This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Hadžija (talk | contribs) at 01:51, 19 December 2005 (a few edits, the "controversial" edits are based on the quote). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 01:51, 19 December 2005 by Hadžija (talk | contribs) (a few edits, the "controversial" edits are based on the quote)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Mehmed Meša Selimović was a Serbian writer born in Bosnia-Herzegovina to a Bosnian Muslim parents. He was one of the greatest 20th century Balkan novelists. He wrote his novels in the Serbo-Croatian language 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
- Many of the people who declared themselves as Serb by nationality and Muslim by religion declare themselves now as Bosniaks. Meša Selimović was one of people who declared himself as a Muslim Serb (and he died before the formation of the Bosniak nation in the 1990s). (A clear example of this trend is the Bosniak national leader Alija Izetbegović.) This situation causes the fact that Bosniak authors consider Meša as Bosniak, as they feel he would have considered himself a Bosniak had that nation existed during his lifetime, while Serbian authors consider him as Serb.