of the Balkans. The first and the second volumes were published in French in 2002 and 2003 with the remaining five volumes to be published annually, completing all seven volumes by the year 2008.
During the 1980s Pekic created something entirely new. He had been collecting material for a book about the lost island of Atlantis, with the intention to give “a new, although poetical, explanation of the roots, development, and the end of our civilization”. Despite the classical sources that inspired his anthropological interests, Pekic decided to project his new vision into the future and thus avoid the restrictions of the ‘historical models’, which he had inevitably had to confront in his earlier remakes of ancient myths. The result was three novels: Besnilo ("Rabies", 1983), Atlantida ("Atlantis", 1988) and 1999 (1984). The novel Rabies together with The Golden Fleece and The Years the Locusts Have Devoured, were selected by readers as the best novels in the years from 1982 to 1991. All of them were reprinted numerous times in Serbia. Rabies was published in Spanish in 1988, and Hungarian in 1994, and Atlantis in Czech in 1989. For Atlantis Pekic won the ‘Croatian Goran’ award in 1988. At the end of 1984 Pekic's twelve volume Selected Works appeared, winning him an award from the Union of Serbian Writers.
Godine koje su pojeli skakavci ("The Years the Locusts Have Devoured", in three volumes) was published between 1987 and 1990. Two parts of the 1st volume were translated into English and published in literary magazines. These are Pekic’s memoirs with an account of the post-war days and the life and persecutions of the bourgeoisie under the communist rule. The account is not purely autobiographical in the classical sense, since Pekic also deals with life in general in Yugoslavia after the Second World War. He depicts prison life as a unique civilization and the civilization of ‘freedom’ as a special kind of prison. This trilogy was selected as the best memoir and received the ‘Miloš Crnjanski’ award.
The gothic stories Novi Jerusalim ("The New Jerusalem") were published in 1989, and Pekic accepted the Majska Rukovanja award in Montenegro in 1990 for his literary and cultural achievements. Two stories from the book were published in French and English in different anthologies.
End of life and posthumous work
In 1990 he became the Vice President of the Democratic Party and one of the editors of the party’s newspaper "Demokratija" ("Democracy").Pekic was a member of the P. E. N. Association in London and Belgrade, and became Vice President of the Serbian P. E. N. Association between 1990-1992. He was elected to The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1985, and was made a member of the Advisory Committee to The Royal Crown in 1992. Active both as an author and a public figure until his last day, Pekic died of lung cancer in London on July 2, 1992. Posthumously, in 1992, H.R.H. Crown Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia awarded Pekic the Royal Order of the Two-headed White Eagle, being the highest honour bestowed by a Serbian monarch.
A large body of his work was, and continues to be, published posthumously: Vreme reci ("The Time of Words", 1993); Odmor od istorije ("A Break from History", 1993); Graditelji ("The Builders", 1994); Radanje Atlantide ("The Birth of Atlantis", 1996); Skinuto sa trake ("Transferred from Tapes", 1996); U traganju za Zlatnim runom ("In Search of the Golden Fleece", 1997); Izabrana pisma iz tudjine ("Selected Letters from Abroad", 2000); Politicke sveske ("Political Notebooks", 2001); Filosofske sveske ("Philosophical Notebooks", 2001); Korespondencija kao život, 1&2 ("Correspondence as a Life", 2002-2003).
On the 1st and 2nd July 2000, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in Belgrade, held a symposium with the theme: ‘Literary work of Borislav Pekic on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his birth’. The essays from that symposium were published in 2003.
Pekic has left a vast corpus of high literary quality characterized by following traits: narrative structures of growing complexity that, in the case of The Golden Fleece cross the fuzzy bounds of the post- modern novel and can be best described by the author's sub-title "Phantasmagoria" (this mammoth work is more than 3,500 pages long); the presence of autobiographical thread one can detect in all major Pekic's works, but especially in his vivid and unsentimental memoirs on his years as a political prisoner and essayist books on life in Britain; obsession with the theme of personal freedom crushed by the impersonal mechanism of the totalitarian power.