Debut novel Heroin, bread and sulfur mines Nikole Strašeka (Zagreb, 1978) was recently published in Croatia, by the "Oceanmore" publishing house. It is an autobiographical confession of a treated drug addict, but regardless of the therapeutic effect, not as a mere intention to get rid of a terrible experience. Life on the edge from the early teenage years, the Zagreb underground, apartments of nice families that become a breeding ground for vice, lost young souls... It's all there. Nikola studied comparative literature and Latin language at the Faculty of Philosophy and Film and TV direction at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. He has won several awards for documentaries and short films.
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"WEATHER" You opened your soul., You exposed yourself to everyone.. Admittedly, you did it through literature.
NIKOLA STRASEK: Although I know that this will make me an additional fool and create surplus value, I have assessed its literary potential not once, not twice, but countless times, when one of the extreme and qualitatively crazy situations happened to me. I was looking for a way to give that material a form and include it in the text. And barely, only in the prison of my skull where the damaged receptors were both prisoners and guards. Once upon a time I made films, acted as an artist and took drugs, I almost died several times, once I even ended up on the road and when I was exhausted I agreed to go to a commune, where after forty-five days without sleep I stripped and cleaned myself. I came out, hid, got a job in a fruit and vegetable warehouse that I called a mine, broke my back for six years, and now I write songs and remind myself that it's not important to last the rest of my life because I'm always alive, and only now, and only here. It is important to endure that day, from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, and so on until my last breath. My life is reduced to a struggle with my own brain and the damaged receptors in it that chase me and think that I need heroin like air, like water, like the woman I love.
It's your first novel.. Let's go a little further. "behind the scenes", how much the editorial hand of Kruna Lokotar contributed to it?
Kruno and I started collaborating on my first collection of poetry, which was published in 2024. Considering the experience, knowledge and reputation he earned by editing extremely high-quality literature by the best contemporary authors from this area, Kruno at the same time ensures exceptional reader reception, numerous awards and media visibility with these works. I am aware that there are a number of writers who are constantly trying to match him and the expertise with which he edits manuscripts. Some of the most widely read and awarded authors fought for a year to get Lokotar to agree to cooperate. I was not aware of that at the time we met, and as a 45-year-old beginner I behaved quite carelessly, even the word rudeness could better describe my attitude and behavior. But Kruno put up with me because he believed in what I was writing and because - without me being aware of it - he forgave me knowing that I had no idea what I was doing. However, the cooperation between the editor and the writer takes place on several levels and depends on where the weaknesses and strengths of the writer are. I was already in my fourth decade of life, not entirely unsuccessfully I was involved in film and learned by collaborating with producers and I knew, although not well enough, that I had to avoid excess words, excess signs like the plague, and I don't think there were any major interventions in the collection or individual songs.
There are popular books that represent the experiences of addicts, such as We children from Zoo station Christian F, Confessions of an opium user Thomas de Quincey, Requiem for dreams Hubert Selby, to take just a few as an example. Did you deal with that kind of literature at all while writing the novel?
Drug addiction is just one of my addictions. I am polytoxic. Addicted to alcohol, cigarettes, but also books. The professional term is legomania - just one of many manias. I read the mentioned titles, as I knew who in the nineteenth century was on "laudanum" and who just smoked hashish. I read about opium dreams and why Kublai Khan stops in the middle of a verse. I read, from the last century, Burroughs, Troki, Hunter Thompson. Venedikta Yerofeeva and his alcoholic delirium Moscow-Petushki. But I also read all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with drugs and drinking, because I am characterized by an addictive character and I surrender to everything that gives me pleasure.
Artists today often mention their sins from their youth, and sometimes it seems glamorous to people. It seems like it's something that's cool in a way, to have it on your resume, as a spice.
Because a mythological aura is created about knowledge gained through danger, unlocked doors of perception, experience for the chosen ones. And there is no mention of the increase in tolerance, the disappearance of moral considerations and the pursuit of the very purpose of drug use. In the end, you have to "sort yourself out" in order to be able to get up and function at all. There is no longer any talk of pleasure.
Municipality "My days" in Croatia, where you finally met "took off", It takes up a good part of your novel.. A year and a half of living in such a place is not at all small.
It is a secular institution, where addicts are allowed a reasonable dose of food supplements such as coffee or cigarettes, and a place that inevitably reminds readers of the seemingly distant, socially egalitarian pedagogical idyll of youth camps. I took the fact that I ended up in a commune as the ultimate defeat and proof that I had wasted myself. And again - I wrote there every day, and a good part of the novel grew out of those notes. I don't think that the book will stop anyone from taking drugs, but I can hope that people who have nothing to do with that world will feel at least a little how it is under our skin, the veins pierced and pulled deep into our drug addict bodies.
You quoted poet Roque Dalton's lines in the book"I believe the world is beautiful., and that poetry is like bread, for everything. " Your collection Butterflies in the stomach, heads on stakes from 2024. It also represents you as a poet.. It's all that accumulated over the decades or it came when you healed?
Roke Dalton, whose father was one of the brothers known to us from Talicni Tom, wrote a kind of intimate manifesto of mine with this song, which I have been using since I experienced a life breakdown and ended up in a commune. No one can, nor should he, say that he is a poet. He can, but it means nothing if what he writes is not felt by someone else as a poem. The rest is for the drawers. One can make things up, one can use documents, complicate plots and cover up quotes, put as many obstacles as possible between oneself and the understanding of others - but I no longer want to read such texts. Although in the hands of a master a literary text can be a riddle, a test of general knowledge, a sudoku or a crossword puzzle, much more often it is an empty and cold intellectual exercise that occupies the intellect, but does not touch the emotional essence of everyday existence in the existential trenches. In the title of the song by the English poet Stevie Smith, there is an essential truth of both poetry and life. The song is called "Not Waving but Drowning", and so it seems to some that you are waving to them, and some are convinced that you are drowning, and maybe you are just swimming and saying hello. Literature is not public relations, it is not a means of achieving social success, it is nothing less than the evolutionary goal of our species. I don't consider the songs my own, except that I tried to write them down as accurately as possible by listening to the dictation of the language teacher.
What kind of literature helped you survive the difficult times the most?? What is "your" literature?
My literature fits in the Squirrel Library (children's literature editions) and a dozen books on the window next to my mom when she was dying. And them and all the others, because even the ones she never got to read, I determine by her criteria. Or even more precisely: words that resonate with my childhood, and some of them I etch for so long that they become incomprehensible and too comprehensible - that's literature to me. All in vain, defeated in advance, and let's do it - literature. For example, if they put me in front of a machine gun and asked for my favorite lyrics, they would be Max Voloshin's lyrics as recorded by Tsvetayeva, to whom she addresses: "Three things, Marina, are winding. Water, hair, leaves. Four, Marina, flame." Or the best title and description of the feelings of all of us ever alive: My sister - life. That's what Boris Pasternak called his first collection of poems. By the way, I've been writing since I was little, but fortunately, I never sent it to anyone, so it remained unpublished. Even then, I wrote thinking of my late mother as an ideal reader because, as a professor of comparative literature and a librarian, she introduced me to literature. Except for her, I imagined writing for a select few writers whom I considered at that moment to be the best I had read. The result is an elitist and self-indulgent attempt to impress and keep what I write hidden under numerous references, quotations, allusions and other dribbles that I used as a scared and proud idiot prone to elitism. Today, the situation is different because I write for comrades who are drug addicts and comrades from the front lines of capitalist exploitation, I consciously choose to be understood by as many people as possible.
It is said that art today has no real social power. How do you feel about that??
If art can't do anything, why are we constantly convinced of this, and always by mercenaries status quo? It seems to me that they are not convincing us but themselves, too scared to create something, too terrified to fight. I cannot say what art does and how it does it, but I know that it is often the only one that judges the judges, seeks revenge for the innocent and shows the future what the past has suffered, in the hope that it will never be forgotten. I also know that the powerful are afraid of art, regardless of its form, and that art sometimes circulates among people like rumors and legends and gives meaning to what life's cruelties cannot, a feeling that unites us and is inseparable from justice. Art then becomes a meeting point of the invisible, the irreducible and the possible.
