A conversation with author Marko Vidojković about his literary work and life. The main theme will be his novel “Thanks a Lot”, based on alternative history of our region, where Yugoslavia never split up, quite the opposite, it’s a highly developed country in which the levitating superfast train comes from Belgrade to Zagreb in mere thirty minutes, where people are using Obod Cetinje tablets and driving Zastava 10001 and where prosperity rules. This is Yugoslavia that knows no nationalism and bloody war. But, for some at first unexplained reasons, portals begin to open, from which at first chetniks and ustashe come, followed by unwitting inhabitants of another post-socialist reality, the one that we know. A true political thriller begins, mixing two realities, the real one and the utopic one. Because in year 1989, under the burden of historical shifts, time has split in two, one time is the one in which Yugoslavia keeps on existing, and the other is the one in which it violently falls apart. And it is this utopic Yugoslavia, as a blend of nostalgia and alternative, that provides a way of thinking about post-Yugoslavian reality here and now.
A conversation about the novel “The Man Who Killed Tesla”, which is not a novel about Tesla – it is a novel with Tesla. It is also a novel about the end of the world and the dangers of science.
Young Tesla’s assistant, Jevrem Radivojević, committed to the fantastic, technology and absinthe, was unaware that the path to the laboratory will lead him to the biggest secrets of the universe, an even less aware of the role that Annie Oakley’s revolver, given to him by Buffalo Bill, will play in the tragic death of Nikola Tesla.
Goran Skrobonja’s fiction in “The Man Who Killed Tesla” is interesting not just because he placed Tesla’s laboratories in Belgrade, and not just because it features meetings between Lenin, Mata Hari, Apis, Lazar Komarčić, Jovan Skerlić, kings and princesses, deceased and contemporaries, but because he, from the scratch, created an entirely different world, based on real people’s biographies, but also on apocalyptic visions, where the boundaries between lives move into the direction of fantastic twists and turns, the outcome of which is crucial for the fate of mankind.
