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Revision as of 18:32, 20 December 2005 by Hadžija (talk | contribs) (rv my edits, see talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Mehmed Meša Selimović was a Serbian writer born in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Bosnian Muslim parents. He was one of the greatest 20th century Balkan novelists. He wrote his novels in Serbo-Croatian and the variant of language that he used has had a lot of influence on today's Bosnian standard language.
He was born on April 26, 1910 in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary, where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the high school that today bears his name. In 1943, he was arrested for collaboration with the partisans (an Communist resistance movement). From 1947 to 1971 he lived in Sarajevo, when he moved to Belgrade where he spent the rest of his life until his death in 1982.
He wrote at least ten significant novels, the most important of which was Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt). Selimović wrote the book after his brother was imprisoned on Goli Otok in the Adriatic by Yugoslavia's Communist regime. It tells of the futility of one man's resistance against an oppressive system. It has been compared to Kafka's Prozess. The only other of his works to be translated into English is The Fortress.
Selimović is considered to be one of the hundred greatest Serbs.
Quote
- I descend from a Muslim family, from Bosnia, and by nationality I am a Serb. I belong to Serbian literature, while the literature of Bosnia, to which I also belong, I consider only as my geographic literature center, and not a distinct literature of Serbo-Croatian language... I belong, so, to the same nation and literature of Vuk, Matavulj, Stevan Sremac, Borisav Stanković, Petar Kočić, Ivo Andrić, and my deepest kinship with them I don't need to prove.
Notes
- Most of the people who declared themselves as Serbs by nationality and Muslim by religion now declare themselves as Bosniaks. A clear example of this trend is the Bosniak national leader Alija Izetbegović. Meša Selimović was one of people who declared himself as a Muslim Serb but he started to declare himself simply as a Serb after the constitutional changes in Yugoslavia in 1974, which introduced Muslims as a nation. He died before the formation of the Bosniak nation in the 1990s. This situation causes many Bosniak authors to consider Selimović a Bosniak, as they feel he would have considered himself a Bosniak had that nation existed during his lifetime, while most Serbian authors consider him as Serb.