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In the autumn of 2018, the book “Living One’s
Ideals: Sonja Biserko: A Portrait Sketch” – Sonja’s friends and
associates have compiled to mark her 70th anniversary - was launched
in the Center for Cultural Decontamination. Borka Pavićević titled
her paper for the book “Sonja, a Nice Name.” What followed on such
rather inconspicuous title was a perfect psychological portrait of
Sonja Biserko. (“Sonja may be a perfectionist too, but above all a
perfectionist about her own self. At the same time, she is a
remarkably and unusually hardworking person, a laboring worker, a
researcher, a traveler, a writer, a publisher…She lives by her
principles, dedicated to the mission she has put together and
imposed on her own self without exception; in a word, Sonja has
turned her flows into virtues. She has turned the loss of the
country she was born in into a gain through her work, by speaking
clearly and distinctly about causes and consequences, and fighting
for the rights of people weaker than herself.”)
Before she addressed the launch, Borka told me
holding the book, “It’s very good that this saw the light of day.”
My reply to this was quite spontaneous. “I’ll make your biography
sketch as well.” And then I got a rather unexpected answer. “I would
like that,” she said. I understood it as her need to have stock
taken – and not only of her live and work. But Borka and I –
fourteen years her senior – believed we had plenty of time ahead.
Ana Miljanić also sensed Borka’s need for “taking stock” when
directing a play to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1968 student
uprising at the University of Belgrade, and especially when planning
a monograph on the 20th anniversary of the Center for Cultural
Decontamination.
* * *
Borka’s death this summer in Belgrade had a
powerful effect on many circles (among playwrights, theater
directors, actors; anti-fascist organizations and peace movements;
within the non-governmental sector) and in many centers (Belgrade,
Sarajevo, Zagreb, Skopje, Ljubljana, Podgorica, Kotor, Danilovgrad,
Pristina, Warsaw, Stockholm, etc.). And echoed in the media too.
Even media outlets that have smeared her for years, showed good
taste by running decent news about her passing. Faced with her death
and, probably, with her entire life, they simply stopped dead.
Friends, associates and many public figures
recognized in Borka a unique phenomenon of Serbia’s cultural and
social life, and of Yugoslavia too over decades; unique, by her
steadfast opposition to the war, resolute engagement in anti-war
manifestations, and, no doubt, and in the way she had built and
modeled the Center for Cultural Decontamination she had been at the
helm of from 1995 till her death.
In the days we were saying the last goodbye to
Borka Pavićević film director Želimir Žilnik gave us the key to
understanding her phenomenon. Addressing the commemoration in the
Center for Cultural Decontamination he said, “In the 1990s slaughter
reined on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Against this
tragic backdrop women stood for a better part of the society.” And
indeed, women were those who were raising their voice against the
draft of their husbands, brothers and especially their children –
against the call-up to yet another war. There were wise women too in
some political parties, non-governmental organizations, the cabinet
of Zoran Đinđić, and in almost illegal women’s organizations in
local communities. There were clearheaded women among
journalists…But the women Žilnik was referring to were “the
witches,” the label given to the women leaders of non-governmental
organizations in Serbia at the time of the Milošević regime: Nataša
Kandić (Humanitarian Law Center), Sonja Biserko (Helsinki Committee
for Human Rights), Biljana Kovačević Vučo (Yugoslav Lawyers’
Committee for Human Rights), Staša Zajević (Women in Black) and
Borka Pavićević in the Center for Cultural Decontamination, the only
place wherefrom all these non-governmental organizations could raise
the voice against the policy of war, ethnic cleansings, war crimes,
millions of people made to seek refuge and massive destruction.
Those were the very women the warring propaganda has stripped off
their proper names, “pasting” them with stickers threatening to
their lives. Grujica Spasović listed all those labels “pasted” on
Borka’s name: mercenary, Ustashi, traitor, agent provocateur,
renegade, Bali, witch, commie…). And each of those “witches” is an
actual person. And each of them of different profession
(sociologist, diplomat, lawyer, philologist and dramaturge).
Missions of their organizations were also different. There were even
in disagreement sometimes. But in the 1990s they spoke as one
against the war as a way of settling disputes within the country,
and against crimes. Once the war was over, they were standing
against relativization of crimes and eventually established the
culture of memory. From the 1980s till this very day, they have
stood for a major chapter in the history of the Serbian society. The
resistance they have articulated and symbolized still remains to be
thoroughly researched in the search for the answer to the question
not why this resistance had no success in the 1990s but why it is
being beaten to this very day.
Those women, united in the struggle for general
wellbeing, are special and, therefore, I would say – irreplaceable.
Hence, the strongest sense in the sea of sorrow following on Borka’s
death, was the sense of – emptiness; the feeling of a deep gap this
this woman dramaturge, columnist, strategic organizer, this woman of
ethics and with style, this citizen of the world has left behind.
The feeling that death has cut off the energy of concentrated
talent, knowledge, and experience (at the commemoration Mirjana
Miočinović quoted a verse in Danilo Kiš’s poem “On the News of the
Death of Lady M.T.” /poem dedicated to Mira Trailović – L.P./ – „Oh
very well done, indeed, Death, what an achievement, to bring down
such a fortress!”)
It may sound paradoxically, but – to start with –
we could try to fill these gaps with documents and our memories and
thus throw light on Borka Pavićević as a person. That’s what she was
doing herself. With the columns she was writing she was filling the
gaps the deaths of her contemporaries had left: theater actors,
student protesters from 1968, anti-fascists, peace defenders,
historical figures that had gone. Her column was sometimes the only
trace left after some of them. And with these writings she was
pointedly creating a legacy, the actual bedrock of the Center for
Cultural Decontamination. And she left us in her columns many
precious information about the history of that institution.
* * *
Having learned that the outcome of Borka’s decease
would be fatal, Tanja Petovar, who was close to her, said, “She has
lived two hundred lives.” Actually, her life was one and only: a
rich and uncommonly intense life, a contradictory life.
Borka’s understanding of freedom was touching on
the doctrine of anarchism. Unrestricted freedom was immanent to her
artistic drive. Nowhere in her articles have I ever detected even a
paraphrase of Bakunin’s words, “The passion for destruction is also
a creative passion.” But I have always had a feeling that this
phrase was imbedded in her way of thinking.
In her youth, she was standing for the right to
rebellion. And she was among the rebels against the system,
conventions and dogmas. Neither has she renounced that right when
actively participating in marking the 40th anniversary of the
student revolt in 1968 (2008). She turned up at the round table
marking the 50th anniversary of the event (2018) with her “bag” (as
Grujica Spasović wittily described it) full of artefacts about 1968.
Out of it she was pulling out and showing the audience badges,
proclamations, banned issues of the “Student” magazine, a pass to
the “occupied” Faculty of Philosophy…Half a century had passed at
the time, many books about all of it had been published – but to
Borka, that was not a history. Her passionate speech was the best
illustration of the authentic atmosphere of the student revolt.
At the same time, she has built the institution
that, in a way, stands for the realization of her project for the
society: tradition and modernity, equality and democracy (social
ownership and political pluralism), dialogue instead of monologues,
rights of the different and weaker, compromise for the sake of
social wellbeing.
Even some friends of hers occasionally saw all of
it exorbitant, “a last farewell.” But Borka remained unwavering. In
her being there was a certain tension between undeniable contraries
and a balance aspired to. This can be barely explained without
knowing the family ambience she was raised in, or the ambience of
the family she formed herself; nor without knowing her character.
And her own trade also taught her that nothing was that simple.
Borka’s project for the society implied “small,”
“short-term” goals as well, such as to manage things “under one’s
nose” (making benches in the Center’s yard, watering plants,
sweeping snow…).
* * *
Death definitely leaves one all alone. But one’s
life is closely tied with lives of many others some of whom stand
out. Standing out in Borka’s life were; her father, university
professor Vuko Pavićević; her husband, lawyer Nikola Barović and
their son Jovan; Mira Trailović, theater director and cult manager
of Atelier 212; and, theatrologist Jovan Ćirilov, she had cooperated
and been a friend with for half a century.
Borka Pavićević was born on June 5, 1947 in Kotor.
Her mother Sonja Hurir of Czech origin was a teacher. Father Vuko
Pavićević was born in Rsojevići - Danilovgrad (named after Prince
Danilo Petrović), a small Montenegrin town between Podgorica and
Nikšić.
I have often talked with Borka about her father.
For the last time, and probably more than ever before, on our road
to Danilovgrad, last autumn, to a memorial evening dedicated to
Montenegrin politician, former president of the Federal Executive
Council, Veselin Đuranović. I had known professor Pavićević and held
him in high esteem. The two of us had discussed Stalinism and came
to the conclusion that it had not been only about concentration
camps – it had been a system. Back in 1951-53 Vuko Pavićević was
writing critical articles about the writings of Dušan Nedeljković
and Oleg Mandić, calling them domestic variants of Stalinism. He was
not in Belgrade’s Praxis group, and the latter treated him by the
maxim “Whoever is not with us, is against us.” Memoirists from the
group (Mihailo Marković, Dragoljub Mićunović) testified of such
attitude in black and white.
Another issue I used to discuss with professor
Vuko Pavićević were student developments in 1968 (renamed student
rebellion as of 2008). That was for the first time that I learned
about Borka. She was twenty-one at the time. Along with Bogdan
Tirnanić, Mirko Klarin and Slobodan Mašić she was in the newsroom of
“Susreti” (Encounters) magazine the regime had made a target of.
“That (student revolt) had to be unrestrained like the revolutionary
‘Student’,” she wrote bitterly between the lines many years later
(Glava u torbi/Head at Stake).
The circle around her expected Borka’s father to
“take up and defend their cause” at the meetings of the Committee
for Ideology. But he “belied” their expectation. “He neither took up
nor defended our cause, he just said that our preoccupation with
Marcuse (Marx, Mao, Marcuse) was quite legitimate, but wondered
whether we were in the know about the life of the youth from the
working class,” says Borka.
What professor Vuko Pavićević had in mind, but
never said, Borka would understand many years later while talking to
literature professor at the Faculty of Philosophy Miodrag Popović,
author of studies about Vuk Karadžić, romantism in the Serbian
literature and a major work “Vidovdan i časni krst”/”St. Vitus Day
and Honorable Cross” (1997) that brought him a barrage of criticism
from nationalists in academic circles. “Aware of what dark powers
were spinning webs around the student movement in June 1958, we both
(Popović and Pavićević – L.P.) feared the student revolt could end
up in a bloodshed the rulers would use to fortify their omnipotence
and cut off the bud of political democratization,” the professor
told Borka. Even some of those “rulers” shared such fears once
Alexander Ranković was swept away from the political scene.
Be it as it may, in 1968 Borka parted ways with
her father („Moj rastanak s ocem na vratima“/Parting Ways with My
Father at the Doorstep”). Her parents were in pain. Nevertheless,
they let Borka and her three-year younger brother Goran – who
graduated math and physics, and, the word has it, knew Shakespeare
“by hear,” but wanted to be a pilot – make their free choice.
Actually, parents and their children alike took responsibility for
their actions.
As the time went by Borka was returning to her
father. While quite young she was typing her father’s writings he
used to dictate to her, and discussing with him at the same time,
she was learning the true meaning of dialogue. Over conversations
that were going on at home, she was learning that one has to judge
people and developments with utmost care. At the time the Faculty
was marking the 100th anniversary of professors Vuko Pavićević and
Veljko Korać’ birth she was listening her father’s contemporaries
speaking about him. Commenting on some of her father’s stands,
professor of ethics at the Faculty of Philosophy Jovan Babić told
her, “A value will always be a value be it recognized or not…Nothing
unworthy can remain regardless of some changed context.” And the
above-mentioned professor Miodrag Popović told Borka that he would
hand her over the facsimile of a letter in which “professor
Pavićević stood up for him at a rather painful debate at the Faculty
that was threatening to him.”
In the article headlined “Great Minds of the Old
Faculty of Philosophy” (Politika, October 23, 2000) Miodrag Popović
wrote about Vuko Pavićević as one of those intellectuals in constant
search for the truth. “This was why Vuko had always found himself
between the hammer of the petty-minded and the Party’s anvil,” he
said. Hard work was his defense. He spoke Latin and Russian,
translated works from German and French, and spoke some English…He
was the editor of “The Philosophic Library” and Belgrade-seated
“Culture.” Those publishing houses’ rich collection included works
by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, Lenin, Sartre,
Pierre de Chardin… Vuko Pavićević had translated many of these works
and written forewords for them. Two works are standing out in his
bibliography – Ethics and Sociology of Religion with Elements of
Philosophy of Religion.
Borka was rekindling the memory of her father in
many ways. She managed to round off a picture of him. She did it in
one of her finest columns in the Danas daily, published under the
headline “The Home of My Father.”
“In all these issues, the issues of the left, and
socialism, and religion and Christianity, of ethics actually that
also gives birth to aesthetics, in the field of sense that is also a
highly strung bow, was the home my father was living in, as it was
in Njegoš’s Luča mikrokozma/The Ray of the Microcosm (Ethics, second
editions 1967, Kultura, Belgrade, Sociology of Religion with
Elements of Philosophy, third edition, BIGZ, 1988). These books I’ve
been photocopying since readers and students are short of them. Vuko
Pavićević was a member of the Commission for Religion, and for years
after his death people from various world universities have called
me seeking information that were nowhere to be found.” And then she
quotes again professor Miodrag Popović saying, “What is
characteristic of many of his (Pavićević’s – L.P.) works is advocacy
for religious, national and political tolerance.”
Actually, one can barely imagine Borka’s finishing
touch on the picture of her father other than by Queen Gertrude’s
quote in Hamlet: “Good Hamlet, cast thy knighted color off, and let
thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not for ever with thy
vailed lids seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou know, its
common; all that lives must die, passing through nature to
eternity.”
In Borka’s virtue and refinement I detected the
traits of her father, the way I remembered them. A memorial evening
dedicated to a townsman, professor Vuko Pavićević, was organized in
Danilovgrad. Borka was looking forward to it. No one could have
imagined at the time that in September 2019 citizens of Danilovgrad
would not only honoring the memory of her father, but hers as well.
* * *
I shall never forget the journey to Danilovgrad
with Borka; among other things, mostly because of what I learned –
or, to put it precisely, what testified my impression of her. Though
a free spirit, she was she was deep down devoted to the values that
are called patriarchal. I shall never forget Borka, her husband and
son talking to one another all the time (we were traveling by car),
that tone of tender care and love; and then, the visit we paid to
the Barovićs in Podgorica, the conversation we had with them…
A romance Borka Pavićević and journalist Bogdan
Tirnanić had in their youth was being mentioned. Since 1986 she had
been married to lawyer Nikola Barović (b. 1950, Zagreb). “A love
that implies mutual respect, individual freedom, acknowledgment of
the other person’s integrity, and everything that is close to the
two is close by their emotional choice and associative stands. This
is best testified in their son Jovan named after lawyer Jovan
Barović,” NIN journalist Radmila Stanković wrote in the necrology
headlined “The Noblewoman of Activism.” All that was true, but at
the same time – more complex and much deeper.
Nikola’s father was a well-known lawyer, Jovan –
Joro Barović (1922-1979). With his two brothers and two sisters he
joined the partisans in 1941. He was among the fighters of the First
Proletarian Brigade. He was in the Army till 1954 when he was
“officially demobilized.” He was one of the directors of the Tanjug
News Agency and Radio Yugoslavia. When Milovan Đilas was
excommunicated no organized group stood behind him. But there were
people who thought it impermissible – especially after the showdown
with Stalin in 1948 – to have one of the “historical four” deprived
of the freedom of expression. Jovan Barović was among those
individuals. He was deposed on the eve of the first trial of Milovan
Đilas. He was admitted to the Law School (1956) and became a lawyer
(1960). He defended liberal dissidents Mihajlo Mihajlov and Milovan
Đilas, orthodox communists Vlado Dapčević and Mileta Perović, as
well as several Serbs, Croats and Albanians accused of nationalism.
He met his death under mysterious circumstances.
Nikola’s mother, Dušanka Spasojević, was left
disabled after a traffic accident. Her brother, Aleksandar /Kole/
was a historian, the same as his son, Boško, but the 1990s wars made
him give up both his profession and country. Dušanka and Jovan’s
daughter, Slavica, had lived in Switzerland where she married and
had two daughters. Later on, she came to live with Nikola and Borka.
Borka spent her last days at the Barović’s home,
surrounded by her closest relatives. Her brother Goran Pavićević
flied in from Australia to be her.
Borka and Nikola’s son Jovan (b. 1987) is a lawyer
and lives in Belgrade. For years have I met all the three of them at
the Center for Cultural Decontamination. After various events I have
usually talked with Nikola in the Center’s tasteful yard.
During the 1990s wars Nikola actively participated
in many peace campaigns. He was among the founding fathers of the
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. Thanks to his
engagement Bosniak refugees in Germany restored their tenancy
rights. He was professionally involved in the trials for the murder
of members of the Serbian Renewal Movement at the Ibar Highway, as
well as in the proceedings initiated in the cases of murdered
journalist Slavko Ćuruvija and former president of Serbia’s
Presidency Ivan Stambolić.
The man of liberal mindset and refined,
considerate irony, Nikola Barović was critical about developments in
Serbia after October 5, 2000. He was not mesmerized with the story
about swift and easy changes. He was always ready for a dialogue.
Borka Pavićević and Nikola Barović were dedicated
to same causes: they were serving them differently but consonantly.
The two of them, as Nikola puts it, “overlapped:” he, with Mihajlov,
Čudić and other, while she, with the people around BITEF. The manner
in which they addressed each other - „Pavićevićka“ and „Barović“ –
emanated mutual respect and tenderness.
* * *
The theatre, in its most comprehensive sense,
marked Borka’s life. Even in the segments not directly connected
with it, if there are such. Numbers of theatrical artists –
playwrights, theorists and theatre historians, directors, actors,
etc. – spoke their mind on the news of her death. Some future
biographer of hers – she certainly deserves to get – will have to
pore over her work in the theatre; because that work is interwoven
in her entire life, and because it was from that work or, more
precisely from the culture, that her social engagement had sourced.
This is what singles out Borka as a unique phenomenon even from
other campaigners against the war and all forms of violence, and not
those in Serbia only.
Borka Pavićević graduated from the Academy of
Theater, Film and Television in 1971. She earned her master degree
in 1976 with the thesis “Neo-realistic Dramaturgy between Two Wars.”
Nominated by her professors Slobodan Selenić and Vladimir
Stamenković she became a member of the BIFEF jury as a third-year
Academy student. Having graduated she got a full-time job at the
Atelier 212. Borislav Mihailović-Mihiz, Jovan Ćirilov and she made
up the Department of Dramaturgy. To her, Atelier 212 stood for a
major school, professional as well as of life: because it was
promoting new theatrical trends, was open to the cultures from all
around the world, digging into the society and experimenting freely,
and taking risks. And because of the Atelier’s buffet where at
noontime, listening to anecdotes and intrigues, with a drink in
hand, she was revealing the mindset of Belgrade’s petty-town
circles.
Borka had worked for Atelier 212 for ten years
(1970-81). That was a dynamic period: all together, they were
testing the limits of modernization and hinting variety of answers
to the question “What is in store for the country after Tito’s
death?”
Borka had spent twenty years in BITEF (1971-91).
She was a dramaturge in theaters in Zenica, Split, Skopje,
Ljubljana, Subotica and Belgrade (1978-91). Her Yugoslav identity
gained in strength during these years but also had her delusion that
the whole of society had accomplished much in the field of culture
after 1945. She did have her artistic role models, but never treated
them as cult figures. And she was experimenting too – to her, art
was a play of the mind. She set up the theatre Nova osećajnost/New
Sensibility in Belgrade’s abandoned brewery (1988). Along with
Ljubiša Ristić she was among the founders of the KPGT theatre (abbr.
for Kazalište, pozorište, gledališče, teatar/named after the capital
letters of the term in Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian and Bosnian)
(1984–1991). She was also the artistic director of the Belgrade
Drama Theatre. In 1993 she was deposed on account of her public
engagement.
Theatre, in the largest sense of the very term,
had been always alive – in her columns the same as in the Center for
Cultural Decontamination. It can be said with full certainty – even
so shortly after her death – that her writings and activism in the
Center had been inseparable to her. It was against the backdrop of
that unity that she articulated her ethical and aesthetical stands
that make the sum and substance of her uniqueness in the history of
Yugoslavia’s intellectual elite; her stands about the relation
between tradition and modernity above all. She was weighting the
tradition in the same way as Vinaver (Stanislav) and Konstantinović
(Radomir) had: if you want to change it, you have to know it. She
was considering phenomena through analogies (Germany) and processes
(modernity). She was standing up for the right to revolt but siding
against the discontinuity with political orientations that had
placed Yugoslavia on the global map (antifascism in 1941,
anti-Stalinism in 1948). During the 1990s wars the Center revived
the memory of Serbian social-democrats that had criticized the
sacrifice-making policy as a trump card in the game of border
drawing at the time of the Balkan Wars (1912-13). And following on
Yugoslavia’s collapse the Center was reviving the thought of
Miroslav Krleža (Excursion to Russia, the exhibition held in Paris
after 1948, the conflict within the literary right, liberation from
Zhadanovism and socialist realism, Institute of Lexicography and his
work on encyclopedias). It was also reviving the memory of
Belgrade’s avantgarde (Marko Ristić, Koča Popović, Dušan Matić, Moša
Pijade, Oskar Davičo); and its continuity (Bogdan Bogdanović,
Radomir Konstantinović, Danilo Kiš). And in what way was the Center
doing it?
In her column headlined “The Days of Mirko Kovač,
October 6-10, 2016 in the Istrian town of Rovinj” (Head at Stake),
Borka Pavićević quoted Vlaho Bogišić. Addressing the ceremony of
bestowal of “Society Kovač“ on Ivan Lovrenović for his book Isus u
Ahmićima/Jesus in Ahmićimi, Bogišić said, “We have almost forgotten
how to think from the standpoint of responsibility and in accordance
with the standards of responsibility, while taking utmost care not
to use a single word that may hurt another person, no matter how
much – this other person – in his public statements negates his own
humanity.”
There has been no place for such oblivion in the
Center for Cultural Decontamination. The reason why it has been so
is quite obvious: the Center’s work was deep-rooted in the pattern
so different from its mainstream political and cultural counterpart
in power not in the 1990s only. This is not only about a wall
separating the masses/people and elites, but about a split within
political and intellectual elites alike. A conclusion as such, Borka
Pavićević has reached instinctively or consciously, called for hard
work, great knowledge and experience. Her work in the Center for
Cultural Decontamination – her writings are so closely connected
with – mirrors everything both political and cultural elites have
accomplished for general well-being. Hence, she herself got a deeper
insight into the causes of Yugoslavia’s disintegration.
* * *
BITEF stood for her major experience: a window to
the world but also a need of one’s inner being to be recognized
against the complexities of the social and political background
(hence the U-turn towards nationalism theaters were the first to
make in the 1980s). Borka Pavićević, fully aware of it, was
appealing to like-minded people; to Ivan Vejvoda, who said, “BITEF
has been much more than a review of alternative theater plays, it
stood for a policy of freedom realized through an alternative
medium:” to Jovan Ćirilov, the biggest authority in the history of
BITEF, who, from a historical distance of forty years, wrote in
2006, “At the theater map of the world BITEF stands for a major
fact, and in the sea of several hundreds of international festivals
not a single encyclopedia, lexicon or vocabulary on theater omits a
section on BITEF as one of most relevant festivals.”
So, how to safeguard the memory of the legacy of a
cultural matrix marked by openness, pluralism and universalism
against destructive effects of a cultural matrix based on parochial
isolation and uniformity (national, social, political and cultural)?
And how to save from the oblivion the vitality of the first cultural
matrix emerging – against all odds – from the “mud and blood” of the
war, as Bogdan Bogdanović would put it. Answering these questions
was of strategic importance. And, yet, how was it to be done?
Borka Pavićević, not the one and only in the
Serbian and Yugoslav society (as it could have seemed in the
aftermath of her death) answered these questions with the activity
of the Center for Cultural Decontamination. And yet, not every out
of 6,000 performances and events staged in the Center (the figure
Borka referred to back in 2015) has been prepared or “planned” by
the Center’s Council and management. Many have been initiated by
individuals and groups to whom the Center was a shelter – a safe
house for “being themselves,” in what they stood for and expressed.
Borka Pavićević was writing even before she
founded the Center for Cultural Decontamination. But once she
established it, her work in the Center and writing were something
she was doing in parallel. In her writings she was attracting public
notice to whatever was going on in the Center, bringing them closer
to the people who were not in its audience, and forging relations
with centers and the states emerging from Yugoslavia, and with the
world. Reading Borka’s weekly columns as they were published and
reading them compiled in a single edition is not the same. Three
editions that have been published – the third one the biggest of all
– under the title “Head at Stake” are major sources of information
for Borka Pavićević’s biography. The last book in a row, as Saša
Ćirić put it, “is also an implicit autobiography.”
* * *
Selection for three of Borka’s books –
Moda/Fashion (Belgrade, 1994); Postdejtonska moda/Post-Dayton
Fashion (Novi Pazar, 1999); and Glava u torbi/Head at Stake
(Belgrade, 2017) - was made from the articles she had started
writing as a university student. Almost enough for any professional
writing career! The two of us were often travelling together. On our
way back home, sometimes late in the night, she used to go to the
Center to write her column for the Danas daily. Her columns the
daily was running on weekly basis from March 9-10, 2013 till
December 3-4, 2016 – for three years and ten months – have been
compiled in the edition Glava u torbi. In his afterword to the
latter titled “Torba za na glavu/A Stake to Rest One’s Head on” Saša
Ćirić finely pictured the author herself. “While reading Borka
Pavićević’s columns you can easily hear or imagine the tone of her
voice, as if she speaks to you standing there, dressed in black, in
front of a red armchair. I cannot tell who the designer of this
weekend column was, but the very design perfectly fits the contents.
“Lord’s “Singer of Tales” or a storyteller from
Split is the one whose head is at stake, a lady in black who (got up
from an armchair?) who comes from the proscenium and steps towards
you not to cross swords with you or lecture you, but because there
is something she wants to ask you or tell you about – in other
words, she wants to speak with you. Many are analogies between Borka
Pavićević’s manner of speaking and writing style – they are
colloquial in the best sense or the word (rather than jovial),
analogies between her expressions and thoughts.
“Language, language, brothers (and sisters) – that
is what we read between the lines or touch the contours of the stake
to rest one’s head on…And why the language after all? Because the
language – or public and media discourse of today - is the key to
understanding, explaining and justifying numbers of social
transformations, rather than just examples of some ‘alternative
grammar.’ As you interpret the articles penned by Borka Pavićević,
you yourself start writing in the same way, filling your story with
associations and digressions, all in hurry to have it all said – at
once.” (Saša Ćirić)
Borka Pavićević has never even tried to be a
historian or a politician. She has never written point-blank about
the causes of the war or portraited its spiritual inspirers,
political leaders and army commanders like, say, Mirko Kovač (Elita
gora od rulje/The Elite Worse than the Mob) has. Instead, she has
confronted the realities they have created with the past of a
country marked by contradictions of its own, ideological and
political restrictions but also by remarkable achievements of many
generations. To her, that was a most important memory – to others,
oblivion.
With her columns she was removing the layers of
time from many figures, making the values those people had been
setting foundations to a modern identity for all to see. She wrote
about communists regardless of places they occupied in the hierarchy
of the party and state (Milovan Đilas, Koča Popović, Mirko Tepavac,
Jovanka Budisavljević – Broz, Mina Kovačević); she wrote about the
people advocating peaceful settlement of conflicts (Josip Reihl-Kir
who did all in his power to pacify the situation in Slavonia;
General Vladimir Trifunović who had surrendered the barracks in
Varaždin to save the lives of the troops under his command); she
wrote about liberal Albanians in Kosovo who, like Fehmi Agani, had
been killed – sober, temperate people prone to agreements and
compromise have never stood a chance; she wrote about the books a
new generation of Albanian intelligentsia in Kosovo had published
(Skelzen Malici, Veton Suroi); she wrote about her brothers and
sisters-in-arms in Serbia (Dragan Babić, Biljana Jovanović, Lazar
Stojanović, Miljenko Dereta, Dragoljub Todorović); and she wrote
about builders of the monuments to the anti-fascist culture.
“So, this is about the monuments sculptured by
Vojin Bakić, Dušan Džamonja, Miodrag Živković, Ranko Radović, Bogdan
Bogdanović…And this is about an epoch, an era, about one country,
about its modernism, about a unique capacity for abstraction and
creation, about Utopia that existed and the future; and, finally,
this is about the notion we are so short of today, the notion about
the man, and culture and nature.” (Head at Stake)
And that was also about everything done to destroy
the memory of that culture. Bogdana Bogdanović’s monument
“Partisans’ graveyard” was devasted in Mostar. In Croatia only,
three thousand monuments to the anti-fascist struggle were
demolished. A documentary about all that vandalism that protested
against it met the same fate. “With his documentary Igor Grubič had
built yet another anti-fascist, modern monument, a monument to the
country, the freedom and the nature where all those monuments had
been built.” (“A Monument to the Monuments,” Head at Stake)
Vane Ivanović and Desimir Tošić, steadfast
democrats and Yugoslavs, and emigrants over decades, were among
friends and associates of the Center for Cultural Decontamination.
Authors from Sarajevo and Tuzla were launching their books in the
Center where they felt at home. An exhibition dedicated to Reihl-Kir
was also staged in the Center…
And yet, as she was writing in parallel about the
events organized in the Center, she was mostly focused on theater
people.
She wrote about Mira Trailović she was learning
the trade from. “Institutions are built in the way Mira Trailović,
herself an institution, had built them.” “All relations, be they
political or social, are emphatic and loverlike. There is no
‘judgment day’ when I will not hear your voice, Mira.” (Head at
Stake)
She wrote about Jovan Ćirilov who “was always
moving ahead,” towards harmony, rather than disharmony, towards
constitution, rather than destruction, towards positive, rather than
negative, towards movement, rather than a dead end, towards salvage
rather than disaster.” “To work and live with such traits was not an
easy enterprise. On the one hand these traits could be seen as a
compromise, and absence of critical thought on the other. Jovan
himself has opted in every way to be an object of criticism, which
has always been to him a beginning of a dialogue or a contribution
to general well-being no matter how ill at ease he could
occasionally be about it.” (Head at Stake)
She learned from Mira Trailović and Jovan Ćirilov
that associates should be sought within the ruling structure. And
not just for diplomatic reasons. Was it not for Milan Vukos, the
then vice-mayor of Belgrade, there would have been no BITEF; and she
learned from the two that all those thick layers of social
conservativeness were not to be ignored. “So many letters, so many
thick envelopes with a variety of offending sketches have we hidden
at the time, so as they cannot be used as burdens on BIFEF, itself
anyway a mischievous, exclusive and estranged, poorly fit for
families, socially provocative, experimental, and feigning
internationality. I encountered BITEF in 1967 on the stair-head in
front of Atelier 212 the audience of the Living Theater’s “Paradise
Now” ran onto shouting, ‘They are spitting in our face!’.” (Head at
Stake)
(The premiere of Hair in Atelier 212 was seen in
the press as a revolutionary act and not only in the theater life.
However, the “Tokovi istorije/Currents of the History” magazine ran
findings of a public opinion survey showing strongly conservative
responses to this premiere.)
Without a single trace of vain pride, Borka
Pavićević identified the theatre milieu (Atelier 212 and BITEF) with
a crucial source of her own intellectual and moral stance. “Was it
not for Mira and Jovan there would have been neither the Center for
Cultural Decontamination nor Jovan’s production of Nepozvani/The
Uninvited (2004, Momčilo Nastasijević) or Izlet u Rusiju/Excursion
to Russia (2012, Miroslav Krleža); there would have been neither the
exhibition “Everything You’ve Forgotten and This Phone Number - Mira
Trailović“ (2010), nor Center for Cultural Decontamination at the
stage of BITEF with Sonja Vukičević and the play Midsummer Night’s
Nightmare, nor Ana Miljanić’s Bordel ratnika/Warriors’ Brothel, Smrt
Uroša Petog/Death of Urosh the Fifth by Mira Erceg, nor this year
(2015- L.P) Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People as Brecht’s Sidepiece,
Ibzenov neprijatelj naroda kao Brehtov bočni komad directed by
Zlatko Paković.”
Theater was to Borka a manner and mean of her
thought, her resistance. No wonder that she wrote about it so much;
and she was writing about it with expertise and passion.
She put finishing touches on portraits of the
actors of several generations. She wrote about Maria Crnobori, Mira
Stupica, Ljuba Tadić…And she wrote about Milena Dravić as well.
“Milena Dravić, her roles and she as a person stand for a
constitutive pillar of the world that would have fallen apart was it
not for it.” She was impressed by “the avant-garde and
unconventional thought about the theater coming from the
longstanding torchbearers of the Yugoslav theatrical tradition,
Maria Crnobori and Mira Stupica.” She understood why those two divas
had always been Mira Trailović and Jovan Ćirilov’s “sources of
strength and their support whenever confronted with conservative
beliefs about what’s good and what’s ‘selling people a bill of
goods.” And, “straightforwardness, strong characters and artistic
achievements of Mira Stupica and Ljuba Tadić” have taught her that
“those who are only after making a career and may be left without
this or that are prone to compromise and collaboration.”
Probably due to the time when they were written
(“About Decency That is Actually Extinct” – Head at Stake) Borka’s
columns about theater artists are also miniature studies about the
society. She was not just pointing to heights of their artistic
accomplishments about also to their virtues as human beings. Rather
than defending the world those artists lived in, let alone the
political system of the time, she saw those figures as guarantees of
a better and saner world.
“A big picture of Maria Crnobori as Antigone has
been placed at the façade of the Yugoslav Drama Theater. One day I
was looking at it only to spot, a while later, Maria slowly crossing
the street with a shopping bag in hand. Her writing style is the
same, furiously pedantic, serious and ‘amazingly’ responsible when
it comes to her roles, the theater, colleagues, historical context,
space, work and order; and witty, precise, highly entertaining but
never anecdotal.” (Head at Stake)
“Mira Stupica and her brother Bora Todorović have
always kept their heads above water that sweeps away all sorts of
things…resistant to trade-offs, never adjusting themselves to what
we call day-to-day politics, but what so frequently was a ‘national
policy’ too.” (Ibid.)
“With his huge artistic and political experience
Ljuba Tadić was unusually critical as an artist, he had a mind of
his own and dignity. Everyone caring about dignity should remember
him; those caring about life rather than making ends meet; and
remember him for all to see rather than funereally.”
Borka Pavićević’s columns about people – and not
only about theater people – are also short stories. Her readers can
form mental pictures of persons these columns are about. Even about
the author herself. Having read a column of hers in the Danas daily,
I’ve never stopped imagining her otherwise than standing, in those
fine, long dresses she used to wear, at the balcony of her office in
the Center. But there is no singing in that ‘minstrel’ scenography.
Voices of people in front of Germany’s Consulate – close to her
Center – chanting “We want no visas!” reach her ears. That was at
the time sanctions were imposed on the country. “Who are those
people?” she wonders. Though so fully aware of the times and
developments, she simply couldn’t explain some phenomena.
* * *
In her columns she also wrote about a startup of
the Center for Cultural Decontamination. Establishing the Center was
a necessity, and an adventure at the same time. Few were those in
the 1990s who could have imagined, let alone established, an
institution as the Center for Cultural Decontamination as our Borka
had. After the Dayton Agreement instead of a “Balkan butcher”
Slobodan Milošević became a “peace warrant” to the international
community. Banking on this delusion, the regime was strengthening
repression at home: repressive laws on the University, the press,
more and more frequent assassinations. At the same time, it was
preparing itself for the war in Kosovo that eventually provoked NATO
intervention. The conflict with the entire world thus reached
irrational brims.
In the winter of 1994, in the company of her young
associates Borka Pavićević walked in the Veljković Pavilion (“the
home of the once decent urban folks” – Bora Ćosić, Danas). In the
aftermath of WWII “Museum” (the Veljković Pavilion) was Moša
Pijade’s painting atelier. The word has it, says Borka, “one of
those mystic stories, that Moša Pijade had frescoed the Central
Committee of Yugoslavia at a wall, a big one, but erased
‘renegades.’ We’ve found piles of documents belonging to the
Veljković family, especially papers on business orders of the
Belgrade Brewery (Vojislav Veljković), but also several trunks full
of books, constitutions and FPRY decorations, but not the fresco.
And then we ‘lifted’ everything from the floor to the wall. That was
the ‘First Decontamination.’ A symbolic act of our unselective
attitude towards the past.
The startup of the Center for Cultural
Decontamination was no a bed of roses. Huge administrative and
financial obstacles were to be overcome. Threats of the regime –
itself at the doorstep of agony after four lost wars – were to be
withstood; and withstood was to be the opposition from a part of the
society that was contaminated with the nationalism of the Greater
Serbia project. And then, people were to be attracted to the Center,
their trust was to be gained, and the Center was to be kept going.
The radical difference between decontamination and contamination was
to be demonstrated. Borka Pavićević was well-prepared for such a
high-risk enterprise: with talent, breeding and experience
throughout 1968-90; with her writings for “Susreti,” “Student” and
“Vreme” magazines; with her travels all over Yugoslavia without
borders, and all across its territory with state borders; with
worldwide “cruises” (she spoke French and English); and, last but
not least, with activism in the Belgrade Circle, the association of
independent intellectuals who had joined hands in standing up
against the war. The Belgrade circle stood for a “break” with a
monistic political culture terrorizing an individual in the name of
national unity. It was there, in the Belgrade Circle, that she
probably best realized what it was that was imperative to Serbian
intellectuals – the dialogue.
* * *
Speaking about the Belgrade Circle, Radomir
Konstantinović, its first chairman, author of Filosofija
palanke/Provincial Philosophy, said, “The ‘Alternative Serbia’
(meeting each Saturday in the Student Cultural Center, in the
dreadful, bloody spring of 1992) was a declaration on personality, a
triumph of intellectual and moral accountability. Nothing had been
planned beforehand, not a single topic of discussion. All we have
discussed about were keynote speakers. At first, we held meetings in
the Student Cultural Center, and later on in my apartment. Those
moments were precious to me. And not to me only. I am sure that was
so…If someone asks you what the ‘Alternative Serbia’ actually is
(what it was, what it is nowadays, and what it shall be), tell him,
‘The Alternative Serbia is the Serbia that says no to crime.”
(“Danas,” November 16-17, 2002).
About one hundred intellectuals addressed two
session of the Belgrade Circle: Alternative Serbia and Intellectuals
and the War. They all spoke as one against the war as a way to
settle disputes in the state but not when elaborating its causes and
especially is consequences in the short and long run. The activity
of the Center for Cultural Decontamination also reflected these
discrepancies.
Some (the minority) participants in the sessions
of the Belgrade Circles left the country in the aftermath of the
war. Others continued their engagement in the newly established
political parties and non-governmental organizations. The rest,
probably those most critical and skeptical about some swift changes
(Europeanization, facing up the recent past, regional
reconciliation, etc.) found shelter in the Center for Cultural
Decontamination. Some of them are saying today that they couldn’t
tell what their personal lives would be like during the 1990s wars
was there not for the Center (Mirjana Miočinović). Slovenian
director Dušan Jovanović told me once, “Whenever I stepped into the
Center, I saw you there.” I cannot remember what it was I replied,
if I replied at all. Probably I just shrugged my shoulders.
* * *
Borka Pavićevič saw the 1990s wars as a conflict
with the modern civilization, symbolized in the destruction of towns
(Dubrovnik, Vukovar, Mostar, Sarajevo…). And she was not alone in
this view. Many Serbian intellectuals, especially after the
bombardment of Dubrovnik (Mirjana Miočinović, Bogdan Bogdanović,
Mirko Kovač, Sima Ćirković, Andrej Mitović, Ljubinka Trgovčević,
Mirjana Živković, Ivan Đurić, Sreten Vujović, Ivan Čolović, etc.)
held that destruction of towns not only mirrors a conflict with
human civilization but a “drop” form history. In his book Grad
kenotaf/Cenotaph Town Bogdan Bogdanović deciphered the phenomenon
and warned against its long-term consequences. “I shall never
understand that military doctrine prescribing that one of first
target, probably the major one, shall be – destruction of towns.
Sooner or later, the civilized world will just shrug its shoulders
at all that butchering of ours. Well, what else can one expect it to
do? But it will never forgive us destruction of towns. We shall go
down the history – especially we, the Serbian side – as destroyers
of towns, some new Huns. It is quite understandable that a Western
person is aghast. For hundreds of years this person has not, even
etymologically, differentiated terms ‘town’ and ‘civilization.’ He
cannot and should not understand the senseless demolition of towns
other than as a manifest, bullish confrontation with the highest
values of civilization.”
And, addressing a session of the Belgrade Circle
(“Do You Remember?) Borka Pavićević reminded her contemporaries,
people of her own generation, of what Europe, Germany and Russia had
gone through, of long preparations for the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia
starting with a no to modernization projects, and a priority given
to territorial wars rather than to – progress. She reminded the
audience of tons of books analyzing the phenomenon. “Apart from all
of its political and sociological characters, this war,” she said,
“has a symbolic meaning, the one the war propaganda, preparations
for the war have hinted at. A town has to be destroyed because what
must be destroyed are humanity and every possibility for a life
together. A destroyed town means a destroyed notion about it…
… “Two months ago, I watched Bertolt Brecht’s
‘Mother Courage and Her Children.’ A prayer for salvage of the city
ends the play. Everyone in the audience was on his feet, applauding
and crying. Because everything was symbolically crystal clear. And
each and every of us knows too well what’s in store for him…”
(Alternative Serbia, Ten Years later, 1992-2002, Helsinki Committee
for Human Rights in Serbia, edition “Testimonies” No. 12).
I shall also refer to Nikola Barović’s address at
the session of the Belgrade Circle (“A Repeat of the History”). A
reader will know why. Having seen Posavina in ruins, Barović said he
had understood that “the ambitions of the regimes on both sides are
much higher than victory and occupation.” “In order to have them
come true and create a brand new world, so as to mend the history in
reverse, to fix up what happened in Kosovo in 1389, so as to
establish something that used to be one thousand, five hundred years
ago or had never been at all, everything must be destroyed, every
village and every town turned to ashes. Those involved in an
enterprise as such are sole equals to Pol Pot. They have to start
from scratch and so they have to destroy towns and persecute people
of different ethnic origin. What they need are empty plains. That is
why they would not bypass towns…” (Ibid.).
To “Pavićevićka” destroyed towns symbolized the
1990s wars: to “Barović” war planners could not have the history
“mended” without towns turned to ashes. The two of them were tacitly
rounding off a unique intellectual and moral stance, crucial for
understanding their entire relationship. We are aware of the role
women, in their capacity as wives, have played in the lives of
numbers of creative men. But we are much less aware of the role
spouses have played in the lives of many outstanding women; the
roles as such have not been so frequently played – but it has been
much more difficult to play them.
Borka has examined the war from the angle of
aesthetics too. She was referring to Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of
Resistance and Slobodan Šnajder’s Otpor estetike/Resistance of the
Aesthetics. Even after the war she was detecting the aesthetics the
war had established (Serbian commander Božidar Vučurević had
promised to build “a more beautiful and older Dubrovnik”). She was
obsessed with it. “In brief, it’s obvious that whatever was not
turned to dust in 1991 onwards can be bought, and then destroyed
nowadays.” And the pretext for this has always been the same – “By
the law.” Skeptical about the authorities, she was skeptical about
their urban planning and architectural novelties. She was not always
right (as, say, about plane trees sawed along the once Revolution
Boulevard, or the hotel “Montenegro” that was torn down in
Podgorica). But what she saw in the Belgrade Waterfront project and
“new” squares and monuments was nothing but “erasing” the history –
or production of some wishful reality. Though she has never written
about it, all this must have reminded her of Moscow in the 1930s.
Dictatorships simply adore “monumentality:” it screens the reality.
* * *
Borka Pavićević also used to be just one among
women antiwar activists. She used to join the protests staged by
anonymous people and be just one in the crowd. As an intellectual in
protest she has been both harshly assaulted and rewarded as she
merited. True, at the times decorations were proliferated to
dissidents she war decorated only once ((Osvajanje slobode/Winning
the Freedom, decoration bestowed upon her by the Maja Maršićanin
Tasić Foundation – 2005). She got three international rewards out of
which two were for achievements in the domain of culture – from
Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture (2004) and European
Cultural Foundation (2009)/ During his visit to Serbia (2002) French
President Jacques Chirac bestowed the Legion of Honor upon her and
three other Serbian intellectuals (Vojin Dimitrijević, Ivan Čolović
and Svetlana Velmar Janković).
To Borka, the highest recognition she could get –
if I may assume so – would have been a monograph about the Center
for Cultural Decontamination, as a free territory of sorts and
realization of her project for the society. To her, taking stock of
the Center’s mission was a way to safeguard specific intellectual
and moral values in the Serbian society: most of all, the spirit of
freedom that always implies the spirit of solidarity with those more
vulnerable, of understanding the “Other,” of dialogue and tolerance.
* * *
“Everything in one and only hall the Center has,
but to me that very space always looks somehow different; sometimes
as a church, an amphitheater, a theater stage, a gallery or a
secluded square,” I told Borka once. “The sum and substance of
events are those that determine your perception of that space,” she
replied.
From the very start the Center for Cultural
Decontamination has been an umbrella institution – or, maybe to put
it more precisely – a free territory to non-governmental
organizations and all “the others” (by their ethnicity, race, social
status, cultural preferences, gender, etc.) It has been a free
territory to marginalized antifascists, former communists and even
anti-communists; to liberal intellectuals from all over
ex-Yugoslavia and the world. The Committee for Liberation of Ivan
Stambolić has held all its meetings there. That has been a meeting
place of critical historians and architects coming from Bogdan
Bogdanović’s school; and for directors and actors. Simultaneously
with Belgrade’s Book Fair Ivan Čolović was staging the 21st Century
Library Fair in the Center.
The Center was hosting exhibitions, theater plays,
lectures, round tables and commemorations; many authors have
launched their books there. Quite often police cordons had to be
lined up to protect participants.
Gradually, the Center has been identified with
Borka. It were anti-fascists who were the first to refer to the
Center as “Chez Borka.” They were launching their editions, marking
anniversaries of birth or death of outstanding anti-fascists, etc.
“Chez Borka.”
Hence, what bothered everyone in the days of
saying the last goodbye to her was the question – spoken or unspoken
– whether the Center would keep going without her. No doubt, her
talent, her work “from dawn to dusk” and her character make her
irreplaceable. Already seriously ill she used to tell me, “I am
going to the Center but not taking my medicines with me so as not to
be tempted to stay there all day long. People there are so
wonderful.”
Borka’s nature, the tone of her voice (never
quarrelsome or intriguing) can be barely found in a single person.
And yet, many people have worked in or cooperated
with the Center over the past 25 years (Slavka, Ana, Dragan, Ljuba,
Saša Luna, Aleksandra, Tanja, Barbara, etc.). With Borka there, this
“core” aware of the Center’s unique role has crystalized. And,
interpersonal relations in the Center, marked by equality and mutual
respect (the Center being among a handful of institutions never torn
by internal conflicts and factions) make a part of Borka’s project
for the society. And she herself has emerged as a manifestation of
the Serbian society’s need in the aftermath of a disaster – the need
to learn the truth about what happened, and its awareness that there
were no quick and simple solutions; answers to all questions had to
be patiently searched for. The Center for Cultural Decontamination
will be standing as long as the Serbian society feels that need.
Neither Borka Pavićević could have done anything should such a need
be lost. Neither her understanding of the times, invention and hard
would be of any avail to overcome indifference of a society
incapable of making progress.
Finally, everyone preoccupied with what would
happen with the Center without Borka should well read her
reflections about institutions once their founding fathers are gone:
“Historians use to claim that over here
institutions can barely survive their creators. Especially if the
latter are glorified postmortem while having been threatened when
alive and working, and especially if they had known how and wanted
to merge their thoughts and actions; to turn their ideas into deeds.
Such was, no doubt, Jovan Ćirilov, and such was Mira Trailović…
Ćirilov managed to stand Mira’s passing; like some Demiurge, like an
alter ego, not only Mira’s but also of a mission that is constant
and at all costs cosmopolitan, and, as we would put it today though
not quite appropriately – European. For, what Jovan Ćirilov had
always been after in BITEF was the presence of non-European theater
and culture, presence of people from Africa and Asia…awareness that
Caucasians and Christians are not all that should be taken into
account in the world…
“All this is not and has never been about BITEF in
the past, but about BITEF in the reality, today; the BITEF we are
having now, the BITEF of today belong to the future. And that is
exactly what we all should endeavor for.” (Head at Stake).
Wise as she was Borka Pavićević, who had never
placed her own merits above general well-being, would simply tell us
today, “All this is not about the Center for Cultural
Decontamination in the past, but about the Center that belongs to
the future.”
In Belgrade,
July-August, 2019.
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