| Mehmed "Meša" Selimović | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 26, 1910 Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire |
| Died | July 11, 1982 (aged 72) Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia |
| Occupation | Writer |
Mehmed "Meša" Selimović (pronounced [mɛ̌xmɛd mɛ̌ːʃa sɛlǐːmɔʋitɕ]) (Cyrillic: Мехмед Селимовић Меша; 26 April 1910 - 11 July 1982) was a Yugoslav writer. His novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-war Yugoslavia.[1] Some of the main themes in his works are relations between individual and authority, life and death, and other existential problems. His ethnicity and nationality as well as how he considered himself in these terms is a matter of some dispute.
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Selimović was born on April 26, 1910 in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 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 Faculty of Philology and has graduated in 1934. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the gymnasium that today bears his name. He spent the first two years of World War II in the hometown Tuzla, where he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943. After the release, he moved to the liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the political commissar of Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans.[2] During the war, Selimović's brother, also a communist, was executed by partisans' firing squad for alleged theft, without trial; Selimović's letter in defense of the brother was to no avail. That episode apparently affected Meša's later contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother.[3]
After the war, he briefly resided in Belgrade, and in 1947 he moved to Sarajevo, where he was the professor of High School of Pedagogy and Faculty of Philology, art director of Bosna Film, chief of the drama section of the National Theater, and chief editor of the publishing house Svjetlost. Exasperated by a latent conflict with several local politicians and intellectuals, in 1971 he moved to Belgrade, where he lived until his death in 1982.[2] In his 1976 letter to the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Selimović argued that despite his muslim roots (he was a descendant of a notable bey family,[4] he regarded himself as a Serb and a Serb writer.[5]
Selimović was a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Selimović began writing fairly late in his life. His first book, a collection of short stories Prva četa (The First Company) was published in 1950 when he was forty. His subsequent work, Tišine (Silences) was published eleven years later in 1961. The following books Tuđa zemlja (Foreign land, 1962) and Magla i mjesečina (Mist and Moonlight, 1965) did not receive widespread international recognition either.[6]
However, his novel Death and the Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) was widely received as a masterpiece in the West. The plot of the novel took place in 18th-century Sarajevo under Ottoman rule, and reflected Selimović's own torment of the execution of his brother; the story speaks of the futility of one man's resistance against a repressive system, and the change that takes place within that man after he becomes a part of that very system. Some critics have likened this novel to Kafka's The Trial. It has been translated into numerous languages. Each chapter of the novel opens with a Qur'an citation, the first being: "In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful."[6]
The next novel, Tvrđava (The Fortress, 1970), placed still further in the past, is slightly more optimistic, and fulfilled with faith in love, unlike the lonely contemplations and fear in Death and the Dervish. The Fortress and Death and the Dervish are the only novels of Selimović that have thus far been translated into English. Subsequent novels Ostrvo (The Island, 1974) and posthumously published Krug (The Circle, 1983), have not been translated into English.
He also wrote a book about Vuk Karadžić's orthographic reforms, an elderly couple facing the aging and eventual death on a Dalmatian island, as well as his autobiography, Sjećanja (Сјећања).