The origins
It all begins with a mystery that historians are still debating. The Chronicles of the Priest of Dioclea
- a text that is said to be the Latin version of an older (and untraceable) manuscript written in Old Slavonic - is indeed full of inaccuracies when it comes to recounting the past of Dalmatia and the neighbouring regions. The copies that have come down to us - the works of a Benedictine from Ragusa, Mauro Orbini, in 1601, and then of a Dalmatian historian, Ivan Lučić, in 1666, to which we should add a fragmentary translation due to Marko Marulić, a Croatian born in the middle of the 15th century - add to the confusion. The identity of the author, it goes without saying, also lends itself to all sorts of hypotheses. Whether it is a relic of ancient times that has survived the centuries thanks to translations, or a pastiche composed from scratch to encourage patriotic feelings, this text must be considered with caution from a historical point of view, but from a literary point of view it is the first important work attached to Montenegro, which also confirms the strength of the oral tradition. It takes a few centuries for the birth of the man who would be proclaimed the national poet and who was also the prince-bishop of Montenegro. Petar II Petrović-Njegoš (1813-1851) succeeded his uncle in 1830, after spending some time in the monastery of Cetinje where he composed his first poems. The man was a poet and a religious, but he was still at the head of a semi-independent country whose borders he tried to widen by opposing the Turks who occupied the territories around Podgorica. He went to Vienna to seek support, where he met Vuk Karadžić (1787-1864), the great reformer of the Serbian language, from whom he drew inspiration. His political aspirations did not come to fruition, and Petar II Petrović-Njegoš spent most of his short life establishing schools in his country and writing. One of his most famous works is a long epic poem, The Crown of Mountains, which he published in 1847. Although no one denies the documentary interest of this chronicle, which helps to discover the habits and customs of a people, it will nevertheless become a political issue after the death of its author. It became in turn the object of a cult or a pretext for fanning the flames between the Orthodox and the Muslims, claimed by the Serbs and disowned by certain intellectuals. It is in the very particular history of a small country that will be confronted with the wars of Yugoslavia that this founding work will sometimes be instrumentalized.20th and 21st centuries
The conflicts that punctuate the great history of the 20th century do not prevent the smaller ones from being written, if we are to believe the number of writers who leave their mark. The first did so posthumously, since it was in the very year of his death, 1901, that Marko Miljanov's Examples of Humanity and Bravery was published, the great specificity of which was that he had learned to write at the age of 50, when he had just retired from political life. A museum is dedicated to him in his home town of Medun. Milovan Djilas (1911-1995) was also involved in politics until he first criticized Tito in an article published in the New York Times in 1954. His stance earned him regular stays in prison and his works were subjected to censorship until 1988, but he nonetheless remained a theoretician of communism whose works have been translated into French, notably by Belfond and Gallimard. It is, on the other hand, the medium of fiction that Mihailo Lalić, his quasi-contemporary, will choose to evoke the recent history of Montenegro, for example in Ratna sreća, which in 1973 was crowned with the Nin Prize - a prestigious award that honoured an author of Yugoslav literature since 1954 and from now on concerns only Serbian writers. Fiction and politics again for Čedo Vuković (1920-2014), especially associated with one of his major novels, Mrtvo Duboko, which portrays a man who during the Second World War tries to escape the Chetniks by finding refuge in a small Montenegrin village. Vuković has also written for young people
In 1930, two men were born, both of whom won the Nin Prize in 1970 and 1975 respectively, and which readers will have the pleasure of discovering in French translation. Whether it is thanks to the three volumes of The Golden Fleece, which retraces the destiny of a Serbian family of Aromanian origin over five centuries, or to the strange The Man Who Ate Death, which, as the title suggests, describes a strange and little-known profession, Agone Editions offer a glimpse of the protean work of a writer who had to resign himself to exile and breathed his last in London in 1992, Borislav Pekić. As for Points, it has in its catalogue the most famous of Miodrag Bulatović's novels, The Red Rooster, the story of Muharem who decides to flee oppression and set out to conquer the vast world, his bird under his arm. But before leaving, he has the unfortunate idea of attending the wedding of the woman he was secretly in love with... Branimir Sćepanović (1937-2020) would also excel in the subtle art of anguished metaphors in which it is hard not to discern the future of the former Yugoslavia. In La Bouche pleine de terre, wisely republished by Tusitala after a first edition by L'Âge d'homme in 1975, one year after its publication, it is about a man who is pursued and insulted by others for no reason at all. Salvation will not come from where we expected. We should also mention Mirko Kovač (1938-2013), who received the Tucholsky Prize awarded by the Swedish PEN-Club as much in recognition of his talent as in support following the harassment he had suffered. The City in the Mirror, an autobiographical and nostalgic account of a childhood spent in Dubrovnik, is available from M.E.O. Also worth mentioning is Borislav Jovanović, born in 1941 in Danilovgrad, for his work in favour of Montenegrin literature, both in defence of the language and as a talent scout for young talent. The new generation, moreover, is embodied in the features of Ognjen Spahić, who was born in the capital Podgorica in 1977, and who was crowned in 2014 with the European Union Prize for Literature for The Head Full of Joys, a collection of short stories that attempts to elucidate the process of literary creation (Gaïa Publishing)
