Svetozar Vlajković

Biography

Svetozar Vlajković spent his childhood years in house arrest – his hometown was occupied by the Germans. He did not learn much at elementary school, high school and university. Therefore, he had to educate himself and focused on studying philosophy, psychology, literature and art history as much as he could.

Svetozar graduated from the Faculty of Law at Belgrade University although his desire was to become a medical doctor. Nevertheless, he would find out later that his books had healing power on some people, so his long-standing wish was fulfilled in a way.

Life in Čubura brought him a fair share of bad experiences with people, so he escaped into romanticism.

Thanks to playing jazz on his guitar at dances he scraped by to buy cigarettes, but he was immersing progressively into imaginary worlds in order to bear this so-called real one.

He married very young, out of love. However, he got divorced as a middle-aged man, also out of love – towards truth. His daughter from this marriage taught him how to be a child, so he started writing radio plays for children.

Whenever he had a chance, he starred or played support roles in films in order to enhance his tolerance towards nonsense of this world.

At the age of 44, Svetozar Vlajković met his father who was being kept at distance from him for reasons known only to mothers from this part of the world. His father was a writer, and that is the worst possible recommendation for being welcomed into a society of the mediocre and illiterate such as were the residents of Čubura.

He worked as a court reporter for the daily newspaper Borba. There he realized that he was not living in a law-abiding society, that theory taught at university and judicial practice are two different things.

He came to despise daily journalism, so he found a post in the Art Department of Radio Beograd. Before Third Programme was launched in 1964, he had been invited to do radio shows on philosophy and sciences. After 6 years, he was demoted to write jingles for a noodle factory because his views were ideologically unsound for the theoretical level of thinking.

In 1971, Svetozar got a scholarship to study theatre researches at Sorbonne in Paris. Antoine Vitez appointed him his assistant at the Théâtre des Quartiers d'Ivry. But, Svetozar was more interested in Parisian life he would describe in several of his novels years later.

A year later, Radio Beograd invited him to edit talk shows at the local radio station 202. He was working there until his retirement, in spite of numerous conflicts with the staff members who were refusing to apply new tendencies and ideas in the domain of radio.

In 1979, he remarried, out of love again, and got divorced after a decade, also out of love – towards truth. The birth of his son brought him experience of fatherhood in which that holly relationship Father-Son transposes.

When Svetozar realised that there came time in the man's life not to be involved in the public life any longer, he abandoned official literary circles, distanced himself from the world of media and dedicated himself to gaining his inner peace.

Since 1992 he has been living with the woman whose character he depicted in his novel Nensoleta dela Luna. There is no proper marriage without a church wedding, Svetozar concluded one day. Therefore, he got married in St. Archangel Michael's Church in Herceg Novi and the couple settled down in Svetozar's birth house. Someone made a remark that he was the only writer from his generation in Serbia who was living in the same house where he had been born.

In the meantime, he wrote twenty-five books of fiction and fifty plays of all forms and genres.

When he looked around one day, he noticed that the walls of his rooms were covered with his paintings on canvas and concluded that he had been painting since the very day he started writing books and plays.

Fiction

At the beginning, his novels and stories were overflowing with poetic fantasy. The literary critics from that period, who commended his novels, reproached him excess imagination. This writer saw this comment as a compliment. Even then, in his opinion, writing was like dreaming while being awake.

Svetozar continues as a storyteller to shows his affinity towards the fantastic which results in the following stories:

Since there was no one to interpret his literary works in an adequate way, Svetozar wrote two books of essayistic autobiographies which represent a sort of apocryphal history of Serbian literature in the second half of the twentieth century. These books were released by Svetozar's first publisher Prosveta, i.e. a publishing house which will be closed down soon.

Just before Nolita was to be closed down, this publishing house had released the following books:

Rad, one of the most renowned publishing houses once, had released before being closed down:

The aforementioned books placed Svetozar Vlajković among the writers who react against current socio-historic events.

Nevertheless, he wrote a poetic-fantasy novel in order to create a counterbalance.

Theatre

Three plays by Svetozar Vlajković have been put on stage:

The writer focuses on integrity of a human being, a search for the ideal woman that does not exist and growing up.

Three plays have been broadcast by TV Belgrade Drama Programme:

The following theatre plays have been published in several magazines specialised in theatre:

Svetozar Vlajković has had dozens of his plays broadcast on television and radio. He dedicated a special attention to radio plays for and about children and was awarded a dozen of awards at various public anonymous contests for radio plays. Radio Beograd acknowledged his contribution to radio in 2005. The theatre play Zidanje (Construction Works) brought him the first prize at public contests organised by three theatres (the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade, the National Theatre in Novi Sad and the Serbian National Theatre in Niš).

Film

Four films have been made based on original screenplays by Svetozar Vlajković:

Svetozar played roles in films by Dejan Djurković and Miša Radivojević. He had a special appearance in a TV series by Živojin Pavlović "Pesma“ (The Poem).

He also wrote a dozen of essays on the Serbian writers and artists he was close to (Ljubiša Jocić, Bata Mihajlović, Ljubinka Jovanović, Aleksandar Tišma, Dušan Matić and others).

The most precious acknowledgements for his literary and artistic works come from numerous anonymous readers who write to him.