As a poet, he is a recipient of the most significant awards. As the owner of publishing house Arhipelag, he is a reliable provider of extremely high-quality books. He has also exposed the public to one of the most precious legacies of contemporary literature – the correspondence of Danilo Kiš. His essays and critiques represent an important part of Serbia’s literary historiography. His involvement in the ProGlas movement has led to him becoming visible on the broader social scene
Without additionally idealising his childhood, he recalls how then everything back then was in its right place; that things in life were arranged logically. He felt completely at peace in that world of his childhood. He was a proper little creative constructor in his early years. He always had around him some gadgets that he was able to instantly take apart and reassemble. He was even capable of completely disassembling a radio and putting it back in working order.
“I did that many times, then on one occasion I took a radio apart and was suddenly no longer able to return it to its original state. I don’t know what happened, as that had previously been a routine task. It was then that I abandoned my constructor notions and turned to books, which I’ve never given up on.”
He initially read everything: books of famous and unknown authors, books covering various fields that had nothing to do with his required school reading. He read every book contained in the school library in his home village of Bobovo near the Montenegrin town of Pljevlja, after which it was the turn of the books of the library in Pljevlja, where he completed Gymnasium secondary school. He primarily read its works of literature, but also historiography and opinion journalism. When someone reads so much, it is somehow logical that they will start writing.
“There is the known Fernand Braudel saying that there are only three safe harbours in the world: Carthage, June and July. I would add without modesty that there is one more safe harbour: good books. My life is marked by the reading of the most varied books. I was always curious, interested in multiple things at the same time, and never just one thing. I noticed that I was able to find some of the answers I needed in books. More in some books and less in others, while I didn’t find any answers in some books. I’m still seeking many answers. I’ve since learnt that the search is often more important than the answers themselves. I started writing poems in primary school, presumably as the fruit of all that reading. I started publishing them when I was in the fourth or fifth year. Those were happenings, and that’s when I grew attached to newspapers, and that passion has never left me since then. Of course, those were children’s newspapers, which there was a large number of back then in Belgrade, Gornji Milanovac, Zagreb, Sarajevo etc. I had a major moment in 1984, when I won first prize in the literary competition of the Yugoslav national magazine Zmaj. I received that award in Belgrade, at 7 Francuska Street, where the Association of Writers of Serbia was located. Testifying to how much that competition meant at that time is the fact that the jury members included Desanka Maksimović, Arsen Diklić, Ljubivoje Ršumović et al. That was the first time I’d seen so many great writers gathered together. Most of the writers of my required school reading were there.”
When defining the way he was raised in the home, he describes the behaviour of those closest to him whose words didn’t contradict their actions. He grew up with his parents, grandmother, two younger brothers and sister.
“My parents championed solidarity, but not in an abstract way, rather by helping people who needed help at that moment. That firstly applied to the people around us. On the other hand, in the home I learnt what it means when you’re guided by a sense of righteousness. It was clear what justice and injustice are, what’s good and what’s evil; what’s moral and what isn’t, what’s appropriate and what isn’t. That was crystal clear, to such an extent that it wasn’t even discussed much. Those were categories that were experienced on a daily basis and confirmed through various examples. I also learnt that I have to appreciate others, to listen to them, but to do as I think best, to be calm in confronting myself.”
He continued writing and publishing his works in secondary school – not only literary prose, but also journalistic texts. He began participating in literary contests for young poets, travelling to poetry festivals, receiving awards and meeting young poets with whom he remains friends to this day. As he was completing his high school education, his poems were published in Književna reč [Literary Word] and other literary magazines. He published his first book of poetry, Podzemni bioskop [Underground Cinema], when he was just 19, with most of the poems it contained having been written while he was a secondary school pupil. In that autumn of 1991, when he came to Belgrade to study, that book of his also came with him, to appear at the Book Fair. He didn’t stop writing.
I worry that my children will live in a world that’s worse than the one in which I lived
One of his poems, written around ten years ago, is called Skladište [Warehouse] and starts with the verse: Man is a warehouse of fears. It has been published on several occasions and found its way into several anthologies. We ask what the greatest fear is today for this CorD interlocutor, who is a husband and the father of a son who’s a university student and a daughter who’s completing secondary school.
“There are many fears in our lives. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have fears. Fears modify us, warn us, bring us back down to earth. Fears are natural and necessary. But if fear epitomises us, then we are no longer human. That fear then trivialises, subjugates and humiliates us. It is essential for man to balance fear well.
“I worry that my children will live in a world that’s worse than the one in which I lived. And the world in which I lived wasn’t ideal in the slightest. I was aware that there was a lot of damage and failures in that world; a lot of injustice and imbalance. I would say that I became politically aware early on and realised that man is limited by a one-party system. Having just one opinion humiliates a man excessively. The 1990s were coloured by wars and sanctions, and, like many others, I spent most of my time on the streets. The period I lived through was somehow constantly marked by a lack of liberty and a constant struggle for freedom. From one autocracy, with a brief respite, we quickly fell under the rule of another autocracy. And that’s why I’m today scared that my children will live in a world worse than mine.
“My other fear is deeply selfish and perhaps totally personal: that my generation will experience outright defeat. The main sin of my generation is that it allowed for the restoration of the autocratic order in Serbia. If the ‘90s are the sin of the previous generation, then the return of the autocratic order is the key event in the life of my generation. It’s up to our generation to carry that fight. It will either restore democracy to Serbia or experience its final failure in that struggle. I’m even more worried by the fact that many members of my generation aren’t participating in that struggle at all. Under the pressure of various obligations, as well as social and political fears, they accept the situation as it is and thus create the image of a generation that wanted a lot, but didn’t achieve much.”
Gojko served from 1997 to 2007 as editor-in-chief of publishing company Stubovi kulture, which primarily published works of contemporary Serbian literature. It was then that he realised that a person ought spend a certain period of his life doing one job and should then move on. He needed a new challenge and motivation, which he found in the establishing of his own publishing company. And so it is that next year will mark the 18th anniversary of the founding of his Arhipelag. He started from scratch and has endured successfully in a new publishing model throughout all these years.
“That is a kind of author’s version of publishing in which the editor is an important figure and in which there are clearly profiled editions offering readers literature and humanities. This work is determined by two poles that appear to be opposites at first glance. One is high culture that provides us with our criteria for work. The other is the market. Regardless of how he is profiled, the publisher is an economic entity and must use the market to verify and confirm his ideas. The principle of value and the principle of market and risk can be contradictory, but I firmly believe in the possibility of forging an alliance between those two principles. It isn’t sufficient to simply publish top books and writers, rather it’s also necessary to create visibility and recognition for those writers and their books. In order for us to succeed in this, we have to use modern marketing concepts; we have to be open to new media and technology, perceiving them as allies and a kind of expansion of your domain.”
Apart from interesting books, Arhipelag is also known for organising a large number of events. It has offered numerous programmes to the public, including literary evenings and tours of local and foreign writers. This publisher has brought some of the most important writers to Serbia, such as David Grossman, György Konrád, Péter Esterházy, Claudio Magris, Javier Cercas, Charles Simić, Adam Zagajewski et al. These events have been among the best-attended literary programmes in Belgrade and Serbia over recent decades. The Belgrade Festival of European Literature has also been organised by Arhipelag for the past decade.
If the ‘90s are the sin of the previous generation, then the return of the autocratic order is the key event in the life of my generation
“In this age of glamour and spectacle, literature has a strategic deficit compared, for instance, to film and theatre. Literature offers no premieres. Literary festivals can thus be new fields of activity for modern literature. At them it is possible to introduce writers who aren’t sufficiently well-known, and to bring even more fame to already well-known writers. That’s a model that yields results. We have been working for just shy of 18 years thanks to the trust of our readers.”
Among the most significant results of that trust is the fact that Mirjana Miočinović, Danilo Kiš’s first wife, offered Gojko the chance for Arhipelag to be the exclusive publisher of Danilo Kiš’s works for Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. The last work in that series is the book of Kiš’s correspondence. This relates to the letters that Kiš received during his lifetime from writers, publishers, friends, former friends, literature interpreters, readers, family members, etc. This book masterfully depicts a bygone time in which literature played a huge role that is, unfortunately, no longer the case today.
Gojko was just 17 when Kiš died, and he never got to meet him. He took the news of his demise like a personal loss. “Kiš represents a special figure in my literary upbringing. I’ve never written prose, but I’ve always read it, perhaps even more than poetry. Perhaps the prose of Danilo Kiš is one of the reasons I never wanted to write some story. I was so fulfilled by his prose that it was enough for me to read such stylistically perfect prose. Kiš described himself as a failed poet, which is why he had to write prose, and I always recognised those strong lyrical elements of his literature and that poet’s dedication to literature. Kiš’s life and attitude towards literature are something special. In contrast to many of today’s writers, Kiš comes across as someone who didn’t live from literature, but rather lived for literature; it was his natural choice. He didn’t choose literature because he wanted to have a career, but because he had to express himself, to somehow decant all the drama of his life into literature.”
For Gojko, this year’s Belgrade Book Fair represented the same thing it does every year: the most important business event of the year. And that’s despite the Fair no longer being what it once was, in either a business or a personal sense, and no longer holding the kind of significance it had ten or twenty years ago.
“I’ve been coming to the Book Fair in continuity since 1989. From that Fair to this latest one, I’ve been in attendance at the Fair every day from opening to closing. I met all the writers I know today at those fairs in the ‘90s. The Book Fair wasn’t only a business event, but also a great festival of literature, the biggest possible literary stage. Writers were the main figures there. This changed gradually, with the Book Fair beginning to lose the charm of a great literary and cultural event, while the main figures are no longer writers, but rather retailers, influencers, people who’ve become famous and influential in various other ways, for whom books represent a kind of extension of their public or marketing participation. That’s how literature and books lost the recognisability that made them special.
The Book Fair today serves as a big shopping mall for books, though it isn’t as shimmering, ordered, and polished as shopping malls. Alongside all of this, the Fair has also lost its international dimension to a great extent. The position of Belgrade is such that it is natural for the largest book fair in this part of Europe – in the lands between Istanbul and Vienna – to be in Belgrade, and for it to be a point of reference for broader European circles. It unfortunately isn’t all that, because it has lost the profile it once had, and a new one hasn’t been conceived.”
Numerous Arhipelag editions featured at this year’s Book Fair are attracting the attention of readers. This includes Stone and Shadow, the new novel of highly rated Turkish writer and PEN International president Burhan Sonmez. This novel is a great saga of Turkish society in the 20th century, which unfolds from the beginning of the 1930s to the present day. Another novel that’s proving interesting is by contemporary Slovenian writer Drago Jančar, Upon the Creation of the World, which has enjoyed great success in Europe over recent years. Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s short novel The Funeral Party is also becoming wondrously relevant today, as it recounts the story of a group of Russian emigrants in the 1980s who formed their own enclave in New York’s Manhattan…
It isn’t sufficient to simply publish top book sand writers, rather it’s also necessary to create visibility and recognition for those writers and their books
Gojko has been increasingly promoting himself as one of the founders of ProGlas over the past year, and here he also explains his engagement in this movement to us.
“I participated in all major demonstrations during the ‘90s, but also in recent years. I promoted myself in public life and wrote texts that had a pronounced political or social character. I addressed topics that are public and got engaged. It seemed to me at one point that this wasn’t enough. In conversation with numerous people who I later found myself together with in ProGlas, we came upon the idea that we should perhaps promote ourselves jointly and invite other people to join us in bringing back to Serbia something that’s been lacking for an entire decade.
On the one side, that relates to the expressing of critical opinions in public, while on the other side it is a rebellion of free and independent citizens who speak publicly without any personal interest and without any demands for political power. In our first public address, we said that we are just a group of concerned citizens and that we won’t run for any kind of political office or seek any kind of power. We have come together because we believe that the situation in our country is intolerable and that the damage caused in Serbia over the previous period is enormous. If the current government and order is extended over the years ahead, much of this damage will be irreparable.
Over the past year, I’ve met people in Serbia that I didn’t previously know, people who risk a lot, but who have great hope and enthusiasm. Together we all want to live and work in this country, and for our children to live and work in this country. But we have to create the conditions for the generations to come; the condition whereby staying here is natural and not an act of heroism. The prerequisite for that is the restoration of free thinking, as well as a democratic order in which the government will be replaceable, limited, and responsible.”