Ministry Rejects Entire SKZ Blue Circle for First Time

The Blue Circle is one of the few book series in Serbian culture that readers recognize before they ever open a single volume, by the color of its covers on the shelf, by the fact that it is bought as a complete set and lined up by year in home libraries. Since August 4, it has become recognizable for another reason too. That day the Culture Ministry published the results of its competition for co-financing capital editions in the Serbian language, and the rejected list included all six books the Serbian Literary Guild (SKZ) had submitted for this year’s Circle.

That has never happened before in the history of the contest. The decision was signed by Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic, following the commission’s recommendation. The competition had opened on May 5 and ran for thirty days.

Which Books Were Rejected, and Why

Among the six titles were a book by Vojislav Pavlovic, “Pius XII and the Totalitarianisms in Yugoslavia, 1941 to 1958,” drawn from research in the Vatican archives, along with “The Development of Serbian Literacy: Selected Writings” by Irena Grickat and “The Literature of the Dubrovnik Serbs” by Irena Arsic. Each rejected project came with the commission’s explanation attached, and those explanations end up saying more about the criteria applied than about the books themselves.

Pavlovic’s manuscript was judged to be a narrowly specialized scholarly work aimed at a limited readership. The same phrasing was used for Grickat’s selected writings. For Arsic’s book, the commission wrote that it did not qualify as a capital or especially valuable work.

SKZ’s editor in chief, Nikola Marinkovic, says he does not want to speculate about reasons beyond what the ministry stated, but he points out that Pavlovic’s book is the culmination of years of research on the subject and that, since it deals with Pope Pius XII’s relationship to Yugoslavia, it touches on national themes that interest a wide readership.

It has happened before that two, at most three, of our six Blue Circle books got rejected, but it has never happened that the entire Circle was rejected.

The Guild said in a statement that it received the decision with great disappointment and surprise, all the more so given that it holds the status of an institution of special significance under the current Law on Culture. A separate Law on the Serbian Literary Guild, adopted in 1997, states that the Guild draws funding from the budgets of the Republic of Serbia, the province and local government as well. Marinkovic is not asking the state to carry the institution on its own:

Of course we know the culture budget has been cut, and we don’t expect the state to support us, but we do expect that money to be distributed more fairly.

This year’s competition for capital editions allocated 27,370,000 dinars in total. The largest single amount, 2,000,000 dinars, went to the Publishing Center of Matica Srpska for its anthology series “Ten Centuries of Serbian Literature.” The publisher Scero Print received 1,500,000 for a facsimile edition marking the twenty fifth anniversary of the liberation of southern Serbia, and the Vojvodina Archives got 1,200,000 for a selected works edition of Dragos Kalajic. In total, 81 projects were rejected, including six titles from Akademska Knjiga and four from Kosmos Publishing.

Journals: 10.6 Million Dinars, 54 Rejected Projects

Three days later, on August 7, the results of the competition for periodicals were announced. 10,600,000 dinars were distributed, and 54 projects came away with nothing. That list includes titles that form the backbone of Serbia’s literary press:

• “Knjizevni magazin” (Literary Magazine), published by the Serbian Literary Society
• “Polja” (Fields), published by the Novi Sad Cultural Center
• “Gradina,” published by the Nis Cultural Center
• “Beogradski knjizevni casopis” (Belgrade Literary Journal), published by the Belgrade Literary Society
• “Zlatna greda” (Golden Beam), published by the Vojvodina Writers’ Association

The largest individual grants, 350,000 dinars each, went to the Research and Publishing Center “Stari Vlah” for its yearbook and to the Serbian Association of Folk Dance Choreographers for its trade journal “Nasledje” (Heritage). Matica Srpska, the Ivo Andric Endowment and the Association of Serbian Writers each received 300,000 dinars.

What makes this competition more interesting than a plain list is the comparison with last year’s results. This year’s commission was made up of Jelka Panic, Tatjana Trajkovic and Ivan Becic, and last year, in almost the same composition, it described the “Beogradski knjizevni casopis” as a project with consistently high quality content and undeniable influence in the wider literary public. This year the same journal was told it possessed a certain level of quality, but that other projects were more closely aligned with the criteria. The journal’s prose editor, writer Srdjan Tesin, responded to that shift briefly:

This commission comes across as something like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The signatory of both this year’s and last year’s ruling is “Minister” Nikola Selakovic. And the results of the competitions for translation, support for capital editions, literary events and awards ought to go down in the annals of disgrace.

Tesin also points out that the same journal had already been denied support in an earlier city level competition, making this year’s ministry decision the second blow of the same season.

Taken together with the two publishing competitions, and with what has been reported earlier about film funding running late while NAFFIT received 17 million dinars, a pattern emerges that is not the work of any single commission. Nobody disputes that the culture budget has less money in it than before, but the distribution of what remains increasingly bypasses institutions whose only real asset is continuity. The Circle is printed every year, the journals come out every quarter, and both kinds of publication can be interrupted in a matter of months but take years to rebuild.

Marinkovic expects other publishers to speak out about how the funding for capital editions was distributed. The appeal deadline is short, and the Guild’s autumn publishing plan is being drawn up right now, in August, with a known and much smaller figure in the revenue column.