The manuscript Omphalion or the Songs of a Divine Comedian is the first book written by Dragoslav Čupić, a writer from Novi Sad. For the most part written in the first person, the book includes nineteen stories in prose.
Although each story stands on its own, they represent a unified outlook on life taken as a whole. The stories written by Dragoslav Čupić include both elements of prose and poetry and express the writer’s subjectivity and raise existential questions regarding his life. The writer’s style is largely influenced by modern literature from the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century: Arthur Rimbaud’s prose works, Comte de Lautréamont’s The Songs of Maldoror, interlaced with elements of symbolism, expressionism, and surrealism. Formally, the collection of stories satisfies the criteria required by the form while the literary text itself leaves enough room for a variety of possible interpretations and readings.
Written in the present tense, the book allows the narrator to question his position in the world, and is written from a point of view of a boy who stays forever young. Although these poems in prose show certain poetic digressions by which the writer distances himself from reality, certain places in Čupić’s stories can certainly be identified (the streets of Novi Sad, a famous open market in Novi Sad called Najlon pijaca, a town square in the town of Bečej, a salaša — a traditional farm in Vojvodina…), while some of them are also bound by a specific time reference. In a Nietzschean manner, the writer finds his true self in the text: writing is his need, a journey, a Dionysian celebration of a sentence, pleasure, as well as a a way for him to find his true voice by taking the paths less traveled.
Our edition Beyond the Barricade is a literary project aimed at promoting the short story as a literary genre which has been somewhat neglected in recent years. In today’s age of big moves, media culture, and sensationalism as an inevitable element of the world we are living in, literary knowledge, reader’s experience, and skillfulness and mastery of writing are easily overlooked. Unlike novels, ofttimes written with an intention and a big idea behind it, as well as with certain publicity in mind, short prose requires resourcefulness, tight-space dribblings, and scoring. Aiming at supporting literary fiction (in contrast to commercial literature), Kulturanova is launching a literary workshop by publishing prose works written beyond the barricade. The works are far from the mainstream taste that is being imposed on us incessantly, but familiar enough to the literary public to encourage them to experience the short story as a literary genre differently. Beyond the Barricade is a new space dedicated to the expression of literary freedom, and open to those writers who do not make compromises in culture.
