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Revision as of 05:27, 25 December 2005 by Millosh (talk | contribs) (rv)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Mehmed Meša Selimović was a Bosnian and Serbian writer born in a Bosniak family . He was one of the greatest 20th century novelists of Southeastern Europe. He wrote his novels in Serbo-Croatian language and his language variant made a lot of influence in contemporary Bosnian standard language. He wrote his novels about Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bosniak culture in the Ottoman era. He started his most famous novel Death and the Dervish according to traditional Bosniak heritage when starting any kind of job, with the words: "In the name of Allah, the most kind, the most merciful". For the last eleven years of his life, he declared himself as a Serb by nationality.
He was born on April 26, 1910 in Tuzla, Bosnia, 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 anti-fascist resistance movement). From 1947 to 1971 he lived in Sarajevo, then moving to Belgrade to spend the rest of his life, where he died in 1982.
He wrote at least ten significant novels, the most important thereof being one that he wrote because his brother was in prison at Goli otok, Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt), speaking of the futility of one man's resistance against a pushing system, and the change that takes place within that man after he becomes a part of that very system, sometimes resembling Kafka's Prozess in several ways. The only other of his works to be translated into English is The Fortress. Meša is on the list of the 100 Most famous 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 Bosniak national constitution 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.