Vidosav Stevanović was born on 27 June 1942 in Cvetojevac near Kragujevac, "under German occupation and the government of national salvation, into a family of moderately poor Šumadija peasants." In honour of Vidovdan — in whose name lies a remnant of the old god Svantovid or White Vid, protector of war and sun — he was given the name Vidosav at his christening.
In those days the battles of Bir Hakeim and Sevastopol had begun, the fortunes of war had turned to the Allied side, and the civilised world had narrowly escaped catastrophe. Vidosav's father Dragomir, a fighter of the 17th East Bosnian Shock Division, was severely wounded in the village of Sijekovac near Bijeljina and died in the Sombor military hospital on the day of victory. After the collapse of collectivisation, his grandfather Rajko sent Vidosav to Kragujevac for schooling. "Fortunately, I was frail, sickly and unfit for village work. The lights of the cities drew me — they became and remained the great loves of my life."
Belgrade and the first book
He left Kragujevac eight years later, with notebooks full of verses, prose sketches and essays, determined to become a writer. He arrived in Belgrade on the day the First Non-Aligned Conference began. "It was my chosen city even before I had seen it, and so what I saw did not bother me. I stayed there for thirty years."
He studied dentistry, fell ill, and upon recovery decided to study literature. "A little later I abandoned academic literature to devote myself wholly to real literature. I did not regard it as a profession but a calling — a craft that replaces religion, politics and ordinary life."
The publication of his first book of stories "Refuz mrtvak" in 1969 by "Prosveta" shaped his life for many years. "I had success, won three significant awards, found myself at the centre of polemics, and became the victim of two disqualifications: that I was the founder of the 'Black Wave' and that I had begun the so-called 'realist prose'. Both expressions are literarily meaningless, but they served as a fine cudgel for taming a disobedient writer."
Even then he used the term "fantastic realism" for his prose, coined after Dostoevsky's well-known sentence that "nothing is more fantastic than reality".
A judicial process was begun against Vidosav at that time and lasted six years. He was neither acquitted nor convicted; the process expired. Thanks to the climate of openness and tolerance fostered by the politicians we call the "Serbian liberals", he was employed at "Prosveta", the largest publishing house in Yugoslavia.
BIGZ and conflict with the regime
As director and editor-in-chief of BIGZ from 1982, he managed to save the publishing house from ruin and bring it among the best in Yugoslavia. That success turned into something more strenuous: the republican leadership at the time decided that the same had to be done at "Prosveta", which was then in crisis.
"I repeated both the effort and the results, everything went as it should, but two years later I had to tender my resignation and quit the same day." He spent the next two years as an advisor at Sarajevo's "Svjetlost", where in 1989 his Collected Works were published. "Realising that the nationalists wanted war at any cost, I resigned and left a city that would soon become the victim of the longest siege of the twentieth century."
Exile — Athens, Paris
He joined a small group of intellectuals who fought against Milošević and his politics of national division, hatred and war. The result was the "Independent Writers of Yugoslavia" in 1989 and the "Belgrade Circle" in 1991.
On the day Vukovar fell, he left dying Yugoslavia with his family; they greeted the start of the war in Bosnia as persecuted exiles in Athens. The first attack on Srebrenica in 1993 found Vidosav in Paris, where he had arrived in pursuit of his books from the trilogy "Snow and Dogs". He joined Ivan Đurić and the Movement for Democratic Freedoms.
At the end of 1996 he returned home, joined the demonstrators in Kragujevac, and they took over RTV Kragujevac, of which Vidosav became director for several months. "Realising what was happening within the opposition — that it was merely a department of Milošević's regime and his last line of defence — I decided to leave again for France and seek political asylum."
Like all people from these regions, I carry within me several identities — a Šumadinian, a Serb, a Yugoslav, a Balkan, a Frenchman, a Bosnian, a European and a citizen of the world — and for that reason I consider myself richer and freer than before.
During this time he received the French distinction Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. No Serbian media reported it. In 2004, driven by the need for his own language, he left Paris and came to Sarajevo, the symbolic city. In solidarity with multi-ethnic Bosnia and its victims, they also took Bosnian citizenship.
Return — The Vidosav Foundation
In 2007 he became a pensioner and returned to the house on the hill near Kragujevac that holds his library. He lives quietly, avoids the public and the media, travels occasionally. He works on several manuscripts he has long carried with him. He refuses political engagement. In summer his sons, friends from abroad and readers come to visit.
In 2009, with a group of Vidosav's readers on our country estate, I founded the "Vidosav Club", which through varied programmes attracts visitors and the curious. It now houses a permanent exhibition of Vidosav's books in Serbian and other languages titled "The Books That Aren't There".
In mid-2011 the monograph "Vidosav" was published, marking fifty years of my husband's literary work.
"What will happen next?" I sometimes ask. "If we manage to prevent the worst of the recent past from repeating, I intend to stay here. If the worst does happen, it makes no difference to me: the same struggle cannot be fought twice. Whatever happens will be material for some future book."
— Marija Vasiljević