Claudio Magris: The Danube
Novi Sad and Neighbourhood
Back to the Danube real and proper. Novi Sad was once the "Serbian
Athens", a cradle of the cultural and political rebirth of Serbia. Today
it is the capital of the Vojvodina. In the public offices and in Parliament
there are five official languages (Serbian, Hungarian, Slovak,
Rumanian and Ruthenian), even though the supremacy of Serbian is
indubitable, and in the army total. The countryside is superb, the
fortress of Petrovaradin, with its memories of Austrian and Turkish
occupation, stands high above the Danube, while hidden in the nearby
woods of the Fruška-Gora are the Orthodox monasteries with their
icons and their immemorial peace.
In the market in Novi Sad one even sees peasant women in Slovak national costume. As in Novi Sad, the Vojvodina as a whole displays its multi-national character, almost a concentrated essence of that multiplicity in unity which makes up Jugoslavia in general, and which economic crises and the centrifugal impulses of the various republics appear every so often to threaten. In interviews during the television programme mentioned earlier, Jon Petrović, a Rumanian in charge of the office for cultural self-management in Zitište, stated that when he goes to Rumania he feels he’s in a foreign country. Bački Petrovac is a centre of the Slovaks, who have flourishing cultural traditions. After Tito’s schism of 1948 some of these Slovaks had a hard time because they were suspected of being sympathetic to Stalinist Czechoslovakia, while others, who moved to Slovakia, were persecuted because they were suspected of Titoism. On the television, their bishop Joraj Struharik displays the red, gnarled snout of one with a healthy love for beer and sausages. The Ruthenians punctiliously distinguish themselves from the Slovaks and Ukrainians, looking to culture for their identity — according to their spokesman Julijan Rac.
Like the Slovaks, and even more so, the Hungarians have newspapers, magazines, publishing houses and a flourishing indigenous culture. A few years back Erwin Sinké died, a great figure in Novi Sad. After playing.a part in the republic of Béla Kun, he wrote his memoirs, The Novel of a Novel, as an exile in Moscow. In these he recounted the difficulty he had to get his novel The Optimists published in the Moscow of Stalin’s purges — it was a 1,200-page fresco of the Hungarian revolution of 1919, and above all it evoked those terrible Stalin years. The Novel of a Novel is a remarkable testimony, the story of a writer who thinks that he has written for nobody, because both his book and his diary seem to be destined to remain forever unpublished, and Sinko lives out the drama of a work addressed to no one, himself the phantom of a written text which seems to soak up life, but with neither purpose nor outlet.
In the Vojvodina there are plenty of gypsies, the Romanies, who are not just violinists, but also philologists, like Trifun Dimić, the author of a Romany dictionary. At Sibiu, in Rumania, moreover, they have chief who (at least in the first instance) settles their disputes according to ancient tribal law. In official questionnaires in the Vojvodina an increasing number answer the question “Nationality?” by simply saying “Jugoslav”. However, an Italian living in Novi Sad says that he feels like Lieutenant Drogo in The Desert of the Tartars, sunk in the slough of waiting for something that never happens.
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