Vladimir Arsenijević (, born 1965) is a Serbian novelist, columnist, translator, editor, musician, and publisher. He lives and works in Belgrade. Arsenijević won the prestigious NIN Award for the Yugoslavian novel of the year 1994 for his novel In the Hold (Serbian: U potpalublju).
Early life Arsenijević was born in Pula, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia, and moved to Belgrade at a young age. In his early youth, Arsenijević (nicknamed Vlajsa) played with a punk band called "Urbana Gerila" as well as its post-punk offshoot "Berliner Strasse". After graduating high school and completing the mandatory military service in 1985, Arsenijević moved to London at the age of 20. He returned to Belgrade four years later in 1989.
Writing career Novelist Arsenijević won the 1994 NIN Award in January 1995 for his first novel In the Hold (U potpalublju),Slobodan Vladušić, "Neorealism in Serbian Prose of the 1990s:Its Development and Transformations", 2006 thus at the age of 29 becoming the youngest ever recipient of the prestigious award.Ken Kalfus, "Balkan Sorrows", The New York Times, 22 September 1996 This was the first time the Award went to an author's debut novel. The anti-war novel, which takes place during the Battle of Vukovar in autumn 1991, was one of the first works published in Serbia to discuss the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia, although from the perspective of those who lived in Belgrade at the time. The slim 128-page novel got some attention internationally such as affirmative write-up by Laura Silber in the Los Angeles TimesWorld Report Profile: Vladimir Arsenijevic: HOT YOUNG NOVELIST: At 29, he earns Yugoslavia's top literary prize for a chronicle of his lost generation.;Los Angeles Times, 4 April 1995 and was soon translated into 20 languages, placing Arsenijević almost instantly among the most translated Serbian writers. Translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth, the novel received positive reviews by Ken Kalfus and Richard Eder in the New York TimesKen Kalfus, "Balkan Sorrows", The New York Times, 22 September 1996 and Los Angeles Times,A Surreal Portrait of the Casualties of a Balkan Civil War;Los Angeles Times, 25 September 1996 respectively, upon its 1996 release in the United States by the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. It was also staged as a play in the Yugoslav Drama Theatre by theater director Nikita Milivojević.
Simultaneous to writing, Arsenijević supplemented his income by working as a guide in the Kontiki tourist agency.Glas iz potpalublja
Since then, Arsenijević has published three other novels, two graphic novels and a book of essays. The long-awaited follow-up to In the Hold, and the second part of the envisioned tetralogy "Cloaca Maxima", novel Anđela was met with mixed criticism after it came out in Serbia in 1997. It was generally considered a weaker novel than U potpalublju and, although it was one of the best-selling novels of the year in Serbia, it failed to meet the expectations formed after the success of Arsenijević's debut novel.
As the NATO bombing of FR Yugoslavia began in March 1999, Arsenijević was in Belgrade, but got out some two months later in May through an invitation from the France-based International Parliament of Writers to visit Mexico City. He reached Mexico via Sarajevo, Ljubljana, and Frankfurt, staying there until September 2000. In Mexico City he resided in neighborhoods of Coyoacán and Colonia Condesa, mostly making a living through a series of menial jobs and on the side playing in a band called Los Armstrings. Upon returning to Belgrade in September 2000, he published his third book Meksiko - ratni dnevnik, which revolves around Arsenijević's two-month stay in Belgrade under NATO bombing missions, his sudden trip to Mexico, and his friendship with Kosovo Albanian poet Xhevdet Bajraj.Irodov zakon: Il' te jebe il' te kara;e-novine.com, 15 May 2012
In 2004, Arsenijević came back with Išmail. This entertaining graphic novel set in 1979 is a result of the writer's collaborative work with Serbian cartoonist Aleksandar Zograf. It explores secret connections that punk and new wave scene in former Yugoslavia formed with the radical conceptual art and performance scene of the late 60's and early 70's as well as the negative influence that the politics of former socialist Yugoslavia had on both.
Predator is a crossover between a novel and a book of stories set in different parts of the world. Consisted of several, at first sight, completely different stories, it is a rhizomatically structured story of almost a dozen protagonists who have one thing in common - they are all expatriates (an Iraqi Kurdish cannibalistic refugee in the US, a Kosovo punk rocker, a Bosnian junkie, an Irish priest, Belgrade yobs, Berlin anarchists...). Coming from troubled areas of the world, they pursue their own piece of happiness, but the circumstances of their particular realities distort the picture heavily.
Jugolaboratorija, a collection of essays, columns and speeches contains around thirty texts written by Arsenijević since 2005.
In 2011 Arsenijević published Minut - Put oko sveta za 60 sekundi ("One Minute - Around the World in 60 seconds") in artistic cooperation with Valentina Broštean who illustrated and designed the book. It consists of 25 fragments/stories set within one single minute of time (January 20, 2010, from 12:00 to 12:01 GMT) at 25 different spots on planet Earth such as Samoa, Hawaii, Brazil, Portugal, Kosovo, Kurdistan, Burma, Australia or Russia.
Editor In parallel to his literary engagement, Arsenijević got involved in publishing, forming a publishing company named Rende, where he performed the editor-in-chief duties from its foundation until 2007. Since February 2007, he's been employed as an editor at VBZ Beograd, the Croatian publishing house VBZ's Belgrade arm. Arsenijević is also a co-owner and editor at Reflektor,VLADIMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ, PISAC: I dalje ništa nije kako treba;Monitor, 3 February 2012 a Serbian publishing company releasing audiobooks. Among other works by various authors, the company has released Arsenijević's novel U potpalublju in audiobook form as read by actor Nikola Đuričko.
He is one of the founders and directors of KROKODIL literary festival held annually in Belgrade since 2009. In 2017, he has signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins.
Translator In the early 2000s, Arsenijević started translating English language novels into Serbian. So far, he's translated Macho Sluts by Pat Califia, God's Boot by Brad Fox, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, and A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor.
Published works U potpalublju (1994) Anđela (1997) Meksiko - ratni dnevnik (2000) Išmail (with Aleksandar Zograf, 2004) Predator (2008) Jugolaboratorija (2009) Minut, put oko sveta za 60 sekundi (with Valentina Broštean, 2011) Let (2013) Ovo nije veselo mesto (2014) Ti i ja, Anđela (the remake of Anđela, 2016) Ka granici (2018)
Columnist and commentator From the mid-2000s onward, Arsenijević made a name for himself in Serbia and also in the rest of the ex-Yugoslav countries, as an outspoken columnist and sociopolitical commentator. As in his novels, his columns and public appearances are dominated by recent Balkan history and politics from the Serbian perspective. He's generally very critical of the Serbian political system, Serbian nationalism, various aspects of Serbian culture, Serbia's relations with other states in the region, Serbian role in the Yugoslav Wars. A lot of his criticism is also reserved for various individuals in the public life of Serbia such as Momo Kapor, Emir Kusturica, Dobrica Ćosić, etc. Arsenijević is a regular guest on Olja Bećković's talk-show Utisak nedelje on B92, as well as other B92 programmes.
In late summer 2007, Arsenijević wrote a piece titled "Unsere Neger, unsere Gegner" (Our Negros, Our Enemies) for German daily broadsheet Die Zeit, criticizing Serbian attitude towards Albanians living in Kosovo, which he sees as historically having been based on "offensive cliches, derision, and open hatred", comparing it to way American whites treated their own negros. Arsenijević continues that after the death of Tito and 1981 Albanian protests in Kosovo, this "Serbian casual cultural racism soon grew into violent, murderous hatred of Shiptars", which Slobodan Milošević then further developed "during his brutal tyranny into a collective Serbian paranoia of Shiptars as Serbs shuddered in disgust of Albanian uncontrollable virility and high birth rates".Our negroes, our enemies;Die Zeit, 19 September 2007
Politika From January 2008, Arsenijević began an irregular columnist stintЈуголабораторија;Politika, 11 January 2008 in Politika daily whose ownership at the time was divided between German media concern WAZ-Mediengruppe and Serbian company Politika AD in which the Serbian government owns a large stake. Starting under the editorial stint of Ljiljana Smajlović, Arsenijević continued on at the paper when she got replaced with Dragan Bujošević in November 2008 following the May 2008 Serbian parliamentary election win by the ZES coalition led by Boris Tadić's Democratic Party (DS).
In March 2008, weeks after Albanians from the Serbian southern province of Kosovo unilaterally declared independence, Arsenijević wrote a piece in support of the move while urging Serbia to recognize its secessionist province as an independent state all of which got a lot of reaction in Serbia.Kosovo (ni)je Srbija; Politika, 13 March 2008
He ended his Politika column in March 2009.На мосту;Politika, 3 March 2009
Press Arsenijević got hired to write a regular Saturday column in the Serbian daily newspaper Press from April 2011.O dve bečke adrese #1 - Špitalgase 2;Press, 9 April 2011
The entry that garnered most reaction was his September 2011 piece about late Momo Kapor who had died a year and a half earlier.O Vukovaru (S Momom Kaporom);Press 17 September 2011 In it Arsenijević writes about a July 1995 encounter with the famous author that took place on the Greek island of Thassos. Thirty-year-old Arsenijević was there working as a tourist guide while 58-year-old Kapor was on vacation with his wife. Arsenijević recounts certain details of their quick conversation (the two had just been introduced to one another) pertaining to Arsenijević's then budding writing career and his recent award-winning novel U potpalublju whose story takes place during the Battle of Vukovar. Based on their conversation, Arsenijević labels Kapor "the king of all sociopaths" while quoting him as having supposedly said: "You've got no reason to feel sorry for that city. It was the simplest form of provincial baroque. Practically nothing. Yes, Vukovar is nothing".
In mid-November 2011, two months after the column was published, Arsenijević appeared on HRT's talk show Nedjeljom u 2 for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Vukovar. Before even introducing his guest by name, host Aleksandar Stanković engaged Arsenijević in a lengthy recounting of the writer's encounter with Kapor. Arsenijević recounted their conversation and once again concluded by labeling Kapor "a sociopath who was a fan of blood and death". He also revealed a personal realization that "Kapor's political views in the years since the Yugoslav Wars were not so much delivered from the platform of Serbian nationalism, but from a sociopathic one". The rest of the program centered around Serbo-Croatian relations from the 1990s onward and Arsenijević used it to express personal dissatisfaction with things ranging from Serbian government's official policy towards the country's breakaway province of Kosovo to the overall atmosphere in the capital Belgrade by saying "if Europe were a pub or a kafana, Belgrade would be that small smelly hallway that leads to the toilet".Nedjeljom u 2: Vladimir Arsenijević;HRT, 13 November 2011