Izvještaj s događaja: “In memoriam: Dževad Karahasan i Tvrtko Kulenović”
WRITTEN BY: Sumejja Muratagić-Tadić
During the last day of the Bookstan literary festival, organized by the Buybook publishing house, a panel was held dedicated to the recently deceased writers, essayists, novelists and university professors, Dževad Karahasan and Tvrtko Kulenović. The panel was led by playwright Almir Bašović and literary theoretician Edin Pobrić, both current university professors with long experience of cooperation with the late greats of the Bosnian literary scene.
The panel was opened by Petra Amalia Bachmann with the song ‘On A Starless Night’ by the Palestinian author Mosab Abu Toha, translated by Ulvija Tanović. Bašović then spoke about the similarities and differences between these two authors: he called them 'poetic antipodes', but he emphasized that the bonds that bind Karahasan and Kulenović include their erudition, their approach to literature and culture, and their passion for theater and drama, as a form that it lives on dialogue, not conflict. In addition, the authors have a unique connection with the conceptual framework of the Bookstan festival: both have treated the relationship between East and West almost obsessively, Kulenović through a stay in India and a doctorate on Asian theater, and Karahasan through the thematization of the East in his novels in different ways. The border, Bašović quoted Karahasan, is a 'phenomenon in which our identity is completed and at the same time opens up to something else.'
The second part of the panel was taken over by Edin Pobrić, in which he spoke about Tvrtko Kulenović. He began with a sentence by Umberto Eco, which this Italian maestro takes from Isaac Newton and runs through most of his writing: ‘We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.' Pobrić believes that it is Kulenović who is a giant with incredibly strong shoulders on which new generations of Bosnian writers and literary theorists are raised, and his poetics is at the same time the atmosphere he nurtured at the university and his greatest legacy — an atmosphere of warmth, support, but also creative and critical work .
Tvrtko’s so-called universe of sympathy works on the level of mutual communication of all his texts, regardless of form and genre: while working on the novel ‘Natural History of aDisease’, which he wrote by hand, Pobrić says that Kulenović often cut and pasted whole passages from his textbook-collection of essays ‘Rezime’. In this sense, his essays often function as literary texts and vice versa; this makes both forms of expression an extraordinary delight for readers of all profiles. Although Kulenović was one of the first postmodernists in this area, he ‘squeezed out his postmodernism so much that it almost became its opposite’ by combining the incompatible: irony and emotion into a unique form of written expression. He closed his presentation with an anecdote about Kulenović's sense of humor. During a televised conversation about the possibilities of progress in civilization and its individual fields, he was asked what he considers to be the greatest progress today, and he replied: 'Well, I think it's a telephone, and a good answering machine with it.'
In the last third of the presentation, Almir Bašović presented the character and work of his friend and collaborator, Dževad Karahasan. Instead of Kulenović's ‘ich form’, which insists on individual experience, Karahasan renounced subjectivity and was in an eternal search for objectivity. He thus excluded the so-called ‘first-ball’ humor; his comedy arises from the situation and always bears witness to the absurdity as a way of looking at the world. For Bašović, Karahasan was the wittiest man he had ever met, but he also wrote about 'the most pathetic story in the world: haunted lovers'. Although it is a story that is usually found in pathetic and melodramatic texts, Karahasan's novels have neither pathos nor melodrama. He used to say that he would only start writing a novel when he knew for each of his characters what he would order in a tavern.
Karahasan dealt with language at a time when linguistic structuralism was still unknown in these regions; he dealt with the garden as a meeting place between culture and nature; in the broadest sense, he dealt with reading and readers. He fantasized about his novels being 'letters to unknown friends'.
Both of them, Bašović pointed out, were writers who gladly and devotedly read works of recent literary creativity. He believes that today's young writers should return that kindness to Kulenović and Karahasan. Bašović concludes his presentation with the words: 'This is an invitation to check your mailboxes and your cozy home libraries; if you don't find Karahasan and Kulenović, make sure to get them, because they may be speaking directly to you.'
Photo (c) Milomir Kovačević Strašni
