My life Predrag J. Marković, historian

the useful tactic of ‘fleeing upwards’. And that meant enrolling in college at the tender age of 15, after completing just the first year of high school. He insists that it wasn’t difficult. He figured that Lenin and some guy from Kopaonik who tended sheep had enrolled in university without having completed secondary school. He explains that it’s easy to pass entrance exams, but you have to try, which people don’t tend to do. He took seven subjects, which he found much easier than if he’d had to spent three more years sitting around in secondary school. He doesn’t see that as being something special, but rather considers himself as representing a continuation of the Marković family tradition.

“My father, like every rural child, was left to his own devices, so he wandered around the village and sat down at a school desk at the age of five. Sitting in the classroom together were children from the first to the fourth grades, and he knew the answers to every question. He is thus the initiator of that schooling ahead of schedule, because he was a year and a half younger than his generation. And I perfected that method.”

Predrag is nine years older than his younger sister Milena, while Danica is 12 years her senior. The two elder siblings were thus like Milena’s second parents, even attending her school parents’ meetings and taking care of her.

“It seems that we underestimated her somewhat, as she was the youngest. When that great talent of hers manifested itself, things changed. My older sister and I now believe in Milena’s authority. She is actually the wisest of us. You see how a dynamic system it is; how relationships between people change constantly.”

Women were the key to everything in the Marković family. Predrag was born as the lightest baby to survive at the time. He weighed just 900 grams. And he had hemiparesis, the partial loss of movement in one part of the body. His cousin, famous writer Dobrica Ćosić, managed to get hold of an incubator that wasn’t in Belgrade at the time and had to be brought from Zagreb. The doctors told his mother: ‘let go, you are a young woman, you’ll bear another child’. But Milka ignored them all, deciding that her son wouldn’t only survive, but that all his functions would also restore themselves. She was helped by Cvetko Brajović, a former Goli Otok inmate and one of the first speech therapists. It was Cvetko that gave him the name Predrag. The long and often torturous exercises that his mother took him for every day helped.

“I pulled through. Some consequences remained, but I lived a more or less normal life thanks to my mother’s fierce efforts. My mother was like a Šarplaninac [a devoted and stubborn mountain dog]. She would have jumped out of the window at a nod from my father. And she might even have asked if she was allowed to open it first. When you look at the stories of various successful people, you see the great importance of the role of mothers. Those were mothers in staunchly patriarchal societies who sacrificed everything for their children. Many successful children were raised on the sacrifice of their mothers.

“Fathers are today much better for their children than they once were. That was also noted, for example, by my favourite writer, Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård, who – just like my sister Milena – described his life down to the most unpleasant details. He is a true Scandinavian father, looking after the children, feeding them, preparing their lunch and dinner. When he comes across Japanese tourists they take pictures of him, because that kind of emancipation has yet to arrive in Japan. You have that witty remark about Scandinavian crime shows, when the inspector comes home in the evening exhausted and has a glass of wine, while her husband has prepared dinner. Fortunately, that trend of caring fathers is expanding and today’s fathers are much more dedicated than father used to be. For instance, today you don’t have the model of a father who relaxes after work, after lunch, but rather one that takes care equal of the children as the mother.”

Vukan and Miona are the son and daughter of Predrag and Sara, and they are rightly proud of their children. Miona is a successful 27-year-old actress who is due to get married in a few months. Vukan is 29 and is completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He didn’t want to be his daddy’s boy, so instead took the more difficult route of making his own way in a world where no one could help him in any way. And he succeeded in being true to himself, in dealing with what could be called the philosophy of history, something between philosophy and history. He works at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.

“My children grew up in a patriarchal cooperative. I was a lodger residing with my in-laws, and that turned out well for the children. If anyone suffered, that was my wife. I lived like a student; my mother-in-law was a strict teacher of maths and my father-in-law was an extremely industrious man. They helped in raising the children to an incredible extent. The grandparents took them to school and waited for them afterwards, prepared lunch for them, and what was a frustrating situation turned out to be very good. When you are lucky enough to have grandparents who are interested in learning and are ambitious, that extended family doesn’t have to be a miserable solution. Thanks to some circumstances that were initially unfortunate, my family was more efficient in terms of educating the children than it would have been if I’d had a better living standard.

“Many cultures have shown extended families to be pretty effective. The middle generation goes to work and the older generation looks after the children. It can be seen in many cases that this network of grandparents doesn’t have a negative impact. You have the Chinese and the Vietnamese, among whom this principle of raising children functions well, and they are known as being the most successful people on

Yugoslavia was an incredibly complicated country. More complicated than the Soviet Union. Not to mention Czechoslovakia. In Yugoslavia there were many similar sized nations, with terrible shared wounds. The Soviets didn’t have a tradition of fratricidal war like us the planet. In America, many of them are even more successful than the Jews!”

It was around a year ago that actress Miona Marković wrote a social media post dedicated to her mother Vladislava, who goes by the nickname of Sara, has been married to her father for three decades, works at the Belgrade City Library and successfully avoids the limelight. Her statements are touching: “My mum is a better parent to her parents than they ever were, and I won’t even mention us. My mother’s greatest success is us, her children, but she was never an ambitious parent. The success of her children was never a primary priority for her, and I guess that’s precisely why we wanted it. So, young parents, be like my mum, don’t pressure yourself or your children, they will find their own way to that which interests them.”

Our interlocutor says that its fortunate that everyone close to him does what they love.

“We are privileged people, several generations in the family do what they love. That is a combination of fortunate circumstances. Of course, in that there is also some work, talent, energy...”

There is one interesting detail from the biography of CorD’s interlocutor that is remembered by multiple generations. As a student, he was a winner in the most successful and popular Yugoslav TV quiz, “Kviskoteka”, which was broadcast by Television Zagreb. Speaking in 2017, the man who came up with that show concept and some other television quizzes, the late Lazo Goluža (1936-2020) said