SASA Foreign Member Drago Kekanović’s Inaugural Speech

SASA Foreign Member Drago Kekanović will deliver his inaugural speech titled ’Between the Zenith and the Nadir: Tracing a Novel I Never Wrote (but Should Have)’  on Tuesday, 27 May, at 11.30 a.m. at the SASA Grand Hall.

As the title and subtitle suggest: this is an authorial confession by a narrator who has spent years attempting to write an avant-garde (adventure, love biographical, unclassified) novel about his compatriot,  the greatest (and most maligned) Serbian avant-gardist of the 20^th  century Ljubomir Micić, the creator of the internationally recognised literary movement Zenitism, the editor and publisher of the equally influential international journal ZENIT.

The aforementioned journal was first published in Zagreb from 1921, and then, following the exile of Ljubomir Micić from Croatia and the banning of the journal, it continued to be published in Belgrade, where it was also prohibited and closed in 1926.

‘This is a story,’ notes SASA Foreign Member D. Kekanović, ‘about my unsuspected and unrealized hero—a story of a creator and intellectual who launched a struggle against the so-called values of European civilization, embarking on a battle that he knew from the outset he would lose, but one he never abandoned. Paradoxically, however, it is not difficult to assume that my compatriot, Zenitist Ljubomir Micić, would fit perfectly into contemporary European literary trends and currents, because he was the ideal PR agent of new literature, a promoter of new ideas, a TikToker ahead of his time.’

A live stream of the event is available at  LIVE STREAMING