Summary
Miljenko Jergović: Directory of beautiful skills II.: essays, chronicles, articles
It has already been stated, but it should be stated again: the range of Jergović's essayistic motifs seems to have no limits. Neither in the areas that interest him, nor in the authors and works he writes about. And when the first ones are exhaustively listed - literature, painting, television, film, photography, music, design, history, radio - it is not certain that they are all listed. And authors and works? Only this register most plastically reveals all the irreducible intellectual and reading curiosity and openness of Jergović, not trapped or blocked by any classification classifications and apriorisms. With the same intensity of attention and equal textual eros, Jergović writes about Amos Oz and Zdravko Malić, Malaparte and Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, Mladen Ovadija and Bruna Popović, Stojan Vučićević and Marina Abramović, Georgi Gospodinov and the Teofilović brothers, Viktor Šklovski and Viktor Klemperer, Lojzet Kovačić and Olga Tokarczuk, the TV series Babylon Berlin and to Amira Medunjanin, Jan Kotto and Vladimir Pištal, Tvrtko Kulenović and Vladimir Vojnović, Dragoslav Mihailović and Bora Ćosić, Juraj Križanić and Olga Zirojević, finally (and most often) about two extremely distant literary and life strangers, and so daringly ours - about Krleža and Andrić. Jergović, thank God, is not a critic; his analytical apparatus is in the freshness of his experience and in the strength of his text, and the axiological attitude and judgment are contained in the very choice of the work and the author. Namely, he writes about those he loves, with whom he sympathizes and in whom he discovers value; he does not deal with others. His essay writing is simply a celebration of art and good writing, in its best moments equal to what and those he writes about. — Ivan Lovrenović
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