AN INTERVIEW WITH VESNA GOLDSWORTHY - IRON CURTAIN OF DESTINY OR THE DREAM OF FREEDOM

When it is mentioned in Serbian circles that someone has succeeded abroad, the first impression is money and fame. Vesna Goldsworthy's success is based on intellectual power and talent in artistic creation, called literature.

It is my great pleasure and honor to have had the opportunity to interview the author of the novels: Iron Curtain (2022), Chernobyl Strawberries (2005), Gorsky (2015), novels that have been declared the most read across Europe and have been translated into German, Bulgarian, Dutch, Italian, Catalan, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, Portuguese and Romanian. Chernobyl Strawberries alone received about 250 reviews in the world press; six weeks on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung bestseller list. To remind the readers, this is an autobiography and depicts the childhood and youth that Vesna Bjelogrlić Goldsworthy spent in Belgrade, as well as her first steps in the field of poetry and literature in general. Moreover, this kind of book depicts the life and habits of all of us who lived in a Socialist system. The theme of the Iron Curtain has a similar framework - the main character that goes to the West from the hidden life of the red princess, and experiences a new life in a place she knew only through literature...

In the age of social networks and the increasingly difficult recognition of true values, your new book is well-received and praised in the West. Isn't that overburden West eager for something new, authentic, and different?

Yes, there is a constant search for something new because the overburden in the market is huge. It's hard to publish a book, and even harder to get noticed afterward. But a quarter of a century has passed since my first book, so I'm certainly not a novelty. I can't speak in general about the West because the reception of my books has been so different from country to country, and with the Iron Curtain I'm still waiting for many translations. In Germany and Austria, for example, Chernobyl Strawberries had fourteen editions, a theatrical performance, advertisements on the subway, and numerous television shows. However, although they were bestsellers in Britain and were serialized on the BBC, they didn’t see an American release. I remember that a couple of publishers there thought it was "too European for a book". Paradoxically, afterward the British edition sold well there and was even included in the reading list at universities. Inventing Ruritania was published first in the US, and the Washington Post gave the book the entire front page of its literary supplement. I'm looking forward to the North American release of the Iron Curtain in February as Norton is one of the most prominent publishers 'across the pond'. In Britain, the novel was hailed as one of the most important novels of 2022, but I also know that tastes differ. I have friends among British writers who are stars in the US, but here their resonance is noticeably smaller. They are two worlds even though the language is the same. Canada also has its own specifics and style.

Women's handwriting often increasingly brings a new angle of looking at the world and its appearance in society. Is a woman in politics, literature, technology, just fashion, or something more?

This question can be answered in several ways. Literature written by women is as old as literature itself, from Sappho onwards. The Byzantine world can boast of the incredible achievements of women writers, from Anna Komnene to our own Yefimia. In Britain, the greatest classics of the nineteenth century are precisely women - the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. And yet, they had to publish under a male pseudonym to be taken seriously. The so-called women's script, the idea that women write differently from men, is more recent; represents a specific, fluid style. I like books written in that style, like Marguerite Duras or Hélène Cixous, but that's not my style of writing. Literature is good or bad, not male or female. The same goes for politics, etc. However, I don’t forget that even today it is much more difficult for women to express themselves because the world is still tailored to men. My mother was afraid that in England I would have to work twice as hard to achieve half the success I would have achieved in my mother tongue. Perhaps this is true for women in general. Foreign woman: double handicap. But I have a son and I know that the world is cruel to boys too. "You need to know how to reach and escape and exist in a terrible place."

We are already used to our people achieving top results in the fields of technology, business, and sports. You are a star in the field of English-speaking literature. Does the British audience treat you as an exotic phenomenon in their surroundings or did you present yourself to them in a form and content that rarely appears in that cultural space?

The question seems simple, but it is extremely complex. I have built my university career on the study of images of the Balkans in literature and film, and I know how harmful the idea of Balkan exoticism, the wild East of Europe, is when it is transferred from the entertainment industry to politics. Inventing Ruritania explains this in almost three hundred pages. However, I am aware of my diversity, the fact that I am a Serbian writer in English, and that in that sense I belong to an infinitely small group. That doesn't make things any easier for me, maybe even makes it harder. What does a British reader think when they see my name on the cover of a book? Is he afraid that it will be a boring read about a part of the world he knows very little about and has no motivation to learn more? The advantage of a long career, some awards, and hundreds of views, is that now he doesn't have to think much. But if my name is recognized, if even in a megalopolis like London they stop me sometimes to take pictures with me, so I can no longer wander around disheveled and "shabby", as my grandmother would say, that doesn't mean I'm a star. There are very few of them in literature.

Are the Iron Curtains a fateful challenge in the life of every emigrant from an Eastern European country or is overcoming the Iron Curtains a form of liberation?

The idea of Eastern Europe is changing. The curtain described by the motto of my novel, from Szczecin to Trieste, moved further East in 1948. Then, after 1989, the former Soviet satellites went to Central Europe, then further West to the European Union, and Yugoslavia to a brighter past. Now we're all talking about the new Iron Curtain. I wanted to go back to the eighties to think about just that: the meaning of freedom. With her fate, my heroine Milena draws the difference between East and West, and in a way, the impossibility of liberation. We are hostages of precisely those divisions.

Would the novel Iron Curtain be less interesting if the heroine was from a lower class? The heroine of the novel perceives the experience of arriving in a capitalist, highly developed country as a disappointment, but she is not surprised, but instead tackles an unexpected reality. How do you experience class differences in England and are they still difficult to overcome today?

If the novel was about one of those hundreds of women from the East, let's say, who are found in Western nursing homes, it could be powerful and good. Imagine what those women see. The Iron Curtain was partly inspired by Euripides' Medea, the story of a barbarian princess who marries the civilized Jason, a Greek, and we know how that ends. I was interested in the idea of destiny in the East and the West: the ancient Greeks believe that we fulfill it, no matter how much we run away from it, in the West they seem to believe that you can be anything you want if you want it enough, a million "self-help" books are based on this. In the East you blame the system for everything; in the West you should only blame yourself (laughs), not class differences and everything else that prevents you from realizing your full potential every day. North America is supposed to be less class-based than Britain, and sometimes it seems to me the exact opposite: there, for example, political positions are inherited in a way that would be hard to imagine in Britain. Dynasty is everywhere.

A woman as an emotional being and as an intellectual - is she becoming more and more interesting and multi-layered? Is a woman in today's society more free than at any time in history and is she happier because of that? How capable is she of breaking prejudices and does humor and irony help her in this?

I'm not sure I have an answer to the first question. Women are more educated than ever before or at least in those parts of the world where education is allowed and available to them. In those same parts of the world, they are certainly more free than before. Happiness is a complex thing. I think that in the rich world, unnecessary pressure is created around the issue of happiness; happiness becomes some kind of ambition that needs to be achieved. I really like to complain about everything and anything: and that's a kind of happiness, maybe Eastern happiness, this freedom to be bothered by everything (laughs).

Do you think that the East has preserved traditional values in culture, religion and social relations or is it conservative?

It is a stereotypical view of the East, both the East of Europe and the East in general, from Trieste to Tokyo. Traditional values and conservatism are two ways of describing the same thing. If you think of the East of Europe, then socialism brought radical new values, and the fall of socialism a nostalgic desire to return to some often invented past. In practice, the transition also means the cruelty of the re-accumulation of capital that brings a small number of rich people and a working class that is less protected than in the West. I'm not a political being, I don't know if it could have been avoided after 1989. Socialism, it turned out, was no less rotten than capitalism.

I can't help but ask you: Do you think that love with a poet is the greatest and most uncertain adventure? Aren't great loves just a prelude to tragedy?

Nice question. The answer is yes perhaps only for romantic poets, their battles, and duels, whether it is Byron in Greece, Shelley in Italy, or Pushkin in Russia. Many poets of socialism were poets of the establishment, with apartments and privileges, so it would be a greater adventure to fall in love with a plumber. There are such poets of the establishment in the West, let's face it, that's exactly what I'm dealing with Jason, whom my novel captures at the moment when he turns from a young romantic to an opportunist. But, be careful, he is also a very talented poet. And I love that song by Aragon that says there is no happy love. You need to find love.

Do you like Crnjanski? I enjoyed your Lament over Londongrad, especially the part where you say: " Crnjanski is a ghost I may be in conversation with but...”

Crnjanski and I: that's kind of the general point of my conversations with Serbian journalists, for completely obvious reasons. Suffice it to say that I write novels about London, so that for the Serbian reader it means something and symbolically, while for thousands of my readers in English and other languages, it is only a literal fact. The vast majority, even the most educated, have no idea who Crnjanski is. I named the main character of my first novel, that sad, overly rich Russian, Gorsky Roman. The British think it's because of Abramovich, but it's not. It's because of Miloš. His poetry is a kind of background of my life. When I’m writing, I cannot help but add the words into a sentence without thinking of Lament. I'm exaggerating, but not as much as you might think. And at the same time, that peevish Crnjanski angers me a lot, his fragile and often unjustified sense of superiority towards the English, and a kind of contempt for older women that is proportional to his idolization of the young female body. You can already see how my blood pressure is rising (laughs). I forgive him nothing, but I bow to his gift.

What excited you in the last ten years, and what disappointed you when you return to Serbia? How do you see our literary scene and how much time do you have to pay attention to it?

The same thing always happens: by the time I get from the airport to the Gazela, it's as if I never left. That continuity of socializing, laughter and secrets, the places in the city where we are, bookstores, hidden little shops that I adore, pastry shops with chestnut puree, concerts in Kolarac and at them some grandmothers in astragan to whom I get closer and closer, that one special pleasantness of my Belgrade world: it delights me that it all resists and exists. I am disappointed by the destruction and pollution of the city, the complexity of the system in which I have had neither a Serbian passport nor an ID card for three years because it always takes at least five days more than I was told on the phone when I was leaving, so I return to London sad and empty-handed, as if I someone whispers that maybe I'm not as "ours" as I imagine.

I follow the Serbian literary scene. Friends send me books and recommend them, and the people I grew up with now make up a good part of that scene. Even more often, British publishers send me books in Serbian to read and evaluate whether they deserve an English translation. If I recommend ten, one or none of them get published. There is still very little translation here.

Do you think that our women in the diaspora are responsible for preserving their children's mother tongue and how important is that?

Mother, father, the school, the church, and the motherland are responsible, not only and always the woman. I think it is important, not only for the preservation of the language itself and not only for the diaspora, but also for the children, for their personal wealth. I believe in the ony saying: "The more languages you know the more of a person you are.” Each language opens up a whole world. At the same time, I also know how difficult it is, especially for us who are surrounded by the enormous global power of the English language. It also threatens languages at the source, let alone far from it. And I say this as someone who is a writer in English and who lives in an English family, so with a keen awareness of the beauty of the English language. He has enough room in his head for both.

How did you experience admission to the Royal Society of Literature, where the entry is signed by the pen of Lord Byron? Can you see yourself on another throne of English and world literature?

It's really a huge honor. The reception ceremony has that moment when you sign the members' book, the list on the parchment, and somewhere above you are Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Shaw... to name a few. My hand was shaking. Voting is secret, but the thought that someone suggested me and that I was then chosen among who knows how many candidates to write my name right there. English literature gave me something very important. I'd be lying if I said I don't like awards, they're also a way to reach more readers, but I try not to think about them. I've been on juries often enough to know how many elements of the lottery there are.

We wish you a successful release of Iron Curtain in the US, Canadian and world markets in February 2023, and after the extraordinary promotion of your latest novel in Europe, including Serbia.