MILOS CRNJANSKI (1893-1977)
The most fruitful and the most important novelist in the Serbian literature of XX century. His dynamic youth had given him the taste of the narration and interest for the historical matter. Born in Austro-Hungarian Vojvodina in a family of a notary he had been sent to Vienna to his secondary study. On 1914 he had been conscripted forcibly for the Austro-Hungarian Army, but very soon he had been stuck by cholera. In 1920 Crnjanski continued his study in Paris where he encountered Ivo Andric. His literary career began by the collection of poems “Lirike Itake” 1918 and by “Letters from Paris” three years later. But he mostly had developed the epic prose. In 1921 “The Carnojevic Journal” had followed that Serbian family through many generations known in Yugoslavia.
In 1930 his work “Migrations” led him to the world writers rank through the romanced description of Serbian migrations on the XVII century. Crnjanski had been inclined to one of the key periods of Serbian history. He had stressed this romanesque inspiration in the “Book about Germany” and the “Roman of London”.
In the inspiration of great Russian novelists Crnjanski had been retailing through tens of personalities and thanks to an incessant visual imagination about the break through, each time a tragical story in an historical context in the “Roman of London” a Russian aristocrat thought he had found a refined civilisation in post war England. On the contrary he had been an example of decadent.
Milos Crnjanski had also contributed to the rise of the Serbian poetry, but always with an attachment to the history. His biography about “Sveti Sava” the first monk writer and from that point of views an exemplar. Written in verse, it presents the life and the thought of the great Serbian saint with the genius proper to him Crnjanski knew how to express the historical archetypes from history and the contemporary humans. His historical novels have been translated into French.
IVO ANDRIC (1892-1975)
He is the best known writer in Serbian language. Born in Travnik. He had grown up in Visegrad whose bridge he made celebrated. After his study un Vienna he had been taken prisoner 1914, being a revolutionary, he became an editor in Belgrade 1918. he had created a literary circle with people such as Crnjanski and Milicic. This little group used to frequent the Moscow hotel. But very soon he had been noticed by his intellectual capacities and became the vice-consul in many European capitals. His diplomatic career reached its summit in the pole of special deputy and ministre in Berlin from 1939 to 1941. But when Germans had bombed Belgrade April 6th 1941 he not only refused the comfortable post in Switzerland, but he escaped to the Yugoslav capital at his friend’s Milenkovic. In his little room he had written his most celebrated novels, first “The Travnik Chronicle” and “The Bridge on the Drina” in 1944.on 1961 he go the Noble prize for literature for his last novel. He remained in Belgrade and became an eminent member of the Writers Association.
In two novels of his Andric has been plunging us admirably into a milieu and entanglements in a little village in Bosnia. Each time his romanesque art had succeeded in showing us the connections existing at the transition between the centuries between the Orthodox, Catholic and Muslims rather more than their cultural differences. These links were a way of common living and a neighbour spirit of neighbourhood and proximity making to arrive always to mutual understanding in spite of disassembling. More interesting to us has been the “Travnik Chronicle” taking place between 1806 and 1814 in central Bosnia at the moment when Napoleon had a tendency to enlarge the zone of French influence in the Illyrian province. Two consuls, the Austrian and the French could be seen in Travnik waiting for their dreams to be realized within Europe. But the immobility of the East, the mentality of two contradictory ethnos united in opposition to the strangers drowning their civilisation vigour. The outstanding novel of “Travnik Chronicle” had already shown the difficulties of a non-negotiated international regulation.
Andric is also an admirable creator of novels among which it could be read on French “Anika’s Times” and “The Thirst”.
DANILO KIS (1935-1989)
The author from Serbia best known in France. The lecturer in Serbo-Croat at many French universities living in Paris since 1979 and was nominated the Cavalier of Arts and Literature.
Danilo Kis was born in Subotica in North Vojvodina, of a Jewish father and a Montenegrin mother.
His first translations and poetry had been realized in Montenegro in the post-war years and his essays and novels in Belgrade in 1950s.
But his career made his rise when he was living in Strasbourg 1962 where he became a language instructor at the university. Continuing the translation of great French and Russian authors Danilo Kis had shown the range of his talent. By collaboration with the “Atelje 212” from Belgrade he had tried himself in the theatrical dramaturgy. But especially he published his first novel “Ashy Garden” which had waited just six years to be translated into French. The novel having imprinted the trademark ”Kis”. In a very personal style the narrator had been retailing his childhood in Yugoslavia and in Hungary during the war through the personality of Edward Sam. He tenderly had illuminated how had passed his time writing an encyclopaedia made of dreams rather than the precise knowledge.
Danilo Kis would create a light and imaginative style deepening in always more enigmatical novels. The most known have been “The too early sorrows” (1969), “The Sandpit” (1972) and “The Tomb for Boris Davidovic” (1976). These years had seen the continuing of his theatrical work and his function of a language instructor in Bordeaux and then in Lille.
Rewarded with the greatest literary prizes in his own country (NIN, Ivo Andric) and in France (Great Eagle of the City of Nice). Danilo Kis will remain an author who contributed most to weave the cultural connections between Yugoslavia and France. He is the most translated author in France.
MILORAD PAVIC (born 1929)
This gentleman with the spectacles and with the malicious look of the literary world publishing that what would remain the best seller in the world, the famous “Khazar Dictionary”, published and translated into 80 languages. This fruitful author was born and has been living in Belgrade. He had been nominated to the Nobel prize for literature 2002.
A novelist, retailer and scenario writer in the dramatist art at the same time, Pavic has been known in his country a formidable expert of the language and literary pictures. But he is in the first place a great expert in the Serbian literature. Professor at the Philological University o Belgrade he has been known the best connoisseur of Serbian literature of XVIII and XIX centuries. Specialized in baroque and symbolist currents, but also s the translator of Pushkin and Byron. He is regularly holding conferences at the University of Sorbonne, Vienna and Freiburg. Since 1991 he is a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, but he has been keeping away from politics. His first book published in Belgrade “Palompestes” has been in fact a collection of poems, and three years later it had been followed by the monumental “History of Serbian literature from the Age of Baroque”. Since then Milorad Pavic had been alternating with a good luck the poetry collections, literary studies, historical studies, novels.
In 1988 the surprising “Khazar Dictionary” a lexical roman with 100,000 words he published for the first time in France in the edition of Belfond (the original edition of the book (1984). In this “Khazar Dictionary” could be found the particularity of the romanesque work of Pavic. In each of his books could be found “Landscape Painted with the Tea”, “Opposing the Wind” and “The last love affair in Constantinople”.
Khazars are a people from Caucasus which still in VIII century had not adopted a religion. Across the history of this disappeared people a century later Pavic had invited us to think about myths and religions. For the Muslims, Orthodox and Jews Khazars have been a chance to Pavic to show in a way of Umberto Ecco the transition between reality an imagination. It is also a summery of erudition about the history of civilisations written in a very alert style.
Milorad Pavic is inclined to that what he called “reversibility of arts”: the sculptures an pictures are variable depending on the angle, the view or the light. Why would the same mean for the books? This “reversibility” has been giving a prose of many independent parts where there appeared many layers of significance, the layers being to the reader to choose to explore separately depending upon his own view.
Remaining always very discrete, Pavic would come out of his reserve when a prize such as the Nobel would surprise him beside his bed?
From the side of Milosevic regime singers Dobrica Cosic (born 1921) has been known by his historical novels: “The Roots” (1954) has been relating the good and the bad lucks of the family Katic drawn between the Serbian roots and the opening to the West. His trilogy: “The Bad Times”, “The believer” and “The Time of Death” had been placed into the tome of the II World War. Cosic has been known by his dismissal from the Central Committee of the Communist Association after having raised the Albanian question 1968. He was a short time President of Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1990.
We could not conclude this biography without mentioning Desanka Maksimovic (1898-1993) and the still living Matija Beckovic.
