Teofil Pančić (1965 – 2025): He wrote as if the devils were chasing him

Theophilus died.

Facts

Born in Skopje in 1965, he spent his formative years in Zagreb, then lived in Belgrade and Novi Sad (with a view of the Žeželj Bridge). For Time he started writing in the first half of the 1990s, became a literary critic and columnist of this weekly, spent about six months as editor-in-chief, and edited the culture section for the last few years. In all that time, he only missed a few columns. He wrote always and everywhere, in the newsroom, apartment, cafe, hotel lobbies, Internet cafes (until the Internet became an everyday thing), then on buses, intercity and city, on benches, chairs, in bed... And so until the end. Literally. He published twenty-one books, thousands of newspaper articles, more than a thousand literary, theater and film reviews, several dozen texts of an unspecified genre (Time of enjoyment), twenty wonderful short stories and several even more wonderful songs. He wrote as if the devils were chasing him.

In fact, there are no important newspapers in Serbia or in the region (including Slovenia) for which Teofil did not write: Today, Our fight, Republika, Diary (while it was a newspaper, not a propaganda magazine), Globe, Jutarnji list, Victory, Monitor, he wrote for Sandstone and for Third program of Radio Belgrade, as well as for dozens of small newspapers and portals. People marveled at that linguistic flurry, and he would dissuade that, in fact, he read a lot. Sometimes he would say that writing actually distracts him from his main activity: reading. He read, in fact, everything, even the tabloids as long as it made any sense.

Books were another stream. When he went on (always) short vacations, he would carry between 15 and 30 books, just because fifty was a little too heavy. He read fast, he read hungrily, he read a lot. He was able to read a thousand and a half pages in a few days and a few sleepless nights, and then write a text whose lucidity, penetration and beauty would leave us stunned.

His columns were always displaced from the main streams of interpretation, because he saw what we could not recognize. This is exactly why we waited so impatiently for his columns and his literary reviews: no matter how experienced we were, no matter how close we were to him, we learned from his texts. And that with the ubiquitous humor that ranged from thin irony to juicy Rabelaisian achievements, from humor that just makes our lips part to roaring laughter, from tenderness to self-irony, from just brushing the scoundrel's shoulder in passing, to placing her where she belongs is a place without ever, absolutely never, crossing the civilizational border that separates the appropriate from the inappropriate, the permissible from the impermissible.

He said that he loved the theater so much that he could watch a different play every night, and some of his criticisms are undoubtedly included in the anthology of Serbian theater criticism. There are few great theater and film actors he did not know, he was friends with theater directors and critics, he loved that world in its superficiality and carelessness on the one hand and its seriousness on the other. He read plays with a passion, and one of his habits was to read the text before going to a play. More than once he (panickedly) turned over his phones to get the play, and at least twice he read the play even while waiting for the play to start.

And he loved Olya.

 Interpretations

These were the facts.

For his friends from the public, Teofil was a lightning rod in the most disgusting years in the history of this country, and he remained so in the previous 13. When they shot at his friends, they hit him. (The great man was Theophilus.) To intimate friends he was a joy. A stake stuck in the eye for scoundrels.

He loved buses. A little strange passion, but he didn't hide it. As a child, he knew by heart the bus timetable of the northern part of Yugoslavia, and on the way between Zagreb and Belgrade (and back) he "amused" his parents by saying, as soon as he saw a bus coming from the opposite direction: "Niš Express, departure from Niš at 8 a.m., from Belgrade to Zagreb at 11.40:XNUMX a.m. He also knew geography. Once, publicly, in Vojvodina, he said that there is no place or village in Vojvodina that he does not know. "Come on, please," came the response from the audience. "Well, let's try it out," suggested Teofil. Since the suspect did not last more than a few minutes, Theophilus suggested that he compete with everyone in the audience. Who do you think won?

As a staunch Anglophile, the French were, for the most part, a source of ridicule for him. For example, "Proust is an important writer, it's a shame he didn't write in a world language." When he first shaved in Paris, he briefly told his female Virgil "only without culture", and then lost his breath in front of "the most beautiful urban conglomerate in the world" and urgently changed his opinion about the French. He could, sometimes, threaten loved ones that he would shoot them with a possum. With what? Possum. Why opusoma? And why not, he would answer.

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The abyss that opens up when the tectonic plates move is left behind by Teofilo. And that abyss is not worth burying, not only because it is impossible to bury it, but because it must remain there, as it is: terrible and magnificent.