BORISLAV PEKIĆ AND ENGLISH CULTURE
BORISLAV PEKIĆ AND ENGLISH CULTURE

Summary/Abstract: Pekić’s encounters with English culture have different roots – living, personal, literary, philosophical and political – and not only are their literary forms diverse, but his observations on the English culture are scattered throughout many of his writings. Already in his childhood, during the Second World War, he listened to BBC radio broadcasts, so that by the end of his twenty-year stay in England (1971-1992), he worked as a freelance commentator in the Serbo-Croatian department of BBC and wrote series of reportages on English life and history, which represent a humorous and fruitful dialogue with English culture, and also raise wider issues of European civilisation and history. There, then, he wrote his first major “English” novel, Rabies (1983), after ten years of residence in England, placed on the English soil and set in the English contemporary and cultural history, in which the writer appears solely as an observer and not as a participant in the life that surrounds him, and in that sense it powerfully dramatizes, among other things, Pekić’s life in England. And the very next year, in 1984, his negative utopia 1999 was published, dedicated to the memory of Orwell’s then already famous 1984 (1949) with significant allusions also to Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

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