Strindberg

This morning I met Strindberg at the Moscow Hotel. I met great and unhappy Strindberg.

I see him pacing hastily, weaving through the crowd; he stares at me, evidently wishing to see me. I raise my hand discretely, letting him know I had recognized him; I stop waiting for him to approach.

Strindberg fixes his tie, approaches, while I silently, just by a gesture, propose that we step aside, in the shadow, by a pharmacy shop window. In the window languishes a plaster Hygea, a broken Aesculapius and their white snakes eke their miserable life. Hygea studies her ragged chiton, and Aesculapius, a wise man with chalky eyes, a doctor without eye pupils, leaning on his knobby rod, watches the world with indifference. There are no medicines in the pharmacy, but it does not tarnish their ancient fame.

The great playwright, the brilliant August Strindberg extends his hand, saying:

Good morning, Mr. Strindberg, what are you doing in Belgrade? We are in the war, and you strut here like a real peacock.

I grasp his sweaty hand, with an indefinite grimace I welcome those crazy words but I do not know how to react.

Poor guy imagines I am Strindberg. He thinks now he has met famous Strindberg. He surely imagines he is shaking hands with a genius. I am convinced he is already spinning a witty anecdote about our encounter. My God, what I am to say? How to start the conversation when he knows about himself ten times more than any literary critic? He won’t be so mad to ask me about my health. I can see he is cautious. He pretends he does not pity me, as if all this was nothing, he doesn’t know... but his eyes, his warm writer’s eyes are saying much. Still, it would be tasteless to repeat here, in front of all these people, stale historical facts proving that I am not Strindberg and Harriet is not my wife. Perhaps he wants just that? Maybe he is tempting my shamelessness? If it is so, if I am up to neck in shit, and chance assigns me Strindberg’s fate, I’ll do my best that this encounter passes in pleasant charter, more like an artist’s talk with his own imagination, without Nordic tempests and perfidious rocks.

What will happen in his grieving soul, if I snap bluntly that he is Strindberg, a playwright, a jewel of European art, and anarchist, an alchemist, a poet, and that, to be truthful, that legend, that writer, a Swede, a man of the theatre, the spirit of the North, had passed away already in that distant May of 1912.

How will he act if he discovers I am no Strindberg? He will pop his astounded eyes when he finds out I am Rasa Todosijevic, a local great man, the South Slav Homer. Will he cry once he comprehends that all this is a mix-up and that it is blasphemous to make the circus out of another’s personality? My only wish is that he doesn’t whine in the street. Let this prominent citizen of Stockholm slobber in Paris, in London, let him parade his ass wherever he likes, but let him leave me alone.

A foolish idea comes to my mind that our encounter is a unique example of double incarnation. Something like a double metempsychosis form: a fundamentally split personality. After long quarrels and many unpleasant truths, each soul went its own way, among other people. I am deeply convinced that I myself was Strindberg, the writer! I am the brilliance of his genial profile: a melancholy dreamer, an anarchist and a womanizer. And this creature, this sweaty hand, those puffy fingers blathering nonsense, boring my ears, all that is doctor August, he is that castrated Strindberg, a house tutor and the state pen-pusher. You see, he has come again to slander me, to wave his arms and insist on some cosmic Justice.

I thought: it would be best to take him to the restaurant, here, at “Moscow”. We’ll sit at a small table, order beer; we’ll enjoy in the sun and talk about politics. Once he calms down and pulls himself together, and after he had a few drinks and relaxed, I’ll show him my verses, the new cantos, and by the way, jokingly, I’ll hit him with truth, right between eyes.

I’ll say: August, enough of that fooling around! You’re an ordinary Scandinavian toady, but also a big fool if you expect any money from me!

Perhaps Strindberg will grasp that my poems are not his literature, his élan, his style and problematic. The scoundrel will understand that my art belongs to the corpus of Serbian poetry and not to the Scandinavian literary tradition.