Focus of the news: Kierkegaard believes that human existence is marked by suffering and that the only way to endure it is a leap of faith. Is it really so, How to endure and overcome it? What is worse: the thought that we have not realized the meaning of being or that it does not exist?
R. P: Even a death row inmate has a sense of being. Those few days or hours he had left until his execution. he can forgive the sins that have been inflicted on him or ask for his forgiveness. It is possible, as Gavrilo Princip did in Terezin, to carve a song on the dungeon wall (let's remember the verses: But he said it right before / Žerajić the gray hawk: "Whoever wants to live, let him die, / Whoever wants to die, let him live!" “) Or, if not inclined to poetry, thought or message. He can talk to himself, although the hardest thing is to be honest in talking to yourself. If his whole life had been meaningless to that death row inmate, the last hours of the moment of realization would have gained full meaning. If, however, we do not realize the meaning of being, then we are doomed to experience hell before we reach the mind, if there is one. By the way, suffering is often an integral part of cognition, Conditio sine qua non.
Focus: In the essay "Society of Fatigue", author Byung-Chul Han claims that "today's society of success, based on the 'excess of positivity', produces extreme fatigue and exhaustion, while living is reduced to efficiency". What is today's society based on?
R. P: Today's society, as absurd as it may seem, is based on - superficiality. Honor the exceptions, but we no longer peek into encyclopedias, but rely on what Google offers us, more specifically the unreliable Wikipedia. Volumes of professional books are replaced by a chip on which, often without "thick" professional reviews, the knowledge that has been searched for for centuries has been weaved, we receive everything, as people would say, "new for granted". I will try to illustrate this with an example of a vaccine. When a vaccine was found against rabies, or against smallpox, not to mention other plagues, then it was valid for the whole world. Today, when people are dying en masse from covids, politicians from opposing worlds, not caring about the opinion of the profession, are looking at where vaccines are produced and who produced them, not how effective they are. At the same time, they forget that ideology has never been a medicinal substance of a medicine.
Focus news: You are the author of many books for children, is it harder to attract attention with written reading in the time of modern technologies that children get acquainted with very early? What topics do writers for children and young people most often deal with today, are there different ways to attract the attention of the youngest readers now and a few decades ago? Do you have the impression that children's literature is to some extent marginalized?
R. P: Let's start with your last question. Children's literature is not only marginalized, but completely extreme, left to itself. At the same time, one forgets that reading habits, and even reading taste, are acquired along with the literacy of a young being. In the Serbian-speaking area - I will limit myself to what I know more - there are several publishing houses that focus exclusively on children's publications, their owners are careful about what they offer to young readers, but they must, above all, keep in mind their business, they must not be put in a situation where they create losses at the expense of quality. Their budget support is insufficient to fulfill the function expected of them. Textbook institutes are public companies, but they are mostly focused on textbook literature. I don't think it's far from smart to have a public, "state" publishing house, relieved of financial worries, which would nurture children's fiction.
It is true that a lot of things compete with books, but still the greatest danger is in everything that many parents of today's child have not read and do not have that love for the book that they could pass on to their descendants. Then, there are many writers for the youngest who do not adapt to the sensibility and interests of the modern child, so what they write is often financed by publishers who do not have qualified editors, reviewers, proofreaders, editors, proofreaders. And a book intended for a child, among other things, is literacy, which must be kept in mind.
As far as topics are concerned, it must be known that the child no longer wants songs and stories about houses, cats, grandmothers who spin and grandfathers who tell stories from antiquities with a pipe. That doesn't mean we can't write about a house that became a cosmonaut, about a cat that goes around the world's most famous fashion houses to find a branded fur coat, about a Facebook grandmother or a grandpa who goes by electric scooter to pay bills at the post office or bank. Igor Kolarov wrote SMS stories too early, Uroš Petrović connects readers to the book with incredible riddles, I recently read an excellent novel "It's not Instagram tires on a bicycle", by Vladimir Kalamanda, in which almost everything takes place through social networks… They say I belong to more important Serbian fairy tale writers, so I often ask myself: is a fairy tale an obsolete genre and I answer: it is not if we modernize it in accordance with the thinking of the modern reader. So in my two fairy-tale novels and in many fairy tales in four collections, the plot takes place in space, dark forests have been replaced by dark constellations, evil wolves by some cosmic monsters, good fairies by heavenly light. In one drama text for children's theaters, which was successfully played, the main character is a cosmic purple ray, etc. I believe, therefore, that the motives and themes in children's literature must be constantly updated.
Focus news: "Philosophy should continue to provide answers to Kant's questions:" What can I find out? What should I know? What can I expect? What does it mean to be human? ”Hirgen Habermas believes. Are these questions that literature should answer? What is the essential role of literature, creation in general?
R.P: I think that it is a misconception that literature should give answers, I think that its primary function is to ask essential questions and to lead the reader to look for answers, each for himself. The self is perhaps the greatest mystery, often with elements of mysticism, and to encourage the reader to at least peek into this difficult-to-understand secret, into the labyrinth of his own being, comparing himself with literary heroes, his dilemmas with theirs, his ups and downs with their ups and downs, I guess is the desire of every writer, by the work he creates, to achieve it at least in part.
Focus news:. You have been creating for more than half a century, behind you are many books of poetry, short stories, novels, two books of essays, ten radio dramas for adults, as many as eighteen collections of stories for children, a dozen texts for children's theaters opus.
What challenges did you face during the creation, did you ever think of giving up? What is the most precious thing that literature has brought you?
R. P: It is not up to the writer (and the artist in general) to choose whether or not to continue to be creative. At least that's how I feel. I finish, for example, a collection of poems, publish it and say: I will not do it again, I have written and published a lot, they will classify me as a scribbler, and then, I guess created when the whole world is real, a poem appears from somewhere in space and finds me we will write. Then what else do I have left but to pick up a pencil ?! Then, I am writing a novel or a collection of short stories for, as we say, adult readers, I want to take a break, but just then I get topics for songs or stories for children, for a play. What is the most precious thing that literature has brought me? Again, one question that is impossible to give a complete, final answer. For example, it is the realization that I have created or am creating new worlds, new people / characters, new atmospheres, in short - something that did not exist before and that no one else would create in that form if I gave up.
News focus: How to reconcile the world and the self, is the time we live in a reality of the absurd or an absurd reality?
R. P: Too difficult a question. There is no world beyond our self. Everything that does not belong to our understanding of things is outside our world, and who knows how many of these parallel worlds there are that do not concern us (because, in fact, they do not touch us). I wrote a sonnet (published in the collection "Prometheus' Knot") about a man who set out to discover the meaning of life. He thought that he would find the answer in academies and encyclopedias, but, popularly speaking - a dead end! Along the way, he stopped by an anthill and saw a tiny ant carrying a grain of grain. And suddenly everything became clear to him: "The man exclaimed: I know the meaning of what it is, / I don't need explanations otherwise. / Only suffering gives strength to a man." So, this time, like any other, past and future, is a combination of the reality of the absurd and the absurd reality, with the remark that we often do not notice the border (or there is none) between the real and the imaginary.
Focus of the news: Kandinsky considered it "very important for an artist to weigh his position well, to understand that he has an obligation to his art and to himself, that he is not the king of the castle but a noble servant." What responsibility does she hide?
R. P: I think that an artist must always doubt, not perfection, because there is no such thing, but the value of what he has created. Only a firm belief in the incompleteness of the artist's own work encourages him to strive for that imaginary trap left to us by Kandinsky, a painter whom I highly appreciate and whose few paintings on the covers of my poetry collections make them more valuable. The artist is similar to the ant that carries a grain of grain much heavier than itself into the anthill and without wondering who will eat it. I will not say anything new when I say that creation is suffering, but sweet, similar to Sisyphus and Sisyphus. We would have to ask ourselves sometimes: what would happen to Sisyphus if he didn't have his own stone that always pushes up the hill again and again? The answer is very simple: there would be no Sisyphus either!
News Focus: Is it possible to speak of a true literary achievement if it is not based on truth? What do you rely on, imagination or truth, or both?
R. P: In a literary work, everything you write must be true. To be more specific - artistic truth. I mentioned above that I write fairy tales, and here I would just add that the description of the most fantastic event must seem to the reader to be true. In my opinion, the value of a literary work is measured by how much the writer has succeeded in turning the imaginary into the truth. Well then, the characters. And they have to be real. In building a literary hero, you use the physical, psychological, moral and all the other characteristics of a large number of people you know. I may be trivializing things a bit here, but in order to (in a children's book, for example) create a frowning, threatening cloud, you have to go back to your childhood, so remember a frowning uncle whose eyes would make you bleed at every encounter. in the veins. In other words, in Njegoš's words, we need to turn our imagination into truth and vice versa, and - the easiest ones are the easiest to drink!
Focus news: The fact is that there are a large number of literary workshops that train students on how to write. How did you start, what would you advise young creators?
R. P: As far as I know, Jack London, doing hard work, could not attend any school of creative writing, and readers are simply crazy about "White Fang" and "Martin Idn". Mark Twain did not leave his pipe to go to a literary workshop, and do you know anyone, especially from the older generations, who was not friends with those naughty Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I am quite sure that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Andrić, Crnjanski, Cervantes, Shakespeare did not do that either… Read, read, read and so learn! Where are the better workshops and schools of creative writing than reading ?!
By the way, I think the so-called the American school of creative writing, whose works, in which the more careful reader recognizes more manuscripts, and which some of our publishers publish in a rather poor translation, negatively influenced the formation of the reader's taste. But it is a topic that deserves wider discussion.
Focus news: You are a laureate of many awards: "Laza Kostić", "Skender Kulenović", "Gordana Todorović", several times Book of the Year award, Kočić Award, "Kočić Book", Ivo Andrić Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, Serbian Writers' Association and The Association of Writers of the Republic of Srpska, and recently you received the Golden Badge of the Cultural and Educational Association of Serbia. The awards are a confirmation that what we do is, indeed, significant and noticeable. What did the recognitions bring you in the creative sense, were they perhaps a stumbling block in your further work?
R. P: There are many literary awards in our country and they can be a double-edged sword. They can encourage, but also lull. They should be understood and accepted as something that came unexpectedly, especially if you are not a member of some so-called clan, and forget about them the next day, so keep using your pen or discharge your laptop battery. Many are meaningless, such as the NIN Award for Novel of the Year. In the past, the works crowned with this recognition have experienced a dozen or more editions, it was known that the award went to a good novel that will enrich our literary heritage. And today… Any comment would be a chewing of what has been said many times from various mouths and pens. The problem is not in the awards, but in the competence and incorruptibility of the jury (by the term incorruptibility I do not mean money but "ahbab" relations and publishing lobbies). Only those awards that draw attention to the awarded work and the name of the one whose name they bear are meaningful. And we must admit that there are few of them. The awards that are given to young authors have the greatest value (and so did they to me), because they encourage and encourage.
Focus news: During your creative work and life, you had the opportunity to meet and socialize with many colleagues, would you single out a meeting?
R. P: Despite my communicativeness which many point out, I am essentially a shy man. I participated in many events with famous writers, traveled with them, hung out, but I talked less, I preferred to listen to them. I enjoyed listening to the simple, warm, honest words of Desanka Maksimović, the wise words of Slavko Leovac, Nikola Koljević (whose books I published as an editor), his brother Svetozara, the witty jokes of Matija Bećković, to mention them, but I rarely, or almost never , interrupted in words. I just wanted to listen. And to learn.
Focus of the news: In Vladimir Starčević's book "The Book of Geca Kon", there is information that Geca was known as a miser and that he refused to pay Stanislav Vinaver the fee for the book "Goc gori" for ten years. What is the situation in publishing today, are royalties paid, how will publishing develop further, if we take into account that the situation with the corona virus has greatly changed the lives of all of us in various segments of activity? Do you remember your first royalty?
R. P: I have been a journalist for a long time, part-time and professionally, at a time when the fees were incomparably higher than today. I remember that as a kid, a first grade high school student (later when I went to teacher's school because I was offered a scholarship) I received a fee from the newspaper "Mladost" for a few lines of news, for which my friends and I were honestly honored. There used to be solid royalties for books, and today it’s good if publishers don’t ask you for money to publish a work for you. For example, in that period of self-governing interest communities for publishing, where many people throw wood and stones, at least in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for a short novel, out of ten author's sheets, you had to get AT LEAST ten average salaries in the republic last year. And today? I better not talk. Then, I worked in a well-paid job, was among the few who paid taxes on total annual income, and in the form of fees for a short story in the newspaper "Borba" or for an erotic story in the magazine "Start" I received half a monthly salary. Today, even magazines (with some rare, but very rare exceptions!) And newspapers (which mostly expelled stories from their pages) do not pay royalties at all, because they barely get the funds to cover printing costs.
Focus news: You are represented in textbooks, readings, numerous anthologies, your poems and short stories have been translated into Italian, Polish, Hungarian, English, Romanian, German and other languages.
"Skill and ability to take the reader by the hand, take him through landscapes and spaces that he would never pass, and show him phenomena and objects that he would never have seen otherwise," Ivo Andrić wrote in a paper on translation. If you follow the work of your colleagues in the world, who would you single out?
R. P: I miss book fairs a lot, because they are always an opportunity for new meetings with writers and, more importantly, with new books that arrive in libraries rather slowly. I follow, of course, what is written and published in the world, but I could not single out anyone in particular, because if I tried that, a long list would be made.
News Focus: If the meaning of being could be explained in one sentence, what would it say?
R. P: This is the only moment of eternity given to us and the only world we have, so we must not hesitate for a moment - we must breathe life into our lungs!
Interview author: Valentina Novković
English 
Bosnian 