This is the political and public world that Miljenko Jergović found himself an inhabitant of — born in Sarajevo in 1966, Jergović’s literary career began early. Poet, prose writer, novelist, and journalist, Jergović represented a very different approach to writing and public engagement than had been the case in Tito’s time. The Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović, six years older than Jergović and an editor at one of Sarajevo’s most important literary journals, describes the cultural scene of the 1980s there in the following terms: “There was a great interest in comic book art, rock music and film, that’s what me and my generation educated ourselves on. The same sources motivated artists, musicians, writers, photographers and performers — and this produced a common aesthetic.” One of the unique features of this common aesthetic, and one that has perhaps made facets of the culture of this period difficult to transfer out of its milieu, is the fact that it was produced right at the cusp of the full global assault of mass culture and consolidation of media outlets and access. At the same time, there is an operative intuition in this aesthetic pointing to precisely what may be coming up ahead. Because of this, the work emerging from Sarajevo during this period operates under its own conditions, without adhering to any dominant aesthetic practice or ideology coming from Europe or America. The war, if anything, heightened these conditions, at least for its duration.
In the late 1980s, Jergović’s work began appearing in all the newspapers, magazines and literary journals in Sarajevo, and his style ranged freely, mixing personal essays with journalism and journalism with fiction, in ways that were completely new and captivating to an audience that immediately recognized his qualities and energy. His first book, a book of poems called Warsaw Observatory, won two prestigious prizes in 1988; one of them, the Mak Dizdar Award, commemorates Bosnia’s greatest modern poet, and one of the least known major modern European poets of the 20th century. His second book of poems, Is There Someone In Town Tonight Studying Japanese came out in 1990. From 1989 to the beginning of the war in 1992, Jergović wrote as a columnist for the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, and as the Sarajevo correspondent for Dalmatian Weekly, all the while providing lucid, engaged reporting on the effects and implications of Milošević’s policies. To get some sense of the epic nature of these policies and see how the sensibility of a novelist and poet might be a prerequisite for journalism in such a climate, one has only to remember Milošević’s famous declaration of June 28th, 1989: “Today it is difficult to say what is historically true and what is mythical about the Battle of Kosovo. But today it doesn’t really matter.” It is out of such contempt for historical truth that Miljenko Jergović has molded a writing of the quotidian, a writing of everyday history whose details interrogate myths and lacerate the heart.
During the first few months of the war in 1992, Jergović wrote for DANI, a weekly magazine that came to characterize the Bosnia of intellectuals who came of age in the 1980s. A third book of poems, Himmel Commando, came out in 1992, along with another wartime classic, Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues; these were some of the last books published by Svjetlost, one of Europe’s leading publishers before the war, under the stewardship of poet, novelist, essayist and historian Ivan Lovrenović, a major intellectual presence who nurtured and supported younger writers. Under the siege, those books were almost impossible to come by and I first encountered both Jergović and Mehmedinović’s work in the Biblioteka “egzil-abc” series. These were published and edited by Josip Osti in Ljubljana, and provided a forum for Bosnian writers and translators, either under siege or in exile, to continue publishing their work. Situated between an immensity of pain and the perverse abundance of resources the mass media had at their disposal, the books themselves were extremely “small” productions: 4 x 6 inches, they ran between twenty and seventy pages, and were printed in editions of between one hundred and two hundred copies.
When Jergović left Sarajevo in 1993, he went to Zagreb where he continued working as a journalist. It was there that he began publishing the texts that make up Sarajevo Marlboro, as war stories of a kind entirely other than the ones people were used to reading. Published in the UK in 1997, this masterpiece of precision, restraint and unending compassion has had to wait until now for an American publisher. This, unfortunately, is an all too typical story. Following the publication of Sarajevo Marlboro in Zagreb in 1994, Jergović has published nine books, while never ceasing to be an acute observer and critic of Croatian political and cultural life. Clearly, Miljenko Jergović represents a model of writing whose very terms have entirely different meanings in America. As a professional journalist, Jergović measures his professionalism according to an ethical code that considers the unmasking of power a duty; as an extremely popular novelist and prose writer, Jergović still measures his literary horizons along the same lines from which his early work as a poet emerged, the common aesthetic of a now inconceivable Sarajevo.
While many of the texts in Sarajevo Marlboro could be considered typically Jergović, the incident ending “A Diagnosis” seems to sum up his aesthetic as concisely as possible. Salih F., a man who “saw with his own eyes his wife and two daughters being cut up with an electric saw by the Chetniks,” moves from camp to camp until he is finally taken in to another camp, this time as a refugee and not a prisoner, in the Czech Republic. After fighting with everyone, he ends up in prison where the police conclude that the only real solution would be to send him back to a death camp. But they realize this would be “impossible in practice, because such a move would have contravened the international declaration of human rights.” Finally, a bureaucrat at the Bosnian Embassy in Prague finds a solution: dispatch Salih F. to a psychiatric hospital and have him declared insane. He is treated like a king, and the psychiatrists are “thrilled to have such an opportunity to study a human guinea pig who had witnessed his next of kin being cut to pieces.” Finally concluding that Salih F. was in a state of shock, the psychiatrists make him take up drawing as a form of therapy. The story ends with this:
The day finally came when a decision had to be made about the future of Salih F. The doctors had prepared only one question. “What would you do,” they said, “if you caught the murderers of your wife and daughters?” Salih F. replied that such a thing would be unlikely to happen. By now the Chetniks responsible were far away, across many borders and barbed-wire fences and lines of battle. But the doctors insisted, assuring him that many things were possible even if they seemed unlikely at first. And so, recognizing that his questioners were like small children, and that it was necessary for them only to imagine a situation in order to make it a reality, Salih F. replied, “I would kill them,” adding, “or I would give them a pen and paper and tell them, as you tell me, to DRAW!”
The doctors’ faces lit up. They took their pens and papers and pronounced Salih F. insane.
Here Kafka moves from the projected world to the reaclass="underline" the very terms of knowledge and justice are interrogated by experience and found more than wanting. The best of Jergović’s work operates at this level and the contradictions faced by the characters inhabiting his prose enact a historical reality that too often falls through the cracks of the blindered vision we have been made to think can apprehend the world. Throughout, with both gentleness and bitter irony, he reminds us that we should “gently stroke” the very objects we cherish most, our books, for instance, so we can remember they are nothing but “dust.”