School of Economics in Zenica

Seminar in English language

Topic : Meša Selimović

Teacher : Berina Adilović

Student : Ajla Aščerić

In Zenica, January 2018

CONTENTS

1 ABOUT MEŠA SELIMOVIĆ ................................................................................................1

2 BIOGRAPHY .........................................................................................................................2

3 NOTABLE WORKS...............................................................................................................3

3.1 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................4

3.2 TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH ...............................................................................4

4 LITERATURE ........................................................................................................................5
1 ABOUT MEŠA SELIMOVIĆ

Mehmed "Meša" Selimović (26 April 1910 – 11 July 1982) was a Bosnian and
Serbian 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.

1
2 BIOGRAPHY

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.

2
3 NOTABLE WORKS

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. 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.

He also wrote a book about Vuk Karadžić's orthographic reforms Za i protiv Vuka
(For and Against Vuk), as well as his autobiography, Sjećanja.

3
3.1 BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Uvrijeđeni čovjek (An Insulted Man) (1947)

 Prva četa (The First Company) (1950)
 Tuđa zemlja (Foreign Lands) (1957)
 Noći i jutra (Nights and Days) (film scenario) (1958)
 Tišine (Silence) (1961)
 Magla i mjesečina (Mist and Moonlight) (1965)
 Eseji i ogledi (Essays and Reflections) (1966)
 Derviš i smrt (Death and the Dervish) (1966)
 Za i protiv Vuka (Pro et Contra Vuk) (1967)
 Tvrđava (The Fortress) (1970)
 Ostrvo (The Island) (1974)
 Krug (The Circle) (1983)
 Sjećanja (Memories)

3.2 TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH

Death and the Dervish, 1996, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 0-8101-1297-3

The Fortress, 1999, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 0-8101-1713-4

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4 LITERATURE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me%C5%A1a_Selimovi%C4%87

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/205563.Me_a_Selimovi_

http://www.kurir.rs/vesti/drustvo/2761085/mesa-selimovic-o-poreklu-u-ime-cega-
zatvarati-oci-pred-istinom-moji-su-preci-iz-bilece-od-vujovica

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Me%C5%A1a_Selimovi%C4%87