Mesa Selimovic - Bosnian writer

Selimovic was a Communist and Partisan boy from the first day of the war and these two choices will mark his life and his literature just as the formation in Serbian cultural milieu will permanently mark his political, literary and identity worldviews.

Is there a more mysterious phenomenon in the cultural history of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Mesa Selimovic, writer of the Dervish and Death and Fortresses , novels who have left such a deep trace in the literacy of the country that it is inconceivable that even the below-educated person did not even hear their names? Little is known that their writer had a hard life in which accidents and personal tragedies came as a change, always at regular intervals and always brutal and merciless. Due to political assaults, artistic controversy and envy that followed the character of the poet, Mesa made choices that provoked a coherent Bosnian environment in life, but never gave up the privilege of looking for inspiration for her literature in her history and among her people.

One truth is irrefutable when it comes to Mesa Selimovic, and that is that throughout his life he was in conflict with an environment that he did not want or understood, and because of this contempt of the province, and from a pure defiance, he continually rejected the parts of himself. He wrote in an effort to please his friends, party comrades and poet ideologists, but he did not take his early criticism seriously, and even Mesa himself, and later when Dervish and Death and the Fortress radically changed the reception of his work, repeated the phrases of malicious literary scribes , rejecting the value of their works created in that first creative phase.

Falsification of family heritage

Selimovic was born Tuzlak, but from this simple biographical fact, the writer made a fantasy writing in his Memories that all Selimovići originate from Vranjska, a place somewhere on the border between Herzegovina and Montenegro, and that they are all originated from Vujovic's dishonor brotherhood. Little was written, but much talked under the voice, with suspicion, and some vague fear of the reasons why Mesa had publicly narrated a fictional story in which he claimed that the origin was led by one of the two brothers who turned to Islam led by some obscure, gorgeous logic it is necessary to adhere to the new Ottoman rulers by converting and hypocritical cherotism.

This forgery of his own family heritage was some kind of vindictive act of defiance of a man who, disappointed in the midst of which he had gone, tried to give her the worst possible blow to revanchism. And that went hand in hand, because only a few pages later, in one digression, describes the encounter with Orientalist Abdullah Škaljić. Conversation with the Dictionary of the Vocabulary Turksreveals how angry and humiliating Bosnian Muslims have received his claims. Besides, Meshino's non-shameless play on the foundations of faith, in which they saw malevolent manipulation of tradition and feelings, also bothered. The objections that were made to the famous writer at that time were interpreted as an expression of a conservative revolt, but there remains an indisputable fact that Mesa, for his hasty and perverse writings, was kissing later, aware that the conflict with the center of his rebuttal had received connotations which he himself did not want invite.

Selimovic was a communist and partisan boy since the first day of the war, and these two choices will mark his life and his literature just as forming in Serbian cultural milieu will permanently mark his political, literary and identity worldviews. In the postwar Sarajevo Selimovic, his life was strange and strange, and he often noticed how much he lacked the charm of Belgrade's capital, especially his recognizable artistic bohemia. In the revolution, he took a bold example of his brothers and sisters, and before he went to the free partisan territory and became an active participant of the National Liberation War, he spent several months in the Ustasha prison.

Death of the brother of Szefki

Selimovic had given everything to the revolution: his soul, body, heart, and talent, and for no part of his being, he never regretted, because this selflessness was derived from the very essence of his being. But his older brother, Šefkija, who was shot at the end of 1944 for a completely innocent reason, never pretended. In Memories , these remembers these days: "In the affections scattered around the city, Šefki Selimović was sentenced to death by firing because he took a bed, a wardrobe, a chair and some other small things from the magazine GUND (Main Administration of National Goods), and such a strict verdict was passed, writes published because he was accused of a famous Partisan family. Thus, our family commitment to the revolution and our enthusiasm turned against us and turned us into sacrifices. And the defendant, my brother, to whom the Ustasha took away all the things from his apartment, expected his wife, who by chance remained alive in a concentration camp, and was due to return to Tuzla . "

On this fatal day, the most famous novel of Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Yugoslav literature was conceived, and one comment mentioned below will serve as the basic motive of Dervis novel and death . The words of his brother Selimovic will be elaborated in the most beautiful and longest story of the persecution and the innocent death of the innocent man. Well, even though his novel has been put into an indefinite Ottoman time, outlining the allegorical allegory to the communist regime, a simple sentence from his Memories is the best interpreter and guide to understanding the secret of that great novel. When describing her brother's last moments, Selimovic works with the lapidary ease of a horrified man. In the Memories he literally wrote: "Sheffield was quiet before the shooting; said: 'Say goodbye to Mesa, tell him I'm innocent.' I knew he was innocent, and the judges did not claim otherwise. Söfer did not have to tell me where he was buried, and even today I do not know where his grave is . "

The shadow of this dictatorial evil will accompany the writer to his last sigh, and in an effort to understand what happened to his eldest brother, he will print the most beautiful pages of Yugoslav literature without finding the answer to the simplest question - why his brother was killed?

Until the publication of Dervish and Death in 1966, Selimovic suffered insults and humiliations in the literary world of Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. No attention was paid to his literature, and criticism, as a rule, declared his prose as poor, unoriginal, and uninteresting. As a convinced communist, Selimovic accepted everything that came as an allergic court of the Party unconditionally, determined to change his artistic being, adapting it to dogmatic molds of party ideology.

Literary disputes

He handed over his first book In The Storm to editors in 1948, but soon learned that the man in charge of establishing the first court on the handwriting by the taverns reads a negative review, which was a malicious and unspecified case. Selimovic takes the book and, as I am writing, he will write to Riste Trifkovic's address for decades later in his Collective Works . The first published book, the collection of the story of the First Company , comes out of the press in 1950, and the dreadfulness with which his writing is attacked is the most extensively described by the synagogue N. Simić, who proclaimed the book as mediocre on the occasion of publishing a book by her writer.

Discouraged, dissatisfied, disagreeable, with a strange burden of unanswered condemnation, Mesa had "silenced" decade, and then published the novel Silence , who accepted literary criticism in two ways. The writer himself never opposed the perpetrators of his works, and for the rest of his life he consistently repeated the findings his early books described as mediocre and uninventive.

And then in 1966, after five hard years of writing, he published Dervish and Death , a book that has fundamentally changed the history of Bosnian and Yugoslav literature, and which until then unseen way begins with the public of Yugoslavia to represent the world of Bosnian Muslims. The reasons that Selimovic spent almost his entire life in conflict with the world from which he himself came out should look beyond his literature. During the gymnasium days, the juvenile adventures interrupted the backward fanatism of Muslim bhikkhus, and already at Meša, a religious and religious gap developed, which would later deepen the rigid Communist atheism, which Mesa nurtured as an invaluable spiritual treasure.

In the war, he was disappointed with the Muslim mass and the ulema, who stood on the list with the criminal NDH, and in the postwar period they were overwhelmed by the lack of true will for personal change, recognizing in their socialism too many elements of pre-war life. This sense of inadequacy in the middle was compounded by the scandals in which Meša was a victim, and most of it was "expelling" from the Faculty of Philosophy when he lost his profession, workplace and means of living. Accustomed to material misery, he lived miserably, but more than the poverty was uttered by the injustice he had suffered at every turn. Many remember him as a stubborn, grunty, ragged man who has not "forgiven" anyone, but there are those who have been honored to be part of his intimacy and described him as a bewilderous, gentle and emotional man.

Unceasingly in the confrontation with the world and the environment, Mesa makes a decision and leaves Bosnia and Sarajevo, how it will turn out, forever moving to Belgrade, where it will die in 1982.

Escape from your own being

In Belgrade, at least it seemed to be here in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he tried his own way in an irrational vindictive breath to blame the environment that underestimated and rejected him. He did not miss the opportunity to highlight her backwardness, spiritual attendance and intellectual misery, and knew well that she would cause the greatest shame if she would reject her own identity and family inheritance. Desired public recognition, he declared himself nationally as a Serb, believing that affiliation to Serbian culture with his magnificent literature would breathe importance, which he believed was insufficiently prominent. And only in this context can not understand his actions and words, because Mesa was fanatical in their calculations.

Until today, words from a letter addressed to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which in the language of a rejected man, spoke about their origins and the perceptions of their own national identity, are terrible unjust.

"I come from a Bosnian Muslim family and I am a Serb by nationality. I belong to Serbian literature, while literary creativity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to which I also belong, I consider only the local literary center, and not the special literature of the Serbo-Croatian language. commitment, because I am bound to everything that my person has determined and my work. Any attempt to separate it, for any purpose, I would consider as an abuse of my fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. "

When asked who Mesa Selimovic was the right answer, he would never be. But, whatever his life choices, political and ideological choices are to be understood, we must be aware that this modest man of the titanic will created a literary work that does not have a bow in Yugoslav culture.

• 30 Apr, 2018
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