Krokodil Festival: Literature as Disobedience

There is a single moment, somewhere around dusk on the first evening, that repeats itself every year on the slope in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia like a small ritual: the amphitheatre slowly fills, someone opens a book on stage, and the city noise from the boulevard seems to agree, for an hour or so, to fall quiet. That moment is, before anything else, what the Krokodil Festival has done well for eighteen years, turning open ground into a space of attention.

This year’s edition arrives on July 3 and 4 under a motto that reads like a provocation aimed at reader and institution alike, “Literature as Disobedience”. The organisers do not mean a barricade by it but a sentence, a revolt that, as they put it, begins not on the street but in language, in the way literature changes a society by changing the way it speaks and defending the autonomy of the individual against the demands of the collective.

What does disobedience even mean on a literary stage?

The motto is, admittedly, generous to marketing and dangerous to substance, because “disobedience” easily turns into a pose. Krokodil, though, is a festival that earned the word long before it printed it on a poster. Out of its programme has grown an actual cultural politics over the years, from regional reconciliation and the defence of free speech to a stubborn institutional critique rarely spoken aloud from a stage in the post-Yugoslav context.

That is why this year’s guest list reads like an argument rather than a roster. Rachel Kushner is coming, the American novelist whose books circle power and resistance; Lea Ypi, author of a memoir about growing up in Albania that became one of Europe’s most-read titles of recent seasons; and Asne Seierstad, the Norwegian reporter who turned journalistic nerve into a literary method. Alongside them are Monika Herceg and Rumena Buzarovska, two voices from the regional scene who ask no permission to be disobedient.

The city amphitheatre and what gets read at home afterwards

Krokodil has long been more than a string of readings. This year too the programme is spread across several zones, debate, children’s and film, with workshops and theatrical performances, while the evenings are reserved for literary-musical spectacles on the main and small stages. The small stage is, they say, this year’s novelty, and that is the kind of detail that usually separates a festival that grows from one that recycles itself.

Music is not decoration here but part of the dramaturgical arc of the evening. The band Ana & The Changes, the project of Ana Curcin, performs, and an unusual appearance has been announced by a Sami poet who brings the joik, an ancient northern vocal form, before a Belgrade audience. The children’s programme this year is run in partnership with Children’s City, returning the festival to an old, almost forgotten idea, that an audience is not conquered but cultivated.

What makes Krokodil different from many domestic events is its refusal to treat literature as drawing-room decoration. Entry is traditionally free, the stage is outdoors, and the audience is counted in the thousands, no small thing for a literary festival in a country where alarmingly few books are read each year. The open question is not whether the amphitheatre will be full, but whether any of that disobedience will spill beyond two July evenings.

And you, will you be sitting on the slope in front of the Museum of Yugoslavia this July, or saving your disobedience for a more comfortable occasion?