An interview with Gojko Božović, a Belgrade-based Serbian poet, literary critic and publisher. Interviewer: Nikodem Szczygłowski

NIKODEM SZCZYGŁOWSKI: It has been 30 years since the break-up of Yugoslavia. In an essay published in 2021 titled Yugoslavia. 30 Years, the Slovenian writer Drago Jančar compared the countries that once made up Yugoslavia to islands in an archipelago. The publishing house which you head is also called Arhipelag, which in English means archipelago. What is your mission and what kind of literature do you opt to publish?

GOJKO BOŽOVIĆ: The Arhipelag was founded in 2007. At that time the reality was very different from the one we live in today. It was before the global economic crisis, before the great wave of populism that swept the world and still has no intention of leaving it. At that time, there was much more democracy in Eastern European and Balkan states and societies, especially in Serbia.

It is frustrating to hear people from outside Ukraine minimise the impact of the war. In order for the country to truly become free, however, it is important to acknowledge how such events can become mere metaphors for others.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed the lives of all the country’s inhabitants. For a writer, such an event may well inspire a renewed sense of purpose. While the realities of war bring new duties, they make the power of words all the more clear.

Poetry may not have the power to stop Russian missile strikes but Ukraine’s literary festival season, which carried on in spite of the horrors of war, became a testament to the importance of defending culture during the invasion. After all, the Russians have been very clear that they do not recognise the Ukrainian identity.

In Chernivtsi, a small Western Ukrainian city located on the border with Romania, September begins with poetry. Artists from throughout Ukraine and all over the world have been gathering there for the past 13 years during the annual Meridian Czernowitz Festival. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this year’s festival was different, and, in the words of Meridian’s chief editor Evgenia Lopata, “a small miracle”.

An interview with Serhiy Zhadan, a Ukrainian writer and singer. Interviewer: Zoriana Varenia

A new milestone in Ukraine's public diplomacy began in late March when the foreign ministry approved, for the first time in history, a public diplomacy strategy. The document calls for efforts to form and promote a positive international image of Ukraine at a strategic level and defines the concept of public diplomacy, filling a conceptual void that had existed for many decades.

After Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, public diplomacy in the official Ukrainian public and academic discourse was practically absent. Existing initiatives in this field were mostly isolated, lacked complexity, strategic vision and adequate financial support. For some time, the duties of public diplomacy were assigned to so-called cultural and information centres, which operated at foreign diplomatic missions. These centres were responsible for disseminating information about Ukraine abroad, acquainting foreign audiences with Ukrainian history and culture, and informing them about Ukraine's tourism opportunities and attractions.

A review of Апошняя кніга пана А. (Mr A.’s Last Book). By: Alhierd Bacharevič. Publisher: Januškievič Publishing House, Minsk, Belarus, 2020.

Austrian writer Peter Handke was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. The award renewed a debate surrounding this author – his ardent support for Serbia and Slobodan Milošević, who was the Serbian leader in the mid-1990s – and puts the integrity of the Swedish Academy into question.
On December 10th 2019 the well-known Austrian author Peter Handke, received the Nobel Prize for Literature. A number of ambassadors from the Western Balkans boycotted the ceremony, as did Peter Englund, a historian and former secretary of the Swedish Academy. Kosovo declared Handke persona non grata. The controversy is about Handke’s position on Serbia. He is accused of supporting the regime under Slobodan Milošević or even genocide denial.

Review of Alhierd Bacharevič's Maje Dzievianostyja (My 1990s).

A review of Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova. By: Tomas Venclova and Ellen Hinsey. Publisher: University of Rochester Press, Rochester New York, 2017.

Today our world is plagued with massive flows of information, chaos, propaganda, post-truth and fake news. If we play on John Austin’s conception of doing things with words, one might have a feeling that our world is simply cramped. There is a tendency to equate being prolific with being great, as literary criticism and economics prefer easily quantifiable works. Aware that culture has origins in the Latin cultivare, we should expect it to bear fruit once a year. The Lithuanian poet and Yale professor Tomas Venclova, however, approaches it with much more patience.

Before he ever left home, Joseph Conrad knew what powerful nations and material interests could do to weaker peoples. Born Jósef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz Korzeniowski, in Berdyczów in modern-day Ukraine in 1857, he belonged to a nation, Poland, which was no longer to be found on the map. His father Apollo, a writer and prominent Polish nationalist, was arrested and exiled with his family for anti-Russian conspiracy when his son was four years old. This was Conrad’s first lesson in the power of empires and the cost of idealism. Life was difficult and by the time he was 11, both his parents were dead. Conrad never forgave imperial Russia: “from the very inception of her being”, he was to write in 1905, “the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence”. At age 17, the young Korzeniowski went to sea, serving first as an ordinary seaman and later as a ship’s officer, mostly in vessels of the British merchant marine. He learnt English in his twenties and developed an ambition to become a writer in this, his third language.

Interview with Asli Edoğan, a prize-winning Turkish writer and human rights activist detained on August 17th 2016 for allegedly making terror propaganda on behalf of Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The interview took place at the end of September 2015 in Kraków.  Interviewers: Iwona Reichardt and Bartosz Marcinkowski.