I owe various debts to grand masters of Middle-European fantastika. From E. T. A. Hoffmann I learned how to discreetly introduce fantastical elements, from Gogol how to increase the symbolic value of a fantastic story, from Bryusov how to achieve authenticity, from [Mikhail] Bulgakov how to make the most of the humor in a fantastic context, from Kafka how to handle absurdity, from [Stanisław] Lem how to search for new paths of fantastika.
MM: You have described what you learned from previous writers regarding technique. I’d like now to turn to the content of your fictions, which I think of as “metaphysical fantasias.” What writers, if any, have influenced the conceptual aspects of your fiction?
ZZ: I agree that most of my fictions could be considered “metaphysical fantasies” in that they deal with so-called ultimate questions. Although it might seem that ultimate questions are the exclusive concern of philosophy, it is only apparently so. Other disciplines and arts can substantially contribute to their pursuit. Among the arts, fiction probably has the greatest potential in this regard. One might say that dealing with ultimate questions is its ultimate challenge.
It is by no means a simple task, however. The trap of turning a work of fiction into a tedious tract is always there, threatening an inexperienced, careless, or simply untalented writer. Such a work betrays the very essence of the art of prose: that it is the art of storytelling.
A reliable way to avoid this trap is to master various fictional techniques. This was the reason I emphasized, in my answer to your previous question, the technical aspects I have learned from the masters of Middle-European fantastika. These aspects are essential. In my creative writing course at the University of Belgrade, I spend the first three out of four semesters teaching my students basic prose techniques. Only the final semester is devoted to content.
Although necessary, prose techniques are not sufficient for dealing with ultimate questions in the art of fiction. Many writers who mastered these techniques never consider ultimate questions. I suppose one has to have a special inclination toward them. Besides, it isn’t always pleasant and inconsequential to deal with ultimate questions. There are much safer and less demanding types of fiction.
Many teachers shaped my approach to ultimate questions. In fact, almost everything I have read contributed to some extent to my becoming an author of “metaphysical fantasies.” But if I had to choose one writer who influenced me most fundamentally, I would pick without hesitation Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky. I have spent the last year and a half rereading his entire fiction opus for the third time. It was as if I had never read him before—as if only now, in my early sixties, I have proper eyes for his magnificent work.
MM: During the twentieth century, the Balkans suffered political upheavals, ethnic dislocations and violence, and economic hardships on a scale difficult for an outsider to imagine. Many Yugoslav and Serbian writers have addressed these and other historical events in their fiction, such as The Houses of Belgrade by Borislav Pekić, Knife by Vuk Drašković, In the Hold by Vladimir Arsenijević, and, in the fantastic, Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars. By contrast, the characters in your work seem largely detached from history, politics, and society at large. How, if at all, has the tumultuous situation in Serbia influenced your fiction? To what extent was the decision to not address such matters premeditated as opposed to a consequence of the process of creation?
ZZ: The simplest answer would be that I am not a mimetic writer and therefore my books are not fictional “comments” on reality, even when reality is literarily very stimulating, as it certainly was in the twentieth century in the Balkans. But how is it possible, one might wonder, to be a nonmimetic writer under such circumstances, to neglect the strong historical challenges to which almost all other Serbian writers responded?
I have often faced this question, locally and internationally. For quite some time the Serbian literary establishment didn’t really know what to do with my humble self. It still sticks to a century-long tradition of favoring realistic over fantastic fiction, although this goes against the very roots of our national literature: our folklore, which is so abundant in fantastic elements. Even in the early twenty-first century, a Serbian author must write about themes from our national history to be taken seriously by the establishment.
At first, they simply ignored my books or, if pressed, labeled them as science fiction (in their vocabulary, a synonym for trivial literature), which showed that they actually hadn’t read my work at all. But then I gradually became by far the most widely translated contemporary Serbian author (at the moment, sixty-one foreign editions in twenty-one languages) and could no longer be ignored, for few Serbian writers manage to reach the world. A major part of the establishment finally accepted my fantastika as serious literature. For another, smaller, nationalistic part, however, precisely the fact that my books are so widely translated implied that I had turned my back on what they see as Serbian national literary interests.
Similar dilemmas occasionally appeared abroad. Some foreign critics found it rather curious that a Serbian author wasn’t recognizable by what he wrote about—Serbian themes (usually narrowed to the Balkan civil wars of the 1990s). Moreover, had they not known where I came from, they would never have been able to figure it out from my stories and novels. I had the impression that they implicitly reproached me for betraying a strange literary canon.
I believe this whole misunderstanding originated in a misconception of the act of literary creation. To put it simply, a writer doesn’t choose a theme; a theme chooses an author. At least, this is the case with me. I don’t start working on a new piece of fiction by asking myself what I am going to write about this time. When I come to my desk to begin a new story or a new novel, I know very little about it, at least on a conscious level. It is in my subconscious that the work is already fully formed, waiting to be transferred to my monitor via my keyboard. While I am writing I am little more than a typist—and a reader curious to know what his subconscious will come up with this time. So far, for some mysterious reason, it has delivered only nonmimetic fiction... to my satisfaction as the reader.
MM: Does the Serbian public share the attitudes of the literary establishment? More broadly, how healthy is fantastika in Serbia and southern Europe today?
ZZ: The reading public doesn’t share these attitudes. The majority have no prejudices whatsoever toward fantastic fiction. People read what they like. Some dislike fantastika, which is quite normal and legitimate. The influence of the conservative part of the contemporary Serbian literary establishment is limited mostly to the highest literary circles—institutions like the Academy of Sciences and Arts, some faculties and institutes.
There is continuing interest in books of the fantastic throughout Serbia and southern Europe. But this is largely limited to foreign works in translation. Even if there were excellent local writers of fantastika, their books could hardly compete with imported best sellers, no matter how poor these might be. Print runs of my books in Serbia rarely exceed two thousand copies, while a typical product of the publishing industry—a vampire novel, for example—sells up to ten thousand copies, which is a lot here. But this is only natural. It would be pointless for me to fantasize about having as many readers as an author of trivial fiction. Readers of vampire novels have no ears for my music, nor have I music for their ears.
Considering the sad fact that the local literary establishment doesn’t favor fantastika, it is no wonder that professional writers of the fantastic are very rare here. At the moment, I am probably the only author with a certain international reputation. Works by the few amateur writers of the fantastic are not considered “official” literature, although some of their books are rather good.
MM: Beyond the obvious fact of your nationality, to what extent do you consider yourself a “Serbian writer”? What role, if any, does your national identity play in the dominant concerns of your fiction?
ZZ: I certainly consider myself a Serbian writer. I am a Serb writing i
n my mother tongue, Serbian. On the other hand, I am aware that I am not a typical Serbian writer. Of my nineteen books of fiction so far, in only one, The Last Book, do characters have Serbian names. Otherwise, there appear to be no Serbs in my fiction. This fact, probably even more than my writing fantastika, turned the literary establishment against me—particularly the nationalistic part, which was rather influential during the 1990s, in the Milošević era, and is still present, although not as strong.
Just as there are no Serbs in my fiction, neither are there other nationalities. No Americans, no Russians, no Chinese, no Croats, no Eskimos... For the characters of my stories and novels, national identity is irrelevant. Also, they are either nameless or have “international” names used in many languages. Finally, their whereabouts are mostly vague, not determined.
These aspects of my protagonists follow from the themes I write about: Love and Death. These are the two pivotal themes of the art of fiction. We write fiction in the first place because this is probably our best way to approach the two major determinants of our lives: our greatest sentiment and our mortality.
Paradoxically, it appears that there can’t be love without death. They seem inseparable. The other side of the coin of our greatest misfortune is our greatest fortune. No philosophical, religious, or scientific system can cope with this ultimate duality. Only art is capable of that, and among all the arts literature can penetrate most deeply into this most tragic secret of being human. Basically, these two themes are what we have been writing about for roughly five thousand years, ever since literature was invented. And they are still far from exhausted. They never will be, and in precisely this lies the eternal importance of literature.
In these highest registers of the art of fiction, we are all just human beings; our ethnic, religious, social, or any other contexts play no role whatsoever. On the other hand, although my protagonists are not explicitly Serbs, they could be, or any other nationality. This absence of nationality is the quality that has enabled readers throughout the world to identify with my characters, to understand their situations and dilemmas. My loyalty in literature belongs to a much larger group, humanity, of which my fellow countrymen are just a part—a not very big part and certainly in no way special.
Part II: A career in transition: From scholar, translator, and publisher to author of fantastika
MM: You devoted the first part of your career to scholarship on science fiction. This period culminated with the publication in 1990 of your Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Three years later your first novel, The Fourth Circle, was published in Serbian. Since then you have published a total of nineteen books of fiction, none of which can meaningfully be considered science fiction. The Fourth Circle seems a transitional work, in that it prominently uses science fictional devices absent from your later work. What role did writing this book play in your career change and in your subsequent realization that science fiction was too limiting a storytelling mode?
ZZ: The writing of The Fourth Circle was in many ways a new kind of experience for me. First, although literature was an essential part of my life—my constant and insatiable reading ever since I became literate at the age of six, my university education (in comparative literature), both my academic theses, my activities as translator (more than seventy translated books, mostly from English), editor and publisher (more than three hundred published titles), and, finally, my nonfiction writing—I had never been tempted to try my hand at writing fiction. Actually, the idea never occurred to me.
I began when I was forty-five, but not as a consequence of premeditation. I wrote my first fiction sentence (“The circle.”)—there can hardly be a shorter one—quite spontaneously, in February 1993, in a mountain resort in southern Serbia. My wife, Mia, was (and still is) a passionate skier, and we went each winter to her favorite Kopaonik mountain. Since, however, I was never a skiing fan, I spent my mornings and early afternoons first in long walks and then mostly reading in the large and conveniently empty lobby of the Grand Hotel.
I still vividly remember the urge to write that suddenly came upon me on a brilliantly sunny day, while reading. I closed the book, went to a nearby bookshop, and bought a notebook and a pen. As soon as I returned to the hotel, I started to write. By the time Mia returned from her skiing session, the first chapter of what became The Fourth Circle was completed.
The fact that I was writing fiction quite astonished me, but what amazed me even more was my lack of any rational control over it. The process was very different from composing my nonfiction texts, when I knew precisely what I wanted to do and how to do it. When I wrote fiction, sentences kept flowing, apparently out of nowhere, as if someone was inaudibly dictating them to me.
Only four months later, after The Fourth Circle was completed, did I realize the nature of this unique experience, the true source of my first piece of fiction. Somewhere beneath my conscious level, quite unknown to my rational self, a critical mass was gathering. My knowledge of literature, accumulated over previous decades, gradually transformed into something new. When the moment came to be released, it erupted almost like a volcano—quite appropriately, on top of a mountain.
What I went through while writing The Fourth Circle was almost a personality split. I was simultaneously a writer, rather unconscious of what he was doing, and a reader, impatient due to the slowness of the writer’s typing. (I type using only my right hand index finger). It became particularly frustrating during the closing chapters of The Fourth Circle, the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, when I could hardly wait to see whether and how the novel’s several seemingly unrelated structural threads would merge to form a consistent tapestry.
Since The Fourth Circle was in a way a recapitulation of my previous forty years of intensive living with literature, it inevitably contained traces and reflections of science fiction. After all, I was closely involved with this genre for about a decade and a half. But I don’t see it at all as a science-fiction novel. And it certainly isn’t SF by the standards of the English-language publishing industry. Actually, it doesn’t fit any marketing category. This is one reason it appeared—in a very nice small-press edition—only a decade after I started submitting it to US and UK publishers.
The science-fiction elements are far scarcer or even nonexistent in my eighteen fiction books written after The Fourth Circle. That isn’t because I consider science fiction less valuable than I used to. That would be betraying that long and fruitful period of my life. I still think science fiction is, at its best, one of the two major forms of fantastika in the second half of the twentieth century (the other is, of course, magic realism). But it seems to me that science fiction has passed its zenith and can no longer contribute to fantastika in any substantial way. We are currently in the process of defining a new form of the fantastic for the twenty-first century. I would be truly honored if my fiction could be a brick in this new wall.
MM: Clearly, writing The Fourth Circle was a very intuitive process. Would you briefly describe your creative process now? How do stories originate? How do you develop the seed of a story? How extensively do you revise your works?
ZZ: As a professor of creative writing, I am often asked by my students to tell them more about how I write fiction. I assume the real motivation behind this question, apart from their natural curiosity, is rather practical. Their reasoning goes like this: If our professor, who also happens to be a successful author, tells us the secret of how he creates fiction, and if we follow his steps, we might also produce good stories.
I do explain to them, as best as I can, my creative process, but I hasten to add at the end that it would be pointless to imitate me (or any other writer). First, there is nothing special about my way of writing. In fact, there isn’t any privileged way of writing. Any method is as good as its final outcome: a new work of fiction. It doesn’t matter whether you have reached that goal by a shortcut or a very roundabout route. Every author has his or her unique manner of composing fiction. Instead of following my steps, my stu
dents should try to find their own way of writing. Only if they succeed in this endeavor can they hope to become good writers.
All my books of fiction originated in exactly the same way. A sort of critical mass gathers in my subconscious—a place where everything I have ever felt, heard, seen, experienced, read, or learned is permanently stored. My entire past is there, in incessant turmoil, seeking something new. At least, this is how I imagine it—the creative mind at work, the most subtle and precious process in the universe. Consciously, I am in no way in control of it. Nor can I penetrate any deeper into how it works. But as long as it works, I don’t mind being blissfully ignorant.
Once the critical mass is reached, I get a clear signal from my subconscious in the form of an image from, or the introductory sentence of, a future story or novel. This usually happens in the morning, when my mind is in its best shape. At first, I hurried to my computer to start writing right away, anxious that the “inspiration” might disappear. But eventually I became experienced enough to know that this isn’t just a brief, temporary state. A work of fiction, fully formed in my subconscious, forever remains there, patiently waiting to be written down.
I am aware that this might sound quite unlikely, but I do not revise my fiction. Apart from some typos, the first version is also the final one. Initially this rather confused even me. All my education in literature insisted that some revisions would be required, but I couldn’t find any way to improve my initial manuscript. Now, after nineteen books, I would know for sure that the time has come to stop writing fiction if I ever had to do any revision.
It is fortunate that I have a reliable witness in this regard—my English translator, Alice Copple-Tošić, who has translated seventeen books of mine, starting with Time Gifts. From the very beginning we stuck to the same routine: the writing and translating went on simultaneously. As soon as I completed a chapter from a novel or a story from a mosaic novel, I emailed it to her. While she was translating it, I was writing the next chapter/story and so on, till the end. I never asked her to do any revisions simply because none were necessary.
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