Between East and West
While the Byzantine Empire survived the Roman Empire and the schism that led to the separation of the Eastern and Western Churches was soon to take shape, Bogomilism was born in Bosnia in the tenth century. From it may have come the first literature of the country. Although several works are considered apocryphal, it is in any case established that this religious movement gave rise to many controversies as demonstrated by the Treaty against the Bogomils, written in Old Slavonic by the Bulgarian Cosmas the Priest. It was also in the 10th century that the name of the country, Bosona, appeared for the first time, which was then a simple vassal state of the kingdom of Hungary. The autonomy will only take shape in the twelfth but will not resist the Ottoman Empire which will be integrated the kingdom of Bosnia in 1463.
Sign of the times, a library was founded in Sarajevo following the request, formulated in 1537, by Gazi Husrev-Beg, Bosnian Ottoman governor under the reign of Soliman the Magnificent. The literature saw its first real boom, carried by the appearance of oriental languages (Turkish, Arabic and Persian), by the Arabic characters which are used from now on to write the Slavic languages (literature alhamiado, or aljamiado), but also by the Sufi thought which inspires the poets of the dîvân. The opening of borders favors intellectual life, as evidenced by the journey of Hasan Kafi Prusčak, an important figure of the sixteenth century, who studied in his native Bosnia as well as in Istanbul - the very identity of writers is enriched by these changes and diverse influences. However, although abundant, these works will be the subject of renewed interest only from the end of the twentieth century, no doubt when the desire to define a national identity takes shape. Nevertheless, we can mention Uskufi (c. 1600-1651) who was the author of a Bosnian-Turkish dictionary and whose ease in navigating between languages is confirmed by his poetry, the first written in the Bosnian popular language, the dervish Sabit Alaudin Užičanin (c. .1650-1712) who is said to have signed no less than 650 songs in Turkish(Ramazani, Zafer, Edhem and Huma...), or Hasan Kâ'imi Baba (also called Hasan Kaimija) to whom Jasna Šamić devoted a biography to the editions Research on Civilizations in 1986(Dîvân de Kâ'imi, vie et œuvre d'un poète bosniaque du XVIIe siècle). We could also think of Mula Mustafa Baseskija (1731-1809) who, in the eighteenth century, fixed the memory of his native town, Sarajevo, in his chronicles, or the polyglot Abdulvehab Ilhamija (1773-1821) who wrote moral treatises, then widespread, but whose criticism of the pasha, which he expressed in his poetry, led to his death.
Finally, it is impossible not to evoke the Hasanaginica, this ballad of the Illyrian folklore that the Italian ethnographer Alberto Fortis collected and incorporated in his Voyage en Dalmatie published in Venice in 1774. The following year, Goethe himself gave a German version, before Walter Scott took it up and translated it into English, proof if any were needed that this mourning song of Hasan Aga's noble wife was destined to reach the whole world, after having been passed on for generations by word of mouth. Still in the half-musical, half-poetic field, Umihana Cuvidina (1794-1870) was the first woman poet: she contributed to enriching the corpus of the sevdalinka. Her sad fate became the breath of her inspiration because her fiancé, drafted into the army, died during the Serbian uprising against the Ottoman Empire. She then decided never to marry and to prolong his memory by verses whose melancholy was in perfect harmony with the "sevdah", this typically Bosnian musical genre and still very popular.
From the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Yugoslavia
From a political as well as a literary point of view, the character of Ivan Franjo Jukić, born in Banja Luka in 1818, is representative of the underlying forces that agitated the 19th century. This Franciscan, who called himself Slavoljub Bosnjak, a pseudonym that hid nothing of his love for his homeland, came into contact with Ljudevit Gaj, a Croatian instigator of the Illyrian Movement, which advocated the creation of a single state for all South Slavs, to whom he sent his first writings. He then met Bozidar Petranović, editor of the Serbian-Bosnian magazine Srpsko-dalmatinski, which published his books. The power game was nevertheless subtle: if the poem Slavodobitnica that he dedicated to the governor Omer-Pasha Latas earned him the friendship of the latter, his Requests and supplications of the Christians of Bosnia-Herzegovina cost him repudiation and exile. He died in Vienna in 1857. In the same vein, Musa Ćazim Ćatić (1878-1915) and Aleksa Šantić (1868-1924) are part of what is both a desire for independence and the affirmation of a national identity. The former will affiliate his poetry with an epic lineage, dedicating it to love - of God, women and his country - in Pjesme od godine 1900-1908, the only collection published in his lifetime, while the latter will set out to denounce social injustices in his verse. Šantić also directed the literary magazine Zora (published in Mostar from 1896 to 1901), one of the many titles that promoted the emergence of European currents in the Balkans, particularly Romanticism, and which opened their columns to multiple authors, whether Serbian, Croatian or Muslim.
The First World War will sound the death knell of this effervescence, and it will also be fateful for Ivo Andrić, born in 1892 into a Croatian family and in a Bosnia-Herzegovina now administered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, since he will be imprisoned in 1914 because of his membership in the Black Hand, a Serbian nationalist secret society. In 1918, he was again in Belgrade, first as a publisher and then as a diplomat for the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which had just merged with Bosnia-Herzegovina, and which would become Yugoslavia in 1929. Although it is difficult to speak of Bosnian writers in the strict sense of the term - the choice of nationality is limited to Serbian or Croatian - the fact remains that the period between the two world wars will be literarily fruitful. We could thus briefly mention the writings of Isak Samokovlija, Andrić's schoolmate, on Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the playwrights Hamza Humo (1895-1970) and Ahmed Muradbegović (1898-1972), the great poet Antun Branko Šimić, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 26, or Hasan Kikić, who wrote about the cultural and political emancipation of Bosnian Muslims in the newspaper Putokaz, which he co-founded with Skender Kulenović and which appeared from 1937 to 1939. But already looms the threatening shadow of the Chetniks, then that of the Second World War, which will, again, cover everything.
From the post-war period to today
In 1945, The Chronicle of Travnik and The Bridge over the Drina were published, which Ivo Andrić wrote in Belgrade, a city he refused to leave during the war. In these two books, the future 1961 Nobel laureate is interested in History with a capital letter, a theme that Mesa Selimović will also explore in The Dervish and Death (collection L'Imaginaire, Gallimard), awarded the Nin Prize in 1966. Unraveling the skein of the past will also interest Camil Sijarić, the author of Ram-Bulja, Bihorci, Mojkovacha Bitka, etc., he who was born in Montenegro to an Albanian mother in 1913 and died accidentally in Sarajevo, still in Yugoslavia, in 1989. Branko Ćopić (1915-1984) will also use writing as a necessary layering to decipher the ties, those that unite and those that hinder. In a quasi-documentary approach close to the chronicle, he will evoke in his poetry in particular the wars and their consequences(Borci i bjegunci, Planinci, Surova skola, etc.) but will also become, thanks to his tales, one of the most illustrious authors for young people of his country. At the height of these efforts to reconcile past and present, tradition and modernity, is without hesitation the work of Mak Dizdar (1917-1971) who was largely inspired by stećci, medieval Bosnian tombstones.
Without respite or remorse, the story gets out of control again when the dislocation of Yugoslavia looms. Bosnia-Herzegovina proclaims its sovereignty in 1991, ratified by a referendum in 1992. If the result is mostly in favor of independence, the high rate of abstention demonstrates the split in the population, and bodes well for the deadly conflict to come. Izet Sarajlić kept a diary during the siege of Sarajevo, which was published in French under the title Le Livre des adieux in 1997. Others will make the painful choice of exile, following the example of Predag Matvejević (1932-2017), the author of the unclassifiable Mediterranean Breviary (editions Pluriel), who will eventually become naturalized Italian, or Velibor Čolić who has lived in France since 1992 where he regularly publishes, including Gallimard editions(Sarajevo Omnibus, Manuel d'exil: comment réussir son exil en trente-cinq leçons, Le Livre des départs).
The war - more precisely Sarajevo - remains at the heart of the work of contemporary authors. The great poet Abdulah Sidran, who also acquired his reputation for having scripted the first two films of Emir Kusturica, dedicated to his native city, which became a martyred city, an eponymous work published in French in 1994 by the Demi-cercle editions (unfortunately out of print). Dzevad Karahasan also took Sarajevo as the setting for three books translated into our language, navigating from the present(Un déménagement, L'Âge du sable) to the past with his play La Roue de Sainte-Catherine : miracle which takes place at the beginning of the 17th century. His younger brother, Semezdin Mehmedinović, born in 1960 in Kiseljak, saw in 2022 The Morning I Should Have Died taken over by the beautiful editions Le Bruit du monde; he is inspired by his history to play a man who does not want to forget anything of his past, even if it rhymes with exile and pain. To conclude, and because it is finally easier to obtain novels by Bosnian writers, let's not forget Aleksandar Hemon published by Robert Laffont(Love and Obstacles, The Lazarus Project, Hope is a Ridiculous Thing, etc.), and Miljenko Jergovic who is still in the catalog of Actes Sud(The Gardener of Sarajevo, Buick riviera, Volga, Volga)
