The Devil in the Elevator, or New Belgrade as a Literary Genre

This Saturday, the literary club gathered at Slovo. Brankova 9, the second floor, five o’clock in the evening – and familiar faces around the table.

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The meeting was organized by the regular host of our club – philologist and poet Bojana Radošević, a teacher at the school. But this time, she handed the floor over to a special guest. The evening was led by Anna Rostokina – a translator from Serbian into Russian, a person with a rare double background: she studied Serbian language in Moscow, and Serbian literature later here in Belgrade, at university. And, as it turned out, one of her professors there was none other than Mihajlo Pantić himself – the author of the story we read that evening. Her translation work includes books by Momo Kapor, Milorad Pavić, and Miloš Crnjanski. She knows Serbian prose from the inside.

The story we discussed was “Đavo u liftu” (“The Devil in the Elevator”). Mihajlo Pantić is a Serbian writer, literary critic, and professor at the University of Belgrade. He is the author of more than fifty books and the winner of numerous literary awards. In his youth, he abandoned the Faculty of Law in favor of philology and eventually completed his doctoral dissertation on “The Modernist Short Story.” In other words: he has spent his entire life writing short stories – and his entire life studying and thinking about them as a scholar. His work revolves around three recurring themes: the short story as a literary form, New Belgrade as a setting, and fishing as a way of thinking and reflecting. His texts have been translated into more than twenty languages.

In Pantić’s writing, New Belgrade is not simply a residential area. It is a separate planet with its own atmosphere. A concrete apartment building elevator is, perhaps, the perfect place to encounter a devil. Or yourself.

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A special thank you goes to Anna – she prepared the story in advance for the participants, adding a small Serbian vocabulary guide directly into the text. There was no need to constantly check a phone or interrupt the reading with questions: everything necessary was already there. It made the experience much easier and allowed us to focus on the story itself rather than on the dictionary.

And this is exactly what is important: Texts like these – short, contemporary, written in living Belgrade Serbian – offer much more than simple reading practice. Inside them you find: grammar, everyday expressions, conversational structures, the rhythm of urban speech, and, if you like, the spirit of contemporary Serbia. Reading modern Serbian literature is not just an exercise. It is immersion.

The evening turned out warm and engaging. We talked about the story, about New Belgrade, and about what it means to live in a city that has itself become a literary character. Nobody wanted to leave. And once again I thought how wonderful it is that Slovo gives us these opportunities – not simply to learn a language, but to experience it through literature, through people, and through conversation.

Elena Titova

Student at Slovo