Dorota Magda

University of Lodz

The Kosovo Myth in Branislav Nušić’s Travel Diaries

The turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was a period of rapid socio-political changes in the Balkan Peninsula. The Ottoman occupation and fall of the Empire, the Austro-Hungarian expansion southwards, the birth of local nationalisms, two Balkan Wars, the First World War – all these events left their mark on the cultural identity and national self-identification of the southern Slavs, which – in turn – left its mark on all forms of art created by man, including literature.

This presentation will be an attempt to retrieve ego-documents out of the shadow of the literary borderland by exposing their significance for culturological studies. The main aim of the proposed research is to find an answer to the question of how the memoirs and travel journals of the Serbian writer Branislav Nušić (1864–1938) record and portray the categories of the founding myth, cultural identity and collective memory in the context of Kosovo – a culturally and politically controversial region, symbolizing the promised land and lost paradise. Branislav Nušić served as consul in Serbian diplomatic missions in Bitola (Macedonia) and Priština (Kosovo) in the years 1889–1900, where he wrote Travel Diaries documenting the fate of the Serbian nation in the South. Therefore, the presentation will also analyse elements of the writer’s (auto)biography, based on which, an attempt will be made to determine how the author perceived the category of myth and cultural identity and whether his perception was in line with the so-called ‘spirit of the times’ and corresponded to the worldview generally accepted by the society at that time.