You must register by 5pm on October 1, 2024 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture for a lecture by Gordana Ilić Marković. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
The First World War interrupted or redirected the creative work of many artists. They created art on the front, behind the front, in prisoner of war campus, in occupied territories, and in exile. In contrast to the Austrian literature of this period, Serbian literature produced during World War I must be divided into two text corpora, each exhibiting different motifs and linguistic expressions: literature written by authors from the Kingdom of Serbia (Stanislav Vinaver, Rastko Petrović, Stevan Jakovljević, Stanislav Krakov, Vladislav Petković-Dis, Branislav Nušić, etc.), and literature by the Serbs of the Habsburg Monarchy. This literature ranges from war chronicles by soldier-writers to avant-garde memoirs and poems that sought to make sense of the war. Newspapers also included literary appendices that testified to the vitality of Serbian culture in exile because the press in Serbia was subjected to strict censorship by the occupying forces. Much of the war literature was repressed and rejected after 1919, and, since then, scholars have mainly looked to the Habsburg Serbian authors, such as Miloš Crnjanski, to represent the Serbian war experience. In this lecture, Gordana Ilić Marković will also discuss the topic of WWI in the world of Miroslav Krleža and Ivo Anrdić, as well as in the diaries and memoirs of South Slavs and Austrian soldiers and civilians. All of these authors were active participants in the war, believing in the possibility of change through personal and collective intervention. Some distanced themselves from their pre-war artistic expression, becoming passive observers of chroniclers of war.
