Mehmed "Meša" Selimović 26 April 1910 – 11 July 1982) was a Bosnian
writer, whose novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary
works in post-Second World War Yugoslavia.
Some of the main themes in his works
are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and
other existential problems.
Selimović was born to a prominent
Muslim family on 26 April 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 graduated in 1934. His lecturers included Bogdan
Popović, Pavle Popović, Vladimir Ćorović, Veselin Čajkanović, Aleksandar Belić
and Stjepan Kuljbakin.
In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach
in the gymnasium that today bears his name. At that time he participated in the
Soko athletic organisation. He spent the first two years of the Second World
War in Tuzla, until he was arrested for participation in the Partisan
anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943.
After his release, he moved to
liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the
political commissar of the Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans. 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.
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. In his 1976 letter to the Serbian Academy of
Science and Arts, Selimović stated for the historical record that he regarded
himself as a Serb and belonging to the corpus of Serbian literature.
In his autobiography, Sjećanja,
Selimović states that his paternal ancestry is from the Orthodox Christian
Vujović brotherhood of the Drobnjak clan, his ancestor having converted to
Islam in the 17th century for pragmatic reasons, given the presence of the
Muslim Ottoman Empire in the area at the time. Selimović was a member of
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Selimović began writing fairly late in
his life. His first short story (Pjesma u oluji / A song in the storm) was
published in 1948, when he was thirty-six. 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 recognition either.
However, his novel Death and the
Dervish (Derviš i smrt, 1966) was widely received as a masterpiece. 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 many languages, including
English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Turkish and Arabic.[15] 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."
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), featuring an elderly couple facing aging and
eventual death on a Dalmatian island, and posthumously published Krug (The
Circle, 1983), have not been translated into English.
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