The Death of a Book

Written by: František Šístek

I’ve been deeply engaged with Montenegro – its history, culture, and political developments – for nearly three decades, dating back to my student days. Until just a few days ago, when this year’s official list of July 13th Award recipients was published, I had never even heard of Bećir Vuković, one of the three honorees. This award, once regarded as Montenegro’s most prestigious state honor, has now been dragged through the mud by what can only be described as a disgraceful and provocative farce.

Beyond the name, I gathered from media reports that Mr. Vuković is supposedly a writer. Based on the public statements that quickly surfaced, he appears to be a hardline Serbian nationalist and an admirer of the WWII-era Chetnik collaborationist movement. He also openly denies the existence of a Montenegrin nation and ridicules the Montenegrin people. In today’s Montenegro – where, ironically, ethnic Montenegrins, the country's largest demographic group, are routinely discriminated against and publicly insulted by a government dominated by Serb nationalist and clerical-fascist elements – it’s hardly surprising that ideological nobodies like Vuković are top contenders for state positions, media attention, and generous financial awards.

A few days ago, scandalous headlines erupted across Montenegrin and regional media: the book for which Vuković received his award, Houses of the Homeless, doesn’t exist. It was never published. No copy can be found in any library in Montenegro or in Serbia, where it was allegedly printed. It isn’t available in any library or bookstore anywhere in the world. Sadly, as someone who has followed developments in Montenegro and the region daily for years, I wasn’t even remotely surprised. In today’s Montenegro, it seems you don’t need to publish a book to receive a top state honor, especially one that comes with a substantial cash prize. Literacy isn’t even a requirement. All that’s needed is a public display of contempt for your own country, outspoken denial and mockery of all things Montenegrin, aggressive historical revisionism, militant Orthodox clericalism – and, of course, a good dose of disdain for the country’s anti-fascist heritage.

In other words, fringe figures, ideologues, and third-rate hacks are artificially elevated and declared geniuses simply because they reflect the current regime’s ideology – an ideology that relies entirely on the increasingly unstable and aggressive government of Aleksandar Vučić in Belgrade. The regime’s online cheerleaders – many of them mindless bots – applaud every move made by Chetnik vojvoda Andrija Mandić, the current Speaker of Montenegro’s Parliament and, whether we like it or not, the most powerful political figure in the country today. In the comment sections of online articles, they parrot the tired narrative that Serbs in Montenegro were once oppressed and marginalized. Now, supposedly, it’s finally time for a “proven Serb” to win the July 13th Award – regardless of whether he’s done anything of merit. As we've now seen, you can be awarded for a book that doesn’t even exist. If this government stays in power, don’t be surprised if next year’s prize goes to an “acclaimed” filmmaker for a film that was never made, so long as he’s a devout follower of the Serbian Orthodox Church and a public denier of Montenegrin identity.

In Prague, there’s the renowned Slavic Library Slovanská knihovna, an institution with over a century of history. It’s one of the world’s best-organized libraries dedicated to the literature of Slavic nations, including former Yugoslav republics like Montenegro. Many Montenegrin intellectuals visiting Prague make a point of stopping by. The Slavic Library has long maintained strong ties with Montenegro’s National Library and other regional institutions.

On the day of this year’s award ceremony – attended only by two relatively unknown recipients, as the third, internationally acclaimed musician Miloš Karadaglić, refused the award “given the circumstances” – I checked the library’s online catalog.

There was no listing for Bećir Vuković. Not a single one of his works is held by this prestigious library. According to the Czech Republic’s National Library catalog (which the Slavic Library is part of), just one of his books has ever made it to Prague: Administration of Fear (70 pages, ISBN 9788652301874), published in Belgrade in 2016. That was the same year Russian and Serbian intelligence agencies attempted a failed coup in Montenegro to derail its NATO accession, so presumably, the manuscript dates from the time when Andrija Mandić and his Chetnik entourage were roasting a pig on a spit in a park outside Montenegro’s Parliament in Podgorica.

That particular book by Vuković isn’t even available in the main baroque building of the National Library, the Klementinum. It has to be specially ordered from a warehouse on the outskirts of Prague. That’s the usual fate of books with virtually no readership.

Out of curiosity, a few hours before the controversial award ceremony (by then it was already widely reported that the selection process had been marred by multiple legal violations, and that Vuković’s “award-winning” book simply didn’t exist), I took a deeper dive into the Slavic Library’s catalog. I searched for several previous July 13th Award recipients from the past two decades, specifically those recognized for literary or scholarly achievements.

Here’s what I found: the most represented laureate in Prague’s catalog is Adnan Čirgić, with 34 titles. He’s followed by Živko Andrijašević (25), Radoslav Rotković (22), Andrej Nikolaidis (19), Mladen Lompar (17), Gojko Čelebić (17), Šerbo Rastoder (16), Milorad Popović (14), Božidar Šekularac (14), Pavle Goranović (10), Zuvdija Hodžić (10), and Aleksandar Čilikov (8). And now, as of June 8, 2025, Speaker of Parliament Andrija Mandić has inserted “the homeless man” Bećir Vuković (zero titles) into this circle of distinguished Montenegrin writers and intellectuals.

Back in the 1970s and ’80s, literary theorists loved to speak of the “death of the author.” In today’s surreal Montenegrin reality, we’ve reached the opposite extreme: the author is alive, celebrated, and decorated with awards, while the book itself is entirely irrelevant. The July 13th Award ceremony, presided over by vojvoda Mandić, was effectively a state-sponsored funeral for the written word.

I closely followed the civic protest held outside Villa Gorica in Podgorica during the award ceremony, thanks to livestreams and updates from friends on the ground. Police used excessive force against peaceful demonstrators, including pepper spray, which was deployed clumsily and unprofessionally, as seen in video footage. Several brave individuals who had gathered to stand up for reason and justice were injured – some required medical attention.

Among the injured was my dear friend and colleague Aleksandar Radoman, Dean of the Faculty of Montenegrin Language and Literature in Cetinje. That same Aleksandar Radoman has 19 titles listed in the Slavic Library’s catalog, along with five more in the Czech National Library system.