Selimovich, Mesha

Selimovich was born on April 26, 1910 in the city of Tuzla, where he later graduated from the main school and gymnasium. In 1930, Mesha went to Belgrade, where he studied the Serbo-Croatian language and Yugoslav literature at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade . From 1934 to 1941 he was a professor at the Civil School, and from 1936 also the Real Gymnasium in Tuzla. The first two years of the war, Selimovich lived in Tuzla, where in 1943 he was arrested on suspicion of collaborating with partisans. In the same 1943 he moved to the liberated territories and joined the Yugoslav Communist Party, becoming a member of the Agitprop of eastern Bosnia and the political commissar of the Tuzla Partisan detachment. During the war, Selimovich’s brother, also a communist, was shot without trial or as a member of a partisan detachment. Mesha's letter in defense of his brother did not produce any results. This tragedy, which deeply wounded Selimovich, later received its literary development in his novel " Dervish and Death ", where the main character Ahmed Nuruddin failed to save his captive brother from imminent death.

After the war, Selimovich did not stay long in Belgrade, where he arrived in 1944, and in 1947 he moved to Sarajevo, where he became a professor at the Higher Pedagogical School and an assistant professor of the Faculty of Philosophy. A little later, Selimovich worked as the art director of the Bosna Film studio, directed the dramatic productions of the People’s Theater and was the editor-in-chief of the Svjetlost publishing company. Due to periodic conflicts with local politicians and intelligentsia, he retired and returned to Belgrade in 1971, where he remained until his death on July 11, 1982.

In his 1976 letter to the Serbian Academy of Science and Art, Selimovich argued that, despite his Bosnian origin and belonging to a respected Muslim family (he honored his roots), he is a Serb by nationality and considers himself a Serbian writer. Selimovich was elected chairman of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia, since 1971 he was an honorary doctor of the University of Sarajevo. In 1967, three significant prizes were awarded to Selimovich at once: Negosh, Goran, and the NIN magazine.

Selimovich began his literary activity quite late. His first book - a collection of short stories "Prva četa" ("The First Squad") - was published in 1950, and the second - the novel "Tamnica" ("Prison") - only in 1961. Soon after, the subsequent collection of short stories "Tuđa zemlja" (“Alien Land”), 1962 and the poetic novel “Magla i mjesečina” (“Fog and Moonlight”), 1965 were not seen at all noticeably. The works of Mesha Selimovich are characterized by a European narrative tradition, which is close at the same time to Dostoevsky and modernists of the 20th century. However, Selimovich managed to create his own way of depicting reality, which is difficult to unambiguously attribute to any literary school. He inherited and expanded the genre of confession and the stream of consciousness, the most striking examples of which are Dostoevsky’s short novels “The Meek” and “Notes from the Underground”.

The novel “Derviš i smrt” (“Dervish and Death”), released in 1966, immediately drew general attention to Selimovich as a vivid literary phenomenon. In this novel, Selimovich through the main character expressed his tormenting thoughts about the violent death of his brother, narrating about the futile struggle of a single person with an organized system of repressions and about the changes that the latter underwent, turned out to be part of this system. Some critics compared Dervish and Death to Franz Kafka’s novel The Process. The novel has been translated into many languages. Each chapter was preceded by an epigraph from the Koran.

The novel "Dervish and Death" was written as a reaction to the political regime of Joseph Broz Tito, who was characterized by political arrests and repressions. However, the novel takes place in the 18th century in a small place in Bosnia, and the narration is on behalf of the dervish Ahmed Nuruddin. The novel is written in the form of confession, a monologue, imbued with deep artistic inspiration and harmoniously soldering ancient wisdom with modern philosophical thought. Reasonings grow out of religious truths as a model of dogmatic thinking in order to develop into eternal universal human questions related to the sensation of spiritual torment and fears that invariably accompany human life. The book is dedicated to the wife of Selimovich Darka, who throughout her life has been an unchanging friend, assistant and support of the writer. The writers of Bosnia and Herzegovina proposed to present the novel “Dervish and Death” for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Selimovich’s second novel “Tvrđava” (“Fortress”) was released in 1970. Its action again returns the reader to times long gone, this time in the 17th century. This story is incomparably more optimistic, full of faith in love, as opposed to feelings of loneliness and fear of the future in Dervish and Death. The fortress in the novel is both an existing thing and a symbol, it is "every person, every association of people, every ideology", closed in itself. The exit from the fortress is at the same time the entrance to life, the birth of personality, the opportunity to meet with other individuals and get acquainted with human values. Love in this novel, as well as in Dervish ..., is understood as a bridge connecting people with each other regardless of the difference of beliefs, beliefs and ideologies. The later novels “Ostrvo” (“The Island”), 1974 and the posthumous “Krug” (“The Circle”), 1984, no longer had the same power of expression and vivid originality of images that they so admired in the first two novels of Selimovich. Selimovich dedicated a separate book to his autobiography Sjećanja (Memoirs), 1976, where he spoke about events and meetings that left a deep mark on his whole life. However, one of his most striking non-artistic works is Pros and Cons of Vuk, in which the author discusses the reform of the Serbian language of Vuk Karadzic. “For and Against Vuk” is a book devoted to the problems of creating standards of the modern Serbian language, in which the struggle of Vuk Karadzic and his opponents is described in stages.

• First couple / First Squad ( 1950 , book of short stories)
• Tuђa zemљa / Alien land ( 1957 , book of short stories and film script).
• Noћ and јutra / Night and Sunrises ( 1958 , movie script)
• Silence / Silence ( 1961 , novel).
• Magla and Meseschina / Fog and Moonlight ( 1965 , novel)
• Yeseni and ogledi / Essays and Essays ( 1966 )
• Dervish and smrt / Dervish and death ( 1966 , historical novel)
• For and Against Vuk / For and Against Vuk Karadzic ( 1967 , essay)
• Tvrђava / Fortress ( 1970 , historical novel)
• Ostrovo / Island ( 1974 , novel)
• Circle / Circle ( 1983 , novel, not finished)

Publications in Russian

• Foreign land // Foreign Literature, 1969, No. 3, p. 137-164
• Dervish and death; Fortress. - M .: "Rainbow", 1987.

• Kritičari o Meši Selimoviću. Sarajevo: Svijetlost, 1973
• Petrović M. Roman Meše Selimovića. Niš: Gradina, 1981.

• Texts on line (Serb .)
• [1] (Serbian)
• Meša Selimović - Facebook page