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Miloš Crnjanski (in Serbian Cyrillic: Милош Црњански; 26 October 1893 – 30 November 1977) was a poet of the expressionist wing of Serbian modernism, author, and a diplomat. From his beginnings as a journalist whose social-political stance was at one moment openly opposed to freedom and progress, he gradually arose to become a poet and romanticist.

Biography

Early years

Crnjanski was born in Csongrád, Hungary, to an impoverished family which moved in 1896 to Timişoara, where he grew up in a patriarchal-patriotic community with the implanted cult of Serbia and Serbian heritage in his soul as a precious relic. One of the deepest and longest lasting sensations of his childhood were those with national and religious content: church school, St. Sava icon, incense, the Serbian Orthodox cemetery with its burial ceremonies, evening stories and songs about Serbia, hajduks, and Ottoman Turkish oppression – all of it in a boy’s emotions transferred into continual unrest, but also became an everlasting source of hope, joy, doubt, disappointment and rebelliousness.
At the beginning of World War I, Crnjanski was persecuted as part of the general anti-Serbian retribution of Austria to Princip’s assassination in Sarajevo, but instead of being sent to jail, he was drafted to army and sent to Galician frontline to fight against the Russians. During most of these tragic war days, Crnjanski spent time alone in a war hospital, although just before the end of the war he was sent to the Italian front. In his memory, sights of the havoc of war were impressed unerasably. After the war, he studied art history and philosophy in Vienna and graduated from the University of Belgrade.

Middle years

Thirty million innocent young war dead found their place in the anti-war verses of this unfortunate young soldier, ideas which he brought from the war, then to Zagreb and to Belgrade, where he stayed for the longest time. From this point on, Crnjanski lived like Homer’s unfortunate hero, who returns to his poem Ithaca after his long odyssey. Odysseus, this hero found a way to preserve the vital strength of life, unlike Crnjanski who (along with his generation) returned to their destroyed homeland with the feeling of tiredness and resignation. Both in his wartime and post-war verses, this tired poet wrote sincerely of his resignation and lost illusions.
From his ramble across bloody frontlines of Europe, Crnjanski returned to thoughts about the necessity of dispelling the false myths of the “eternal” values of civil ethics. Both in poetry and life, he lives as a sentimental anarchist and tired defeatist who remembered sorrowfully the relics of his youth, now in his eyes discarded, bloodied, and spat upon. At the time he considered himself a member of progressive social forces and argued for socialism, but his rebellion from those days was only perhaps a strong reaction to the horrors of the recent wars.
The literary work of Miloš Crnjanski from that period was a significant contribution to the effort of his generation to find a new language and expression for new themes and concepts. With completely new verse, and a lot of emotional bitterness, he expressed his discord, in those days, he spoke about futility of war, pugently negated Kosovo battle myths and sarcastically mocked what he saw as the delusion of a “golden century” for mankind.
Using the strength of the compelling poet’s word, he may have done away with many civil values, but he wasn’t able to see or start something new from the ruins. Both the verse and prose of Crnjanski was strong during post-war years, as long as war-fuelled revolt lived on in him. In time, however, those feelings dwindled, and, Crnjanski still wandered and staggered, gradually growing closer to the ideals of Serbian bourgeoisie, afraid of the approaching proletarian revolution.

Late life

After war, Crnjanski worked as a professor and journalist. In 1928 he had been appointed the cultural attaché to the embassy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Berlin, Lisbon and Rome. When World War II began, he was in Rome. From there, he went to London, where he lived as an émigré and didn’t return to Belgrade until 1965.
He died in Belgrade on November 30, 1977.

Work

Crnjanski published a large amount of works of various subjects and content; the following is a selection of notable works:

Poetry

Lyrics of Ithaca (1918)
Chosen verses (1954)
Lament over Belgrade (1965)

Tales

Stories about men (1924)

Novels

The Journal of Carnojevic (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću, 1921)
Migrations (Seobe, 1929)
Second book of Migrations (Seobe, knjiga druga, 1962)
A Novel about London (Roman o Londonu, 1972)

Dramas

Masks (1918)
Doss-house (1958)
Nikola Tesla
Migrations has been translated into English (Harvill 1994, ISBN 0002730049), but with the author’s name transliterated as “Milos Tsernianski”.
Crnjanski also founded the newspaper Putevi, with Marko Ristić (1922), and Ideje, a political paper (1934). He also published two books of eastern nations poetry anthology.

Danilo Kiš (Serbian Cyrillic: Данило Киш) (February 22, 1935–October 15, 1989) was a Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian. Kiš was influenced by Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Ivo Andrić, among other authors. His most famous works include A Tomb for Boris Davidovich and The Encyclopedia of the Dead.

Life and work

Danilo Kiš was born in Subotica, Danube Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the son of Eduard Kiš (Kis Ede), a Hungarian Jewish railway inspector, and Milica Kiš, a Montenegrin (born Dragićević) from Cetinje. His Jewish father was born in Austria-Hungary with a surname Kon, but changed it to Kis as part of Magyarization, a widely implemented practice at the time. During the Second World War, Danilo’s father along with several other family members, were killed in various Nazi camps. His mother took him and his older sister Danica to Hungary for the duration of the war. After the end of the war, the family moved to Cetinje, Montenegro, Yugoslavia, where Kiš graduated from high school in 1954.
Kiš studied literature at the University of Belgrade, and graduated in 1958 as the first student to be awarded a degree in comparative literature. He was a prominent member of the Vidici magazine, where he worked until 1960. In 1962 he published his first two novels, Mansarda and Psalam 44. For his 1973 novel Peščanik (“Hourglass”), Kiš received the prestigious NIN Award, but returned it a few years later due to a political dispute.
During the following years, Kiš received a great number of national and international awards for his prose and poetry.
He spent most of his life in Belgrade until and last decade between Paris, France and Belgrade. Number of years he was working as a lecturer elsewhere in France.
Kiš was married to Mirjana Miočinović from 1962 to 1981. After their separation, he lived with Pascale Delpech until his early death from lung cancer in Paris.
A film based on Peščanik (Fövenyóra) directed by the Hungarian Szabolcs Tolnai is finished in 2008.
In May 1989 with his friend, director Aleksandar Mandić, Kiš made the four-episode TV series Goli Život about lives of two Jewish women. The shooting took place in Israel and program was shown after his death, in the spring 1990. This is the last work of Danilo Kiš.
Kiš was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was due to win it, were it not for his death in 1989.
Bibliography

Mansarda: satirična poema, 1962 (novel) (English title: “The Garret”)
Psalam 44, 1962 (novel)
Bašta, pepeo, 1965 (novel) (“Garden, Ashes’”)
Rani jadi: za decu i osetljive, 1970 (short stories) (“Early Sorrows – For Children and Sensitive Readers”)
Peščanik, 1972 (novel) (“Hourglass”)
Po-etika, 1972 (essay)
Po-etika, knjiga druga, 1974 (interviews)
Grobnica za Borisa Davidoviča: sedam poglavlja jedne zajedničke povesti, 1976 (short stories) (“A Tomb for Boris Davidovich”)
Čas anatomije, 1978 (novel)
Noć i magla, 1983 (drama)
Homo poeticus, 1983 (essays and interviews)
Enciklopedija mrtvih, 1983 (short stories) (“The Encyclopedia of the Dead”)
Gorki talog iskustva, 1990 (interviews)
Život, literatura, 1990 (interviews and essays)
Pesme i prepevi, 1992 (poetry)
Lauta i ožiljci, 1994 (short stories)
Skladište, 1995 (texts)
Varia, 1995 (essays, articles and short stories)
Pesme, Elektra, 1995 (poetry and an adaptation from the drama “Elektra”)
Goli Život 1989-90, host in documentary TV Series

English translations

Garden, Ashes (1975, William J. Hannaher)
Early Sorrows: For Children and Sensitive Readers (1998, Michael Henry Heim)
Hourglass (1990, Ralph Manheim)
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1978, Duška Mikić-Mitchell)
The Encyclopedia of the Dead (1989, Michael Henry Heim)
Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews (1995, Ralph Manheim, Michael Henry Heim, Francis Jones)
Mansarda (2008, John K. Cox)

Vuk Drašković (Serbian: Вук Драшковић) (born 29 November 1946 in the village of Međa, Žitište municipality, Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia), leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, is a Serbian politician who served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia.
He graduated from the University of Belgrade’s Law School in 1968. From 1969 to 1980 he worked as a journalist in the Yugoslav news agency Tanjug. He was also a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party and worked as the chief of staff of the Yugoslav President Mika Špiljak. Drašković also wrote several novels.

Early life and career

Born in a small Banat region village to a family of settlers from Herzegovina, Vuk was only six months old when his mother Stoja died. His father Vidak quickly remarried and eventually had two more sons – Rodoljub and Dragan, and three daughters – Radmila, Tanja, Ljiljana with his new bride Dara Drašković, meaning that young Vuk grew up with five half-siblings.

Shortly after Vuk’s birth, the entire family went back to Herzegovina where he finished primary school in the village of Slivlje, before secondary school studies in Gacko. On his father’s insistence Drašković considered studying medicine in Sarajevo; however, the city was too “uptight and cramped” for his liking, so he went to study law in Belgrade instead.
Between 1969 and 1978, Drašković dabbled in journalism. He first worked for the state newsagency Tanjug as its African correspondent, before taking a job as press advisor in the Yugoslav Workers Union Council. During the same period his novels The Judge and Knife were published, raising quite a controversy among Yugoslav ruling communist elites. Soon afterwards, due to popular demand, Prayer and Russian Consul were published as well.
Because of his controversial literary engagement, Drašković was considered somewhat of a dissident even though he had been a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party since his 4th year of university studies.

Career in politics

Late 1980s
Together with Mirko Jović and Vojislav Šešelj, Drašković founded the Serbian National Renewal party (SNO) in 1989. However, the trio soon found themselves at political crossroads and their party disintegrated in three pieces.
Drašković’s relationship with Šešelj is particularly interesting. Despite sharing Herzegovina roots as well as the godfather personal relation, the two quickly became bitter foes and fierce political opponents.

Early 1990s

In 1990, Drašković founded the Serbian Renewal Movement (Srpski Pokret Obnove, SPO), a democratic nationalist party. They participated in the first post-communist democratic elections, held on 9 December 1990, but finished a distant second amidst the total blackout from the pro-Milošević state media. Following that failure Drašković kept the pressure on Serbian President Slobodan Milošević via street protests, organizing mass demonstrations in Belgrade on 9 March 1991. The police intervened, and clashed with demonstrators with some damage to public buildings resulting in the Yugoslav People’s Army having to be brought in.Franjo Tuđman, then President of Croatia, publicly stated after the 9 March 1991 riots that Drašković had phoned his government in order to “seek help in toppling the current Serbian regime” , which Milošević and his party members used aggressively and frequently to whip up public sentiment against Drašković[citation needed]. However, many in Serbia felt that this was an indication of a subtle but growing symbiosis between two totalitarian leaders in both republics.
Drašković fostered strong nationalist feelings (attempting rehabilitation of Serbian Chetniks, Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s legal army during WWII) to complement his pro-Western tendencies. His additional political engagement at this early stage of his political career is full of inconsistencies and seemingly diametrically opposing views and actions. He insisted that Serbian government should promote radical democratic shift, renew traditional alliances with Western nations as a way to preserve some form of Yugoslav confederation rather than pursue direct confrontation with the Croats. On the other hand, he and his party SPO organized a paramilitary unit called the Serbian Guard led by known criminals such as Đorđe “Giška” Božović and Branislav “Beli” Matić all of whom later fought in Croatia. And although Drašković initially claimed this militia was an incitement to Serbian authorities to form a national armed force outside of Yugoslav People’s Army (see last quote), he eventually distanced himself from the paramilitary formation altogether.

His rather emotional and poetic rhetoric also often brought accusations of extremism and hardline nationalism. There is a contentious quote from his speech at SPO rally in Novi Pazar during the summer of 1990, in which Drašković said: “Those who, on Serbian land, lift any flag other than a Serbian one, whether it’s a Muslim, Albanian, or Croat flag, will be left without the flag and without the hand”. Many took such usage of vividly poetic medieval imagery to be very threatening and menacing, especially considering the fact it was delivered in a town with a large Bosniak population. Drašković’s supporters, however claim he was merely pointing out Serbia would not tolerate separatism and partition of its territory. They also say this particular quote should not be viewed outside of context of his entire speech that day, which they say was very much calling for traditional tolerance and peace between Orthodox Serbs and Muslims living in the Sandžak region.
Drašković’s anti-war views came to the fore in mid to late 1991, particularly in November of that year when he wrote a passionate accusation of the Serbian bloody assault on Vukovar in a Serbian daily Borba. But also in the same period he espoused many nationalist, even bordering on extremist, views through interviews, soundbites and op-ed pieces.
In early 1992 he called on citizens of Bosnia to reject nationalism and was the first political figure in Serbia to openly point to crimes by Serb forces. Always in the thick of anti-Milošević struggle, Drašković and his wife Danica paid dearly for their activism. In 1993 they were arrested, savagely beaten and thrown into a high-security prison. Only his hunger strike, pressure from some opposition parties and the international community’s outrage forced the Serbian regime to set the Draškovićs free.

Mid to late 1990s
In 1996 SPO formed the opposition alliance Zajedno (“Together”) with the Democratic Party of Zoran Đinđić and the Civic Alliance of Serbia under Vesna Pešić, which achieved some success in the local elections of November same year. The coalition soon split up as Zoran Đinđić and Vesna Pešić reneged on the signed coalition document to support Drašković as a joint candidate in the subsequent Presidential elections. Drašković’s SPO participated on its own at the September 1997 election, boycotted by his former partners despite an array of local electronic media outlets being in opposition hands.
In January 1998, the SPO was asked to join a coalition with Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia as tension with US and NATO increased in order to use his influence in the West. In early 1999, Drašković became the deputy prime minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He did so in response to Milošević’s appeal for national unity in the face of Albanian uprising in Kosovo and a looming confrontation with NATO. He was sacked by the Prime Minister Momir Bulatović on 28 April 1999.
Unsuccessful attempts at assassinating Drašković took place on 3 October 1999 on the Ibar highway when four of his close associates were murdered, and on 15 June 2000 in Budva. As of 2006, Milorad Ulemek is on trial for this murder and those of Đinđić and Ivan Stambolić; Milošević was also being prosecuted for it until his death.

Post-Milošević

Drašković has had lukewarm relations with just about every figure of note on the Serbian political scene, with frequently alternating periods of vicious feuding and open cooperation. In what he himself later termed “a bad political move”, Drašković kept his SPO out of the wide anti-Milošević Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition that formed in 2000, meaning that his candidate in the 24 September 2000 federal presidential elections, Vojislav Mihailović, achieved little success and that SPO also was not successful in the subsequent parliamentary election where the DOS won overwhelmingly. Because of this, Drašković and his party were pretty much marginalized over the next three years.
In the fall of 2002, he attempted a comeback as one of the eleven candidates in the (subsequently unsuccessful due to low turnout) Serbian presidential elections. Despite a polished marketing campaign that saw Drašković change his personal appearance and tone down his fiery rhetoric, he ended up with only 4.5% of the total vote, well behind Vojislav Koštunica (31.2%) and Miroljub Labus (27.7%), both of whom moved on to the second-round runoff.
His next chance for political redemption came in late 2003. Fully aware of SPO’s, as well as his own, weak political standing after more than 3 years in political oblivion, Drašković entered his party into a pre-election coalition with New Serbia (NS), thus reuniting with old party colleague Velimir Ilić. Joining forces for the 2003 parliamentary election, they achieved limited success, but more importantly managed to get into the coalition that formed the minority government (along with DSS, G17 Plus), providing it with critical parliamentary seats to keep the far-right radicals (SRS) at bay. In the subsequent division of power, Drašković received the high-ranking position of Serbia and Montenegro’s foreign minister.
In response to Montenegro’s vote for independence, Drašković called for a restoration of Serbia’s monarchy: “This is an historic moment for Serbia itself, a beginning which would be based on the historically-proven and victorious pillars of the Serbian state and I am talking about the pillars of a kingdom.” After the breakup with Montenegro in June 2006, Drašković served (until May 2007) as the foreign minister of the Republic of Serbia, a successor to the state union of Serbia-Montenegro.
In August 2010, Vuk Drašković argued in favour of changing the Serbian Constitution of 2006 to remove references to Kosovo as a part of Serbia because according to him “Serbia has no national sovereignty over Kosovo whatsoever. All of Serbia knows that Kosovo is not really a province within Serbia, that it is completely beyond the control of the government and the state of Serbia”

Personal

Vuk and his wife, Danica, met in the 1960s as students at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law, but she was reportedly unresponsive to his clumsy advances. They would run into each other again during 1968 student demonstrations, but this time it was politics that kept them apart. Danica reportedly did not appreciate Vuk’s soft stance and no-questions-asked acceptance of Tito’s supposed concessions to student demands for democratization. Finally on New Year’s Eve, 1974, they ran into each other at a supermarket and Danica invited him to a party at the apartment where she lived with her brother. “I forgot about my fiancée who waited for me to come back from grocery shopping and ended up playing chess the whole night with Danica’s brother Veselin Bošković”, Vuk would later admit.
Vuk and Danica (née Bošković) married on 10 June 1974, and according to those close to the couple, she became the most important figure in his life, both personally and professionally. She was by his side at all the street protests he later became famous for, and from the very beginning she wielded a lot of power in her husband’s political party, SPO. Danica hails from Montenegro, coming from Bijelo Polje.
He speaks English and Russian.

Ivo Andrić (Serbian Cyrillic: Иво Андрић) (October 9, 1892 – March 13, 1975) was a Yugoslav novelist, short story writer, and the 1961 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His writings dealt mainly with life in his native Bosnia under the Ottoman Empire. His native house in Travnik has been transformed into a Museum, and his Belgrade flat on Andrićev Venac host the Museum of Ivo Andrić, and Ivo Andrić Foundation.

Biography

Andrić was born on October 9, 1892, to a Roman Catholic family of Bosnian Croats in Travnik, mahala Zenjak number 9, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of the Ottoman Empire, under control of Austria-Hungary. He was born as Ivan, but became known by the diminutive Ivo. When Andrić was two years old, his father Antun died. Because his mother Katarina (née Pejić) was too poor to support him, he was raised by his mother’s family in the town of Višegrad on the river Drina in eastern Bosnia, where he saw the Ottoman Bridge, later made famous in his novel The Bridge on the Drina (Na Drini ćuprija).
Andrić attended the Jesuit gymnasium in Travnik, followed by Sarajevo’s gymnasium and later the universities in Zagreb (1912 and 1918), Vienna (1913), Kraków (1914), and Graz (PhD, 1924). Because of his political activities, Andrić was imprisoned by the Austrian government during World War I (first in Maribor and later in the Doboj detention camp) alongside other pro-Yugoslav civilians.
Under the newly-formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia) Andrić became a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Faiths and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he pursued a successful diplomatic career as Deputy Foreign Minister and later Ambassador to Germany. He was also a delegate of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the 19th, 21st, 23rd and 24th sessions of the League of Nations. Andrić greatly opposed the movement of Stjepan Radić, the president of the Croatian Peasant Party. His ambassadorship ended in 1941 after the German invasion of Yugoslavia. During World War II, Andrić lived quietly in Belgrade, completing the three of his most famous novels which were published in 1945, including The Bridge on the Drina.
After the war, Andrić spent most of his time in his home in Belgrade and held a number of ceremonial posts in the new Communist government of Yugoslavia, and was also a member of the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country”. He donated all of the prize money for the improvement of libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Following the death of his wife, Milica Babić-Andrić, in 1968, he began reducing his public activities. In 1969 he was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As time went by, he became increasingly ill and eventually died on March 13, 1975, in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia.
He was buried in the Belgrade New Cemetery, in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens.

Works

The material for his works was mainly drawn from the history, folklore, and culture of his native Bosnia.

Ivo Andrić monument in Belgrade, Serbia
The Bridge on the Drina
Bosnian Chronicle[1] (a.k.a. Chronicles of Travnik)
The Woman from Sarajevo[2]
Those were all released in 1945 and written during World War II while Andrić was living quietly in Belgrade. They are often referred to as the “Bosnian trilogy” as they were released simultaneously and had been written in the same period. However, they are connected only thematically -— they are indeed three completely different works.
Some of his other popular works include:
Ex Ponto (1918)
Unrest (Nemiri, 1920)
The Journey of Alija Đerzelez (Put Alije Đerzeleza, 1920)
The Vizier’s Elephant (Priča o vezirovom slonu, 1948; trans. 1962)
The Damned Yard(Prokleta avlija, 1954)
Omer-Pasha Latas (Omerpaša Latas, released posthumously in 1977)
His manuscripts and literary legacy is in custody of the Foundation he founded (Fondacija Ive Andrića) and Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts,
Some claim that the works of Ivo Andrić particularly his thesis “The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule” have resurfaced as a source of anti-Muslim prejudice in Serbian cultural discourse.

Classification

He is claimed as part of Croatian literature, Serbian literature, and Bosnian literature. As far as standard language is considered, he wrote in Serbo-Croatian; he had been a believer in Yugoslav unity and Pan-slavism. However, it must be mentioned that Serbo-Croatian used to have two different subtypes – the Eastern standardization (spread in Montenegro, Serbia and partly in Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Western standardization that is common in Croatia and partly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Andrić first used and wrote Serbo-Croatian Croatian form (Western) and later Serbian form (Eastern).
Some characteristics of Eastern-standard are translating of foreign words, as well as some morphological aspects such as the construction of future tense: radiću (Eastern, I shall work), radit ću (Western).
There was also a more specific, and more fundamental, divide—that between ekavian and ijekavian standards of then-Serbo-Croat — Andrić wrote in the ijekavian (standard in both Western standard Croatia, middle-of-the-road standard Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Eastern standard Montenegro) only in his youth. As a mature writer he wrote and published in ekavian (the official standard only in Serbia), even when depicting characters who live in Bosnia and who are quoted as speaking ijekavian in the dialogues, that stand out in otherwise ekavian text.
As far as first issue is considered, Andrić never used the translated equivalents of foreign words, as it used to be common in Eastern standard. As far as the second issue is considered, Andrić did allow Croatian publishers to change his ekavian works into ijekavian (unlike the Eastern, the Western standard was exclusively ijekavian), but he strictly forbade them from changing his future tense forms.
Serbian sources claim him as a Serbian writer, their arguments are following: 1. He mainly wrote in ekavian, standard existing only in Serbian language. 2. He declared himself as a Serb[19]. In 1954 he stated ‘‘I stayed connected with the land of my birth, Bosnia, but the place of my life and my work was Belgrade.’’ Also, when he got married at the age of 67, he declared himself as a Serbian . 3. He was a member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts.

Slobodan Rakitić ( Serbian Cyrillic: Слободан Ракитић) is a well-known Serbian writer and politician.

Rakitić was born on September 30, 1940 in Vlasovo, Prokuplje, Serbia. He visited the elementary school in Raška and the high school in Novi Pazar. First he studied medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade, but then changed to the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology, where he graduated.
He was the editor of literary magazines such as Contemporary (Savremenik) and Raška. He was a member of the first editorial staff who initiated the appearance of Literary Word (Književna reč) in 1972. As the editor in charge of literature and language, he has been working at the Ilija M. Kolarac Foundation ever since 1973.
S. Rakitić wrote and had the following books of poetry published: Lights of Writings (1967), Raska Tunes (1968), The world is not our home (1970), Earth on the Tongue (1973), Poems of Tree and Fruit (1978), Craving for the South (1981), A Descendant (1982), Basic Land (1988), Deeds on Fire (1990), A Soul and a Sandbar (1994); his published books and essays are: From Ithaca to Illusion (1985), Forms and Meanings (1994); an anthology: Yugoslav Peoples’ Poetry of Romanticism (1978); Selected Works in five volumes, Selected and New Poems (1998), Letters Made of Water (2000).
The poet received the following literary awards: “Milan Rakić” (1974), “Isidora Sekulić” (1982), “Branko Miljković” (1989), “Laza Kostić” (1995), “Kočić’s pen” (1997), “Jovan Dučić” (1998), “Gold Link” (1998) and “Prince Lazar’s Gold Cross” (1998). The book of poetry Deeds on Fire was awarded “The October Belgrade Prize” in 1990 and “Rade Drainac” award in 1991. His poems have been translated into a large number of foreign languages.
Rakitic is a meditative lyric poet with a distinct feeling for history, culture and traditional values. His lyrically-intimist, elegiac, reflexive and religious poetry tries to offer answers to eternal issues of life and death, to the position of an individual and historic, collective sufferings. Rakitić’s poetic discourse is outstandingly metaphysical, noble and dominantly neosymbolistic. Thematically, by forms and motives found in them, his poems correspond to the old religious service literature.
Under the communist regime, Slobodan Rakitić played an active role as a writer struggling for human rights and democratic freedoms. He was never a partisan of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In 1990, he took part in founding the “Serbian Renewal Movement” (SPO), the largest opposition party at that time, led by Vuk Drašković. He was the President of Serbian Renewal Movement parliamentary fraction in the Serbian Parliament during the first pluralist National Assembly (1991-1992), also the leader of the parliamentary fraction (1993-1994) of DEPOS – “Democratic Movement of Serbia” (a large union of major opposition parties and numerous individuals not belonging to any of the political parties).
Rakitić was the president of the Association of Writers of Serbia 1994 – 2005.