detail from: KRK Art dizajn

FRAGMENTS ON THE NOVEL MIDAR BY ILIJA ŠAULA

Alexа Đukanović

I

This superb anthropological‑philosophical study, wrapped in the greatcoat of artistic prose, this almost venerable doctoral dissertation on the human being, on his impulses and aspirations, narrated in the form of a novel, is far more than a mere historical, anthropological, social, or mythical chronicle of one or several characters. It is, in fact, an immense analytical microcosm of all humankind walking across the muddy crust of the earth, as well as of that part of humanity that rests in quiet, firm sleep beneath that same crust. Šaula’s Midar is a surgically precise novel about nearly all ontological and metaphysical laws of human life.

II

From the very beginning, it becomes clear that Ilija Šaula has not repeated the multifaceted and often harmful mistake of many of his predecessors in Serbian literature who wrote on similar themes and within similar poetics. He did not allow himself to slip into the seas of literary pathos, a trap that is almost impossible to avoid when portraying one or more idealistic natures, whether they reside in a person, an environment, objects, ideas, or imagined spaces.

On the contrary, Šaula’s Midar, as a carefully balanced artistic‑prose constellation of all existing and invented (imposed, unnatural) contradictions of the human being, that eternally contradictory Homo sapiens, carries within itself the misfortunes and joys, durations and losses, ideals and defeats, resoluteness and doubts, mysteries and revelations that must be the essential elements of any deeply conscious and morally attuned being who observes this world (or rather, it’s increasingly frequent and increasingly destructive unjust side) with eyes of disappointment or with the bitter gaze of righteous contempt.

Thus, Midar emerges as both hero and anti‑hero, a complete and coherent novelistic figure despite his literary materialization in the form of a pseudo‑fairytale. If this novel could be precisely positioned within a genre, it would stand proudly among Serbian works of Borges‑like magical realism, where world criticism has already placed Pavić, Zoran Živković, Ilija Bakić, and others, no matter how much Tolkien‑like, mythical, fairytale, or fantastical material the novel contains.

And it is not only Midar who is a complete “anti-hero” or literary hero; most characters in this novel are such: An, Anan, Jagor, Anina, Did, Megeda, Vasan, Neva, Balčak, and others, whether human or mythic beings of ancient lore. All are sensitively and masterfully shaped, linguistically rich, ideationally distinctive, emotional, and witty. The reason lies in the author’s clear, precise, almost sharp perspective, his firm determination not to let his poetic and philosophical‑moral vision dissolve into meaningless details, but to convey it fully and coherently along clearly defined structural paths, without unnecessary abstractions or digressions, conscious or unconscious.

III

Dostoevsky’s Idiot, Prince Myshkin as the Ideal of the good, fatally good, human being, a gentle soul who loves the world with a mad, irrational love, and Camus’ theory of absurdist suicide alternate in Šaula’s novel as powerful leitmotifs. They function as two primary driving forces from a realist standpoint, but above all as faithful signposts of world literature, which in its millennia-long history has still not answered the essential questions of human spiritual and moral existence.

Thus, Midar, as one drop in the ocean of these unanswered questions, is not merely a “drop,” but another important and valuable “brick” in the attempt to decipher these long-standing human dilemmas, uncertainties, and questions from an artistic and literary starting point.

The motif of travel, return, and the great migrations of Crnjanski appears in Šaula’s Midar in two directions: one essential, migrations and escape in the spiritual and moral sense, escape as a path of salvation from evil (whether physical or metaphysical), a path toward refuge and protection; and the other multidimensional, migrations as a desire for rebirth, for restarting everything, for destroying and rebuilding anew, better, from the beginning.

Šaula uses his homeland as Crnjanski used his, but on opposite symbolic planes. Crnjanski paints a historical epoch with social‑political‑artistic predictions; Šaula, without any such intentions, merges the mythical of his homeland with the mythical of universal human understanding, driven solely by boundless personal devotion to his native soil. Here, “homeland” becomes not only a spatial motif but a kind of literary character in its own right.

The dialogic characteristics of Šaula’s characters unfold in a spiritual, mythical and unreal world with almost no historical contact points with the reality we know or could imagine. Yet rhetorically, Šaula firmly anchors his characters in the linguistic world they belong to. Their speech is as Tolkien-like and ancient as it is local, Serbian, and ijekavian. This harmonious mixture creates an impressive effect: the reader sinks into a mystical world of fantasy, myth, and legend, worlds reminiscent of Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Homer, Dante, only to be suddenly surprised by familiar accents, phrases, and mental patterns of Serbian thought.

Šaula thus achieves something not immediately visible: he unites our ancient need for shaping and fencing off a traditional worldview with the thematic‑spatial literary world typical of Western fantasy. He speaks of our universal ancient and modern Balkan and European roots, Kordun, Vrbas, Herzegovina, and of the Caucasus, Georgia, old Armenia, the city of Ani, weaving a story that stretches from a mythical pre-Christian era to the time of the Bible and the present day.

IV

The mythical literary landscapes in this novel are built in a completely new artistic manner. Šaula intertwines myths, legends, Serbian and non-Serbian folk traditions with reality, a world that should, by rule, be cut off from all contact with the unreal and the otherworldly. Yet in Šaula’s work, myths of a closed whole (a people, a community, a family, or a small circle of individuals) told in a fairytale-like form achieve precisely the paradox needed for the unattainable to become attainable, and the impossible possible. The fairytale mode of portraying a mythical image brings the reader into a state of melancholic sentiment that ultimately produces the impression, and later the firm conviction, that myth is the only truth.

V

What is most important is that Ilija Šaula does something in his novel that likely no one in Serbian literature has done before: he justifies the motif of suicide, a motif condemned in every civilization because it negates, questions, and diminishes the very concept of life, in the only way possible. If the quality of life is measured by wrong standards, then is not the very measure by which one weighs the final decision about one’s life also wrong? Šaula thus suggests that there exists a sanctity, or an ideal, greater than life itself, something that “outlives” material existence, and that is human goodness. History has shown that goodness can outlive its creator; the ideals of goodness continue even after the spiritual and physical end of the one who built them. This is perhaps the strongest and most important meaning of this novel.

VI

The novel Midar is full of symbolism. The author’s powerful artistic imagination is evident, despite the harsh times in which contemporary literary trends often strip literature of its sensitivity and capacity for meaningful symbolic or metaphysical depth, reducing it to a dry shell without value or artistic excitement. A strong religious thread, the active and obligatory presence of God, not as a mere literary “character” but as a real force, intertwines with Old Slavic mythology and the symbolic multivalence of the novel’s passages. The motifs of punishment and reward, paradise, and death are symbolized through various materialized objects and beings of this world. But the most important aspect is not how Šaula arranged these literary motifs or connected them with universal human, religious, and moral symbols; it is how he imprinted them into his narrative so that they radiate a particular and powerful fire. This fire does not merely create an aesthetically and ethically “beautiful” literary work but also conveys a profound ideological message.

VII

There are no “empty pages” in this novel, no unfinished sentences or thoughts, no unclear or murky accumulations of paragraphs. The dominant style is expansive, overflowing with vast landscapes, ideas, reflections, dialogues, moral dilemmas, and above all, aesthetic, ethical beauty. Šaula’s sentences can stand shoulder to shoulder with those of Meša Selimović; indeed, they can be followed by the same critical remark often applied to Selimović: “wisdom emanates from every sentence.” If Selimović’s wisdom is rooted in centuries-old philosophical traditions of medieval Christianity and Islam, exploring eternal human emotions, love, hatred, envy, and greed, then Šaula’s sentences in Midar represent a fusion of that same poetic‑literary wisdom (especially reminiscent of Death and the Dervish) and a specific form of literary fantasy (magical realism). The goal of this fantasy is not to create a phantasmagorical world but to depict reality as suggestively as possible. And for Šaula, the ultimate reality is truth, a concept encompassing God, goodness, wisdom, humility, principles, and more.

Thus, Midar is a novel structurally and narratively shaped as a fantastical work, which, through its “magic wand”, its genre identity, ultimately becomes a sharp realist novel offering the modern world many messages, warnings, and insights. What does it warn us about? Let the readers discover that for themselves.

VIII

One of the chapters in Midar is titled “Timelessness.” Šaula could have named the entire novel exactly that: Timelessness. If the entire artistic, philosophical, and poetic message of this novel had to be condensed into a single word, it would be precisely this one: TIMELESSNESS.

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