National Library Completes Desnica's Collected Works

Nine spines lined up side by side, each carrying the same name in the same lettering: Vladan Desnica. What had for decades been scattered across secondhand shops, library storerooms and private shelves now stands as a single body of work, and only when it is seen this way does it become clear how large the output really is for a writer we have grown used to reducing to a single novel.

The National Library of Serbia has published the final two volumes of Vladan Desnica’s collected works, bringing to a close a publishing project that ran for years. The edition now numbers nine volumes and takes in nearly everything the writer left behind: “Zimsko ljetovanje”, “Pripovijetke”, “Proljeca Ivana Galeba”, “Slijepac na zalu” together with “Ljestve Jakovljeve”, “Kritike”, “Ogledi”, “Pronalazak Athanatika” with “Zasluzeni odmor”, “Pisma” and “Intervjui”, and finally “Book About Desnica” as a critical companion volume that gathers what has been written about him.

What does it really mean to complete a body of work?

At a moment when publishing is most often measured by the season, the hit and the festival appearance, one institution spent years doing work that offers neither glamour nor a quick return: patiently, volume by volume, it put an entire body of work back into circulation. Collected works are not a commercial move, they are an act of cultural policy in the most serious sense of the phrase, a quiet statement that certain writers belong to the canon and that the canon should be kept within reach rather than left to chance and luck at the flea market.

Desnica is, moreover, a writer easy to place wrongly. Born in Zadar and formed between the Dalmatian coast and the Serbian literary tradition, he is one of those authors whom, after the breakup of the shared state, everyone was inclined either to claim or to pass over in silence, depending on the need of the moment. That is precisely why an edition like this is not merely a bibliographical event. It returns Desnica to where he belongs, to reading, instead of to the contest over whose he is.

What the collected form shows best is that “The Springtimes of Ivan Galeb”, the novel he is most often remembered by, is not an isolated peak but the point at which everything else converges. The criticism, essays and stories reveal a writer who thought about form and meaning as carefully as he did about the sentence, while the letters and interviews add the human layer without which any classic remains a monument rather than a person.

The gull that learned English

Alongside the nine volumes came news that may well outlast the edition itself: for the first time, an English translation of “Proljeca Ivana Galeb” has appeared, titled “The Springtimes of Ivan Galeb”, translated by Igor Djuric. This is no small thing. For decades Desnica was a writer the foreign reader could barely reach, locked inside a language and a context that are hard to explain outside the region.

To translate this particular novel, a meditative book in which the plot recedes before thought, is to submit it to the strictest possible test. If Galeb keeps its rhythm and its silence in English too, Desnica stops being a local treasure and becomes what he always deserved to be, part of a wider conversation about the twentieth-century European novel. The completion of the edition and its first opening toward another language are happening, hardly by accident, at the very same time.

There remains the question such editions always pose and rarely have answered: will we actually read these nine volumes, or will it be enough simply to know that they exist?