Generally speaking, one can talk about three types of intellectuals involved in the examination of social context. Taken all together, these types make a pattern that enables one to notice different "social functions" of a writer. The first type (rarely present in the Serbian/Montenegrin public discourse) presupposes a soft subjectivity that speaks only for itself. Thus, it does not lead a debate instead or in favor of endangered or threatened individuals or groups, but recedes and leaves to these groups or individuals a certain space, so they could act for themselves. The second type (especially popular in the former SFRJ) is a Sartrian type of intellectual. This type thinks about the problems of humankind in general, refers to it, and, finally, delivers to humankind its well-formulated attitudes. The third type is actually an ethnic sub-species of the second type. The representatives of this type serve both to the people, while being, at the same time, able to draw the material and the source of inspiration from well-established popular folklore phrases. In other words, the writers that belong to this category represent "the voice of the people".

Petar II Petrovic Njegos and Matija Beckovic both belong to the third type of the intellectual. Compared to Beckovic, Njegos employed a certain subversiveness and manipulated folk anecdotes. As a result, he neither needed to represent "the voice of the people" to a great extent, nor to form the popular basis of the ideology of his own writings. Njegos stuck to the poetic subject that tends to have a general perspective of things, a view that was later criticized by Ezra Pound (who insisted on the techne). Of course, in a domain ruled by the market economy logic, a poet "from the top of the hill" and a Hegelian owl are both engaged with the same task, and they can only comfort each other as losers. Wherever irony results in a deconstruction of any authority, there is no painless way to attack a monolithic, overarching, giant mind, particularly not by being pathetic. According to Schiller, a sensation is pathetic if the defense that an audience can give is greater than the force of the offense that a work of art performs. Of course, "we" have it the other way: although Njegos is - just like Bora Stankovic and a better part of the normative writers - pathetic, the critics from the Serbian/Montenegrin linguistic sphere have never tried to defend or relativize his work in this sense. On the other hand, prominent representatives of the dominant discourse from the eastern part of this sphere did question (through apologies) his writings. This is the writer who has been praised as someone "who teaches us our history", in which case a good deal of his writings should be seen as a historical narrative - not just literature. Some people have, after reading Njegos, concluded that they are Serbs and not Montenegrins, and some have drawn exactly the opposite conclusion. Thus, The Mountain Wreath forms a kind of an ethno-genetic handbook, and the ones insisting that a detailed knowledge of Njegos is the most important in our (Montenegrin) public discourse, are actually reducing it to a social-operational bestseller, a collection of great common sense sayings (using the formula 2+2=4), or a creative and patriarchal version of handbooks for everyday living like M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled.

Unlike numerous Serbian and Montenegrin writers whose main reaction towards Njegos was either imitation or apology, Matija Beckovic did manage, in his earlier writings, to express linguistic ludisms, absurd, as well as the semantic turbulence, with irony as the leading strategy. One could almost say: a postmodern writer playing with the epic discourse. In order to see his poetic and "metapoetic" tendencies in a different way, it was necessary to wait until he published something with the more concrete general framework, within a concrete social circumstances.

Finally, after the bloody war in BiH and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, a book We shall keep chasing each other (Ceracemo se jos) came out. According to some sources, a thousand copies of the book were sold in only a few days of the Belgrade Book Fair in 1996. The lowering of diction and the pathos that Beckovic used in this book apparently paid off very well. At first glance, using irony and an epic poetry pastiche, the book combines epic seriousness with cynicism and sarcasm. The cycles of poems are organized in such a way as to leave the impression that several different narrators are involved; this is a context that justifies the narrator's role as someone who can just "collect" the folk wisdom that is just "there". The poem "Ceracemo se jos" is structured as a collection of typical folk stereotypes related to chasing. Every section starts with the same words ("ceracemo se jos"), and the whole book includes almost all the possible words derived from the root -cer.

Beckovic tried to unite the endless variations in a nihilistic way ("All is nothing/ including chasing"), and this would be OK within an epic registry. However, Beckovic does not postulate a consistent boundary between "us" and "them" in order to make his text look grotesque. For example, he seems to be losing the distance from the fictional narrator in the following verses: "...But the cross is one/But it's all in vain/ When at least two/Apparently equal/ Are the True believers' one and the Untrue believers' one/ And the Untrue believers' crosses are crosses as well..."

Something similar occurs when Beckovic, stressing his origin "from within the people", mentions toponyms that supposedly speak of the destiny of people": after mentioning the Ceranica hill, the Ceranica field, the Ceranica bridge, etc., somehow the family Cerimagic creeps in. This is a Muslim family name, since the writer mentions that they are originally from Ceristan. This makes the beginning of the book, in which it is said that we shall "Well chase each other/ Really chase each other/ Chase each other indeed" - postulating the apparent three-way linguistic variation (Serbian, Muslim, and Croatian), and a generalizing of the problem of "chasing" - look like a distinctive ideological subversion. The absurd, cynicism and nihilism are lost, and what creeps in is the notion that Beckovic could not resist the challenge of the moment, "what is generally known", and "real life". In other words, Beckovic responds to the tension of the Balkan political events, and his work primary has aggressive political overtones. This demonstrates a victory of the local, tribal connotations over the universal ones, a victory of the spoken over the written word, which can all be detected in the auto-poetic statements that Beckovic uttered in the last few years at the presentations of his books and the "literary awards" that he received.

In other times, war and politics were the subjects of the writings of, among others, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Curzio Malaparte, Günther Grass, Thomas Pynchon, and Donald Bartholomew. They used, each in his own way, the fact that the war represents a radical context, and hence suffers radical poetic consequences. Through the use of irony, heterotopy, and various kinds of ludism, resulted in great novels like "A Journey to the Ends of the Earth", "Skin", "Tin Drum", "Gravity's Rainbow", and "The King". Of course, the problem is formally different with different literary genres involved. The aforementioned novels and "We shall keep chasing each other" both have a common general framework, as well as follow the rule that the system of a work should never lose initiative to the "message". The initiative is not lost in the novels - quite on the contrary. On the other hand, it seems that the main problem is that not only our readers, but the better part of our critics as well, enjoy receiving and emitting messages, particularly the ones convenient for the military-political context. The attitude towards the addressee is embedded within the relationship between the system and the message. On the one hand, Matija Beckovic, like every Sartrian intellectual, writes for the "ideal reader". In this case, the "ideal reader" must be from "our country", and, as we have seen, familiar with "our people", its national being and its history. In that sense, the message not only takes the privileged place compared to that of a work's system, but it also becomes the system itself. One of the aforementioned writers, Celine, when asked "who do you write for?", replies that he does not write for anyone. There is nothing worse than lowering oneself to that point, the French author adds, "One writes for the thing itself"...

The famous anthology One Hundred Greatest Works of World Literature (Zagreb: Stvarnost, 1964) includes, among others, five American, five Spanish, seven ancient Greek and Roman, and seven German authors. There are six Yugoslav authors. Following the federal "key", there is a Montenegrin author as well - Petar II Petrovic Njegos with his Mountain Wreath. The number of Yugoslav authors and their texts included led the editor, Antun Soljan, to write the following: "It is possible that some readers will object that we overestimate ourselves and that there is too much local patriotism in our crtiteria... However, as this book is primarily intended for our readers, the editor believed his choice to demonstrate how our literature fits the European and world general patterns, and that that certain basic literary traits occurred in our literature not only simultaneously with the European ones, but also (as in the case of Marin Drzic) preceded them. This will make the anthology quite like the other similar publications in other countries". This selection did certainly prove that the Yugoslav literature fits the European and world patterns. Thus, apart from Njegos - and unlike Celine, Malaparte, and Grass (Bartholomew and Pynchon published their works since this anthology came out) - the anthology also includes Edgar Alan Poe, who was born four years before the Montenegrin author, and died two years before him. Therefore, they are contemporaries. According to Soljan and many Serb/Montenegrin intellectuals involved in the public discourse, they are both classics of world literature. The American classic influenced the forming of the genres of crime story, as well as the horror story. Poe also influenced Latin American literature, American experimental ludism, Russian formalists and German expressionism. On the other hand, Njegos, the Yugoslav/Montenegrin classic, influenced... Matija Beckovic.

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