I came to know Vladimir Dimitrijević at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the early 1970s. From time to time we have all read scathing criticisms of that place and that event, which is said to be the most terrible example of the confusion of languages and of the abasement of culture to commerce. I have never shared these ideas. On the contrary, I rather enjoy the chaotic aspect of the fair, and the relationship between money and the written word, between money and literature, seems to me at least worthy of interest. But the main reason for defending the Frankfurt Book Fair, the reason that, for me, counters any argument, is the fact that there I came to know Vladimir Dimitrijević. Until then I knew only one thing about Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, namely that whenever an author from the Slavic world came to my attention, I immediately noticed that he had been published or heralded by L’Âge d’Homme. And I had heard that behind that name was a certain Monsieur Dimitrijević.
When I met him, I soon found something strange and rare: between us there was a certain fellow feeling, without our knowing why or of what nature. We began talking about books and that discussion never stopped. I think it all happened like this because we have a shared conviction: we both believe that by talking about books one enters a space that is much vaster, lighter, and freer than when one talks about the world or, worse still, about personal matters. Perhaps people become publishers just to endlessly prolong a conversation on books. When I read the thrilling pages of Dimitrijević’s conversations with Jean-Louis Kuffer, where he speaks of his youth in Belgrade, I found that fever, that secret fervor that must nourish the immense patience of the publisher. During their conversations, Dimitrijević used two words to describe the job of the publisher: ferryman and gardener. Those two words, to an untutored ear, might seem like signs of modesty. On the contrary, I think they reveal the highest ambition. Both the ferryman and the gardener are involved in something that already exists: a garden to be cultivated or a traveler to be transported. But that thing usually called creation also involves something that preexists. Every writer possesses within him a garden to be cultivated and a traveler to be transported: nothing more. Otherwise, he would end up involved with something much less interesting: his own ego. But the two words used by Dimitrijević are not just an indication of the highest ambition. For me they are also the manifestation of an ancient dream. I believe that unless someone has an image of paradise it is very difficult to be a great publisher. And a paradise—whatever form it takes—will always be a garden with flowing water. This image must, however, remain well hidden. And what I admire in Dimitrijević is also the relationship between what is hidden and what is visible. What is visible, in him, is for example what I will call his cult of the obstacle. Dimitrijević practices the profession of publisher on the basis of surmounting certain elementary obstacles such as the difficulty in passing a manuscript from an office desk to a printing press, from a printing press to a bookshop, from a bookshop to someone’s mind. Dimitrijević has become an expert in all of these passages. And for precisely this reason he has developed a metaphysics that is the foundation of his cult of the obstacle. I would describe it as the metaphysics of the customs post. With his small van, Dimitrijević is therefore the most improbable and the most practical of publishers—and what I find admirable is the very coexistence of these two poles. All of this places him in a position of chronic imbalance in relation to everything around us: an imbalance that Dimitrijević has sought and eventually found. In fact, if we think of the authors and books that Dimitrijević loves most and has published with the greatest passion, we immediately realize there is something in these books that is too large or too small in relation to what surrounds them: all have a certain boundlessness of soul. Those like Charles-Albert Cingria, like Robert Walser, are perhaps too discreet to be noticed: perfect examples of those Swiss who—in the words of Dimitrijević—know how to “disappear without raising their voice.” Or otherwise they are like Stanisław Witkiewicz or Aleksandr Zinovyev or Albert Caraco or Andrei Bely or Miloš Crnjanski: there is always something excessive about them, they overflow from the confines of reality. It is no coincidence that these authors, however different each is from the others, have found themselves under the same roof—that of Dimitrijević.
Every true publisher builds up, knowingly or otherwise, a single book consisting of all the books he publishes. Dimitrijević’s book would be immense, possessed of a force that plays with form, held together by a total loyalty toward a tribe that no longer has a land to belong to, except for the pages of that same book. It is this, I believe, that creates the unity that gives form to a publishing house, it is this that has enabled Dimitrijević to encounter people who are essential to him and his publishing house, such as his wife, Geneviève, such as Claude Frochaux. From Belgrade to Lausanne, Dimitrijević carried out one of the longest journeys imaginable, an adventure impossible to measure, capable of being retold only by a latter-day Joseph Conrad. I often think of this when I find myself before other people in the publishing world whose adventures are also turning more into corporate sagas. And so, over the years, I have gradually understood the reasons that justified my original impression of Dimitrijević when we first met among the stands at the Frankfurt Book Fair—the impression that, on the one hand, there were those hundreds of publishers around us and, on the other, there was him, Dimitrijević, the ferryman, the barbarian, as he sometimes likes to call himself, the man who reached Switzerland with twelve dollars in his pocket and whose first question in English, since he still knew nothing of the French language, to a bookseller at the Librairie Payot in Lausanne, was: “Who is Amiel?” What Dimitrijević didn’t say, but we know, is that the first good edition of Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s Journal intime would be published a few years later by L’Âge d’Homme.
Thus I discovered that Dimitrijević’s bracing imbalance was needed to balance the overly stable and rather dismal equilibrium of so many others. I hope, for him and for us all, that his bracing imbalance long continues.