Second first book

Although in the previous three and a half decades he published about fifteen prose works book (mainly novels), and by our most respected publishers, literary criticism and the so-called reading public are still getting used to the fact that Žarko Radaković is not only the favored translator of Peter Handke's works, but also writer with a now substantial oeuvre. This cannot be caused solely by the proverbial confusion and inertness of ours culture, which treats artists more like a stepmother than a mother, especially those who at some point left their homeland and live in various parts of the white world, but also the very nature of Radaković's prose, for which Albahari in the preface to the book Fear of emigration (2010) said that, therefore, he always approached this prose with the "direction of a student" and that he would never dare to do in his own prose the things that Radaković does in his. We are talking about a specific avant-garde radicalism in questioning the patterns of the world, which this writer has been using since his very beginnings. In spite of everything, even not so complex or numerous formal and content transformations, this radicalism in a certain way "slows down" the text, makes it "difficult" for the reader to enjoy and empathize with the story.

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This whole situation is further complicated by the fact that after the first series of his own and co-authored books during the nineties and in the first decade of the new century, Radaković published the said book Fear of emigration, which actually represents his prose research from the eighties. This prose in creative chronology precedes Radaković's first published book, a novel Tübingen (1990, shortlisted for the Nino Prize), and the same is the case with the latest book Emigration 2: verses, otherwise the first poetry collection in this writer's oeuvre so far. Emigration 2, namely, has a note following the Introduction: "All the songs were composed between 1978 and 1990 (and some earlier)", and this information should not be understood as mere factography.

When this is said, one is not referring to the happy eighties, schizos and pop music, nor, on the other hand, to the rise of dark nationalist-populist forces that to this day largely dictate Yugoslav political trends, but to a certain social-political framework that includes waves of economic crises, the renewal of Cold War tensions, and then Perestroika and the collapse of the Eastern, communist bloc, during which one feels the breath of true freedom, but also fear, anxiety, existential impotence before what is to come. This can be traced on different levels and in a series of songs, but it is already visible from the first one, "Prestrojanja", whose title is the most literal translation of the word "perestroika", in which the lyrical hero performs an apparently absurd rearrangement of his own life: "I took the drawers out of the closet/ I shook out their contents// I put the left drawer in the place/ of the right one, and the right one in the place of the lower one// in the upper one I put the cards/ that I had previously shuffled/ from the middle drawer I took out the long-/ mad and put it in the bag/ which I put in the top drawer (…), so that at the end of the poem there would be a confession: "(…) but immediately I/ sat down because my friends were at war, my children were on the street, my thoughts were retired, my mouth: trembling, my legs: made of stone, and my forehead: the sky in the painting of Magritte who died a long time ago (perhaps somewhere at a crossroads in the plain where only horses still move)".

One of Radaković's basic artistic procedures is deconstruction, a kind of breakdown of all human patterns (artistic, psychological, social, political, historical, everyday behavior) into their smallest constituent parts (in some songs even words are broken down into syllables and voices), which on the one hand makes their presence and effect conscious, then, on the other hand, everyday life is aestheticized, that is, human existence itself in its most elementary form, which would be typical neo-avant-garde gesture; while on the third side, our notion of artistic value is tested.

In connection with the latter, numerous songs could be cited, including "Ante Marković, on the phone, to Borisav Jović": "lately/ I don't go/ to the market". By what standards are poems like this one evaluated, what aesthetic pleasure does it cause in the reader? First of all, it is certainly a humorous, dethroning effect that causes imagining such a conversation between two politicians who are among the most powerful figures of the second half of the eighties and the beginning of the breakup of Yugoslavia, but it is even more interesting to read it in our time and actually the impossibility to imagine, even in a poem, even in such a humorous way, a similar conversation between, for example, A. Vučić and S. Malog. It is worth asking if there are any lessons to be learned from this?

Emigration 2 is in its entirety, just like a prose collection Fear of emigration, a catalog of experiments, each of which has its own form, and sometimes several forms within the same poem (in the quote from "Prestrojanja", for example, you can see the transition from verse to prose, at the very end). At the same time, Emigration 2 is also an artistic testimony of an unstable, breaking epoch, in which some restraints loosened, but some new, newly installed ones were beginning to tighten. At the center of all this is the artist, an avant-garde lyrical hero, close to the real Žarko Radaković, who is writing his artistic biography, experimenting with a whole range of different poetic formulas, from sonorous-fanciful and humorous-absurd to the purest emotional confessions. All those strategies that this writer later used in prose, but also some that he did not, are in this book, if you can say so - in their basic form.

Therefore, The second book of Emigration should be read in conjunction with Fear of emigration, and then in a somewhat broader context with the novel Tübingen and prose Knife (1994) and Emigration (1997), because, similar to what is written in the poem "Friedrich Helderlin", it would be seen that Radaković was actually a poet all along, but he did not want to know it.