FROM THE DRAMATURGE’S NOTES ON DIVISIONS

Almost everywhere we turn, we hear about some kind of divisions in Serbia. From (pseudo-)political ones: “the First and Second Serbia,” “civil and national Serbia,” “left- and right-wing Serbia,” “the government and the opposition,” “boycott and electoral opposition,” to religious, national, vaccination-related, sports, geographic, gender, generational, and other divisions… The list of divisions seems endless.

No matter how porous the boundaries between opposing sides essentially are, it is the willingness of their representatives to engage in mutual confrontation to the point of annihilation that creates a sense of unease and repeatedly raises the question of the purpose and necessity of such divisions.

The Second World War is, without a doubt, both a metaphor and a metonymy for the bloody divisions in Serbia. Its echoes can still be heard today. The decision to respond to the various divisions in Serbian society through a theatre production, while also marking 80 years since the beginning of the wartime conflicts in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia during the Second World War (1941–1945), is more than logical and justified. The significance of this event for the modern history of Serbia is immeasurably great.

One of the most important works of Serbian literature after the Second World War, Ćosić’s Divisions (1961), attracted considerable attention from both readers and critics because of its thematic and formal departure from the dominant literary model of socialist realism at the time.

The novel explores divisions: revolution/counterrevolution, violence/non-violence, upper/lower classes, domestic/foreign, old/young, heroism/cowardice, peasant/civilian, male/female, as well as family and social attitudes, predominantly from the perspective of the Ravna Gora movement, which at the time the novel was published represented the defeated side.

The thematic shift and the changed perspective from which the axes of conflict are viewed are accompanied by a compositional departure from a clear linear narrative, the blending of fiction and fact, in which the seemingly distinct voices of individuals become intertwined into a single voice of a people bewildered by its historical moment.

The main characters of the novel are descendants of the Katić and Dačić families, thus linking Divisions to The Roots and making it part of the most significant saga in Serbian literature of the 20th and 21st centuries (The Roots, A Time of Death, A Time of Evil, The Renegade, The Sinner, A Time of Power…).

These thematic and compositional elements directed the dramatization process toward identifying the collision between non-verbal action, soliloquy, monologue, and dialogue within each dramatic situation.

This collision provides an opportunity to search, both in the novel and in the dramatic text, for those qualities that irony, in its unifying experience, simultaneously emphasizes and negates. The process of ironization is based on establishing an antithesis between two worlds and two ways of thinking that mirror one another like reflections in a distorted mirror.

The principal ironic effect is achieved by interpreting one world through the terms belonging to another, from which analogous value judgments emerge. The conflicts of the historical moment that are thematized are resemanticized at both their poles into an undefined, amorphous state characteristic of representations of the period preceding a new beginning in the genealogical tree, corresponding to the experience of the “eternal return of the same.”

Writing of both collective and personal tragedy, Ćosić begins the novel with Nazi Germany’s attack on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941 and concludes it with the events surrounding liberation in the autumn of 1944.

He selected and developed the characters according to their social background and life choices, thereby encompassing all the social strata on which the opposing sides—the Ravna Gora and Partisan movements—relied.

From the multitude of characters and perspectives offered by the novel, the dramatization process singled out the most significant representatives, whose individual traits and narrative lines bring together the traumatized experience of division and the disintegration of society, family, and the individual.

At the same time, the fragmentation and reshaping of time, the experience of contemporary theatre, the grotesque similarities between the traumas of the wars of the 1990s and the divisions of the 21st century, and the playful approach to form—in which the Chorus, as a plurality of individual destinies and voices, preserves the memory of Greek tragedy while also becoming an omniscient narrator, something akin to a social network, a group of selected avatars gathered around the retelling of the fate of Uroš Babović and the inhabitants of the villages of Prerovo and Trnava—form the starting point of this dramatization process and a possible basis for its stage interpretation.

The characters are constructed as semiotic clusters, whose more complete map of distinctive features makes it possible to conceive the entire production as a movement of the masses, in which the sparks of individual destinies become both an icon and an index of the society we represent and to which we speak here and now.

The titanic struggle between the two complexes, the Laius and Oedipus complexes, and their questions—why do parents want to kill their children, and why do children want to kill their parents?—seems to take on an extreme form in Serbia: everyone against everyone and each against each.

And so, one somehow manages—or fails to manage—to find one’s way through the thing we call life.

Moving through different layers of consciousness, subconsciousness, and reality with every one of its elements, through different associations, organizing the characters and acting expression around an entire series of thematic axes, Divisions endures as an aggregate of potentially unlimited and ever-new interpretations.

Spasoje Ž. Milovanović