Voice from Fairytale

The NIN Literary Award laureate for best novel published in 2009 is Grozdana Olujić for her book Glasovi u Vetru (Voices in the Wind).

By Mila Milosavljević
Photo by Courtesy of Grozdana Olujić

Grozdana Olujić’s books have been translated into 28 languages. She has received almost every major domestic and international prize, from the Politikin Zabavnik Literature Award to the prize awarded by Mlado Pokoljenje publishers (twice), followed by the Zlatni Leptir Award, the Stara Maslina Lifetime Achievement Charter as well as prizes such as one bestowed by the World Academy for Art and Culture for the best modern fairy tale. In 2004, she won the Serbian Literary Society lifetime achievement award. Grozdana Olujić is an honorary resident of the city of Oslo, honorary faculty member of the Iowa State University (US), and she has also received Denmark’s Order of the Dannebrog in the field of literature. Despite her many achievements, the NIN Award means a lot to one of the most awarded contemporary Serbian writers.

NIN Award has succeeded in preserving its luster and reputation for more than 50 years, and given that it has been presented to such distinguished authors as Meša Selimović, Miloš Crnjanski, Aleksandar Tišma, Danilo Kiš, Borislav Pekić, Milorad Pavić, Goran Petrović, Dragan Velikić, Vladimir Pištalo...

Many years earlier, your novel Divlje Seme (Wild Seed) had been shortlisted for the NIN Award. This book, which was subsequently translated into English, won acclaim from the reading public as well as critics in the English-speaking countries. Your first novel Izlet u Nebo (An Excursion to the Sky) was awarded in the Narodna Prosvjeta publishers’ anonymous-entry competition from among 150 novels from every corner of the for-mer Yugoslavia. It was praised as well as challenged.

- Those were years of severe ideologisation, and the novel’s heroine Minja made no effort to conceal her rebellious spirit. So, attacks were to be expected, as was the case with Wild Seed…

After four ‘rebellious’ novels, you focused on translating and anthologising for a while. Then, although your novels were acclaimed and awarded, were translated into 28 world languages, you decided to turn to fairy tales. Why?

- We lived in a terrible time and were sinking further, seeing neither an exit nor an end to the horrors. While the fairytale, ancient and wise that it is, offered both, no one could call it naïve. The fairytale is well-aware of the existence of envy, disease, death. But, it is also conscious to an equal measure that love is above illness, envy, even death, that love, which conquers every evil as it instills in young readers the hope for a way out of the wilderness, that a speck of light can be found in a backdrop of horror, a speck of hope. But ‘apple-red happiness’ does not fall into the fairytale hero’s lap on its own. It demands a fair degree of suffering, seeking and discovering the path in wastelands, attaining harmony within as well as balance with the world at large. Asked what she should read to her son so that he would become a great scientist, Ms. Einstein answered: Fairytales, fairytales, fairytales. He was fully aware that fairytales had an enhancing effect on imagination, language and one’s will. Fairytales also teach important lessons in ethics and aesthetics on the scale of values. Some of this emerges in games and cartoons, which in essence, represent bastardised versions of fairytales. Perhaps this was the reason I devoted some 20 years of life to fairytales, and only then returned to the novel.

You have stated that the novel Voices in the Wind has been growing in you for 30 years. What marked the moment when you began to write?

- The rapid and irreversible disappearance of people I loved, people who are now no more. All of the sudden, the world was becoming narrower, and the horrors of new wars pervaded the country as a whole. Of late, a spark of hope could be seen returning, although when gone once, we are indeed mere 'splendour in the grass', a voice in the wind, without those who loved us and whom we loved, those in whose memory we continue to live. At one point, it was as if hitherto closed doors opened and I was feeling all this and the novel began on pour out onto the pages of the book on its own, coupled with Danilo Aracki’s fear. But, this was not the fear of death, but the fear of oblivion… So that one can fittingly say that the Voices in the Wind is a book about remembrance and oblivion, a saga about the Aracki family who endured through the centuries and through wars and, despite everything, preserved humanity within themselves, discovering the purpose of their existence. Slipping – somewhere between dream and wakefulness – into a more soulful, more refined world, as they remember their ancestors and await their descendants.

Your hero is saved through love. Is love a universal remedy?

- Yes. "…But if I have no love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell", says the Bible. A hollow. On the 17^th floor of a New York hotel, in just one night the novel’s hero revives the fates of several generations of his ancestors, decides to return to his home-land, save the child of his long lost brother and thus pay his due as a human being and …

Your novel has been described as a "complex 20^th century poetic fresco" in which you portray the fate of the entire Serbian nation through the saga of the Aracki family. Just how hard was it to achieve this?

- I don’t think I can rightly answer this question, although, it was not easy. Sifting through the reaches of memory in a single night to bring together the fates of the erstwhile powerful and numerous Aracki family, whose last descendant is in search of his brother and also of himself by way of the Karanovski Chronicle and fragments of remembrance. Perpetuating the memory of his long since disappeared family, the awareness that only language remembers, and marking the perimeters of countries in which once long ago lived numerous tribes as well as preserving the memory of the historical events that proved inclement to both the Aracki family and to the nation to which they belong. Evil needs no invitation, it is there, right around the corner. What is needed is for someone to stand up against it, no matter how much one abhorrs violence. This is why Dr. Luka Aracki, a pacifist, throws away his weapon after World War I and decides that, for him, wars no longer exist because wars are "worse than the plague." Still, when a group of children are threatened by death, he jumps under an enemy tank and dies a warrior’s death, as some of his fellow townsmen in their dreams see him as a saint, with a halo and a flaming sword in hand, and are of one mind to erect a church from where he flew to heaven.