When I heard their names for the first time as a student of the Secondary Technical School in Novi Sad immediately after the Second World War, it seemed to me that they were characters from legends, such as Marko Kraljević and Miloš Obilić. A few years later, I first met Peka Dapčević and then Koča Popović. I saw, of course, that people are flesh and blood, but also that their lives carry those elements of tragedy, without which there is no hero of the Iliad in the south, the Kalevala or the Ring of the Nibelung in the north, and especially not a hero in the reality in which we live.
photos: historical archive of BelgradePERSONS FROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF P. DAPČEVIĆ: Jovan Gec,...
It was said that Peko sometimes drove a jeep dressed in a leather coat without rank insignia and that he posed as General Dapčević's chauffeur. I don't know if that's true, but it fits the story about him, everything I've learned about him. It was said that once he stopped at Dedinje, seeing the then famous director, actor, comedian, Jovan Goec, and offered to take him wherever he wanted. When they arrived at Terazije, Getz wanted to honor the kind driver, he refused, and finally admitted:
"Don't be uncle Getc, I'm Peko Dapčević."
The actor looked at him a little better and said:
"Really! Thank you very much, but I will never offer a tip to anyone again in my life..."
LOVE ME, HE DOESN'T LOVE ME: I met Peko Dapčević in 1951 at the Writers' Club, which you couldn't enter without a pass, and which received followers from the so-called diplomatic magazine. For me and others like me, the Club was the pinnacle of the socialist paradise, for Pek or, for example, Moša Pijade, the most democratic opportunity to "meet ordinary people". As far as I know, Koča Popović did not visit the Club, although as a pre-war writer and member of the surrealist movement, he certainly had the most right to do so.
...wife Milena...
We were several very young poets at the time, I think one of them was the late Slavko Vukosavljević, and Peko complained to us: "Nobody loves me." They love my fame, my rank, my car, but only my dog loves me..." Then he thoughtfully added: "...which Tito gave me."
Even then I thought that somehow in that strange mood he dragged Tito into a monologue about who loves him or doesn't love him, but also that a man who looks so good can probably sweep any girl off her feet, regardless of fame, rank , money or cars.
The next time I saw him was in 1952 in Dubrovnik. My third book of poems with the title Trains it was published that year, so I could afford a vacation at sea from the fee. I simply went to Putnik, then the only, of course, state agency, got two single rooms at the Excelsior Hotel and took my sister, who had just graduated.
...and brother Vlad
A movie was being filmed in front of the hotel All to sea, with Milan Puzić and Milena Vrsajkov, whom I knew from Novi Sad. She had three sisters, and one of them went to school with me. We called Milena Baby. She was one of the most beautiful girls in town. Peko Dapčević stayed in the neighboring villa "Scheherezada", reserved for people like him, but he swam with us "among ordinary people" and courted - and who else - but Vrsajkova.
There are many written traces about all this. Branko Ćopić had published his Heretical story alluding to "Scheherazade" and the attitude of some of her guests towards "ordinary people", about the film All to sea I published a negative review in "Omladina" under the title "Millions into the sea", and about the love between Beba and Peck in my novel Ballerina and war.
The next time I saw Peko Dapčević was at the New Year's party in 1954 at the Writers' Club. I came after midnight and joined the table of our then most important literary critic, Zoran Mišić, and Milovan Đilas and Peko Dapčević and their wives were sitting in one of the honorable corners. Some time after that, in the journal "New Thought", Djilas published his "Anatomy of a Morality", which turned out to be one of the causes of his conflict with Tito, the party, and ultimately his downfall. Although it is a different story, it also has something to do with Peka, because the relationship of the supreme leader, or rather, the wife of the members of that leader, towards Beba Vrsajkova - now Milena Dapčević - played an important role in my opinion. Peck was expected to marry a friend from the war, not - God forbid - some provincial actress.
FRIENDS HAVE A SAY: The Party's reckoning with Đilas took place at the plenum of the Central Committee on January 16 and 17 - a little more than two weeks after that New Year's celebration with Peka that I described. Although the cause was certainly primarily Đilas's theoretical articles in "Borba", I suspect, and of course I cannot prove, that many threads also lead to the bedrooms of, for example, Tito himself, Kardelj, Ranković and others, where the wives excitedly pointed to " The anatomy of a moral" and mentioned Peck and Beba or her oldest sister. No one said anything like that about it, maybe my imagination ran away with me…
The fact is that 39 members of the Central Committee spoke at the plenum, Đilas was defended only by his ex-wife Mitra Mitrović and Vladimir Dedijer.
As far as I know, Peko was silent, but he must have been terribly uncomfortable, because before that he had a problem when his beloved, younger brother, Colonel Vlado Dapčević, the head of the Administration for Agitation and Propaganda of the Yugoslav People's Army, not only spoke in favor of the Informburo resolution , but in 1950 he tried to escape from the country and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. There is no place here to follow the government's fate, but Peck was certainly influenced by it.
Now he was also involved in the case of Milovan Đilas, neither guilty nor obligated, because of his love for a beautiful, young woman, so nothing is more natural than that he remained silent. I think he could not go against Djilas, who was the only one who supported him from the top, but he never dreamed of going against anything that Tito decided.
I guess that's how the marshal himself understood it. After the scandal surrounding Djilas and the "Anatomy of a Moral", Peko could not remain the Chief of the General Staff of the JNA, so he was hidden from the public eye by being appointed to the position of ambassador to Greece.
SURREALIST AND REVOLUTIONARY: Koča Popović had no qualms either in relation to Informbiro or in connection with the "Đilas case". Much later, he would say in an interview that Djilas was right in many respects, but that he was a "fantasist" and that he "couldn't judge that it wasn't the time to say such things..."
I worked for Koca Popović for the first time only in 1965, until then I never met him. It was my first experience as a translator at the state level and I have already described it several times, because it is so important to me, but in this context I have to repeat something. Yugoslavia was visited by the Austrian Prime Minister Josef Klaus with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Krajski, our delegation was led by the President of the Federal Executive Council (Government) Petar Stambolić, and the Head of Diplomacy was Koča Popović. I sat on the left side of Stambolić, Koča on the right, the Austrians across the street. I had no experience and when it seemed to me that the Austrian translator had made a mistake in translating Stambolic, I interrupted him, corrected him and was afraid that I had caused a scandal. I looked for Koca's gaze behind Stambolic's back, and he was nodding his head. I understood that he wanted me to continue correcting the Austrian colleague, and this led to Klaus asking me to translate on both sides.
When the official meeting ended, and we all got up, Koča approached me and said something like:
“I knew about you, but I didn't know you were so good. Now I'm taking you to Titus!"
Our colleagues from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs heard this and whispered to me:
"Alal you believe, Koca rarely praises anyone..."
Ambassador and Koča's close associate Ivo Vejvoda wrote somewhere: "Koča knew how to be dangerous, if someone was stupid." Koča himself said that he was "sharp". He was gentle with me, but he kept me at a distance. I can't imagine that he could talk about his feelings in front of barely known people like Peko.
I think that one of the reasons why he was like that is that he drew a line between his surrealist youth and the active struggle for a different life as a communist and a fighter, a revolutionary lieutenant in the Spanish Civil War, and another is that his problem with many party comrades was his own. origin - he was the offspring of a wealthy banking family and was educated in France.
Koca knew my wife's family well. Long before we got closer to each other and remained married for over fifty years, she was like a ballerina at a New Year's party at Tito's, and on that occasion Koča told her about her father, my father-in-law, whom he never I didn't meet him, because he died on Sutjeska. Koča said that Milan Nikolić was a "difficult man", because he did not understand that a "bourgeois", like him, Koča, could be the commander of a "real proletarian", like him, Milan, who was called "Krasni Fleet". However, on that occasion, Koča praised her uncle, the surrealist painter Radojica Živanović, known as Noje, with whom he collaborated closely in the surrealist magazine "Nemoguce". Noje Živanović was killed on October 20, 1944 in the center of Belgrade by a stray bullet.
JEEP AND SPACHEK: Serbian politician Dušan Čkrebić titled his book about Koča "Koča Popović - a deep human secret" and said in an interview for "Vreme" that he borrowed that expression from Mirko Tepavac. If Koča remained a secret for such a close associate of his, as was Tepavac, and for a high-ranking Serbian politician, as was Čkrebić, perhaps it is presumptuous for someone to explain such a personality, when he barely knew him. However, not all details can be seen from a distance, but the whole is usually better seen, reconnaissance from an airplane or even from a satellite gives a different picture than a patrol report from the scene, a successful approach to reality is possible only by connecting all the data obtained in various ways .
As far as I know, Koča kept notes in French all his life, there are over 17.000 pages in the archive, Čkrebić says that he has read something, but that only someone younger should study everything seriously. I did not see them, the fact that Koca himself chose to publish it disappointed me, he did not present anything exciting or secretive. I took it as his elegant restraint.
As I said, immediately after the liberation, Peko drove a jeep so that he would not be recognized as a high-ranking leader, Koča, as the vice-president of the Republic, after the fall of Ranković, formally the second man in the state, drove a spaček, a funny, small French Citroen, called deux cheveau - two horses. I think that the choice of a car, if it is not conditioned by gross material reasons, betrays the character, but also the intentions of a person. Peck's jeep was a means of camouflage, Koch's spacek, on the contrary, a challenge. I think he meant to say: "I am not like them!" But I'm not even a bourgeois, I'm an ordinary French intellectual."
Neither the jeep nor the spaček are proof of the modesty of the commanders of the First and Second Proletarian Brigades, Koča and Pek. Perhaps on the contrary, because even by choosing a car, they emphasized their uniqueness, their difference from their immediate surroundings.
HEROES IN RETIREMENT: Ivo Lola Ribar, a man who was far more important than them for the pre-war Yugoslav communist movement, for the preparation of the possibility of an uprising, died in 1943, aged only 27, and thus remained an eternally young hero. Koča and Peko experienced old age, the phrase would say, well-deserved old age. Koca died at the age of 84, Peko at the age of 86, but old age is sad and by no means goes with heroes. Achilles in the Iliad and Siegfried in the German saga in the Nibelungen, Che Guevara in the new age, had to die young, brilliant, as victors even in death, and not be seen decrepit, forgetful, powerless.
The last time I met Pek was in the fall of 1987 in the lobby of the "Slavija" hotel in Belgrade. I was there, because the guests of the October meeting of writers stayed there, I don't know for what reason the married couple Dapčević found themselves there. I went up to greet them, but Peko didn't recognize me, Milena, with whom I also collaborated while I was at the National Theater, reminded him: "Well, that's Comrade Ivanji..."
He nodded absently. I don't know if it was the forgetfulness of old age, or if he simply didn't remember me, but he seemed somehow lost, diminished, nothing like the hero I met and admired for several years after he was at the head of the army that liberated Belgrade. who emerged victorious from the war.
Several writers, who were familiar with the events, wrote about Koča's arrival in Sutjeska in 1973, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Partisan breakthrough, for example, the aforementioned Čkrebić, who was there as a member of the Serbian leadership, and Aleksandar Nenadović, to whom Koča personally spoke that he really was on Brioni, as he often was before that.
I remember a state security official telling me that Koca liked to swim very far, so a patrol boat once blocked his path and warned him that there might be sharks in the area: "Let me go, guys!" snapped Koca, " have you ever heard of a former foreign minister being eaten by sharks?" As I recall, shortly after that, the foreign minister was fatally attacked by a great white shark in Australia.
Koča, already suffering from prostate cancer, got into his sleeper himself, drove straight to Sutjeska on our bad roads, reported to the protocol, who did not know what to do with him and placed him in a tent, while the managers and foreign guests slept in villas or hotels. Koča suffered from prostate problems, every half hour he had to look for a field toilet in the rain and darkness, and while he was waiting in line for dinner, he was rudely pushed by a policeman, so he sat down in his small car, angry and offended, and returned to Brione. Five years earlier, it was Koča who reported to Tita on behalf of the fighters at the celebration. Let's not forget, the breakthrough at Sutjeska was Koča's strategic idea, with which Tito initially did not agree, it was considered that he escaped with the First Proletarian, but reliable historians believe that this is what saved the Supreme Headquarters, and to some extent the outcome of the national liberation struggle.
Nenadović later asked him if, as a "former surrealist", he saw in that experience of a forgotten hero being pushed aside "a crude joke at the expense of romantic condottiere?" Koča replied: "Well, life itself is a kind of game, isn't it? It is important not to lose yourself, to defend yourself and your dignity, if possible... From that point of view, it could have been a certain conditional advantage that I was a surrealist..."
Surrealists were very close to psychoanalysis. How would Freud himself analyze the personalities of Koča Popović and Peko Dapčević? What would he find as a starting point in their very different childhoods? Peko was born in the Montenegrin village of Ljubotinja with only about fifty inhabitants, Koča in a wealthy Belgrade family. Peko remained absolutely loyal to Tito through all the vicissitudes; Koča had his views and after the fall of Marko Nikezić and the voluntary resignation of Mirko Tepavac, who were "his people", Tito resigned from all his positions.
On the occasion of Tito's eightieth birthday in 1972, the military magazine "Front" wanted to publish a series of statements by well-known personalities about the birthday boy, so the editor-in-chief at the time, Šime Kronja, visited Koča with a stenographer. Koča refused, saying that he retired from politics and could not write, Cronja insisted that he did not need to write, let him dictate, but Koča almost kicked him out. Čkrebić writes that he said: "You took twenty minutes from my tennis, so you know I'm a surrealist, I can't do that..."
I told sad stories about people who, as the praise singers of that time - my time - would say, together with Tito, became legends. Perhaps many seventeen-year-olds today know nothing about Koča Popović and Peko Dapčević or, at best, like me when I was their age, they think that they are figures from mythology similar to Kraljević Marko and Miloš Obilić. Admittedly, if, as mature people, we find out the information about the fact that Marko Mrnjavčević, known as Kraljević Marko, was on the Turkish side during the time of the colors in Kosovo, and what reasons Miloš Kobilić had for his act, who was only rechristened as Obilić by a folk song, we will see that they were also in some segments of personalities from tragedies like Koča and Peko.
An extensive testimony about the time in question in this article can be found in a book by the same author Tito's translator published by Laguna.
