Traumatični susret s Evropom: „Austrougarska tema i počeci novije bošnjačke književnosti
Traumatic encounter with Europe: ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ and beginnings of modern Bosniak literature

Summary/Abstract: Initiated by the crucial historical event of the end of the centuries long Ottoman rule in Bosnia (1878) and extremely complex subsequent processes of ‘emancipation’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘europeisation’ of post-Ottoman Bosnia, the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ is a common, or even obsessive, literary topic of Bosniak and the entire Bosnian-Herzegovinian literature from the 19th century onwards, mostly realized as ‘an account of Austro Hungarian occupation, in a range of images of disintegration of Muslim ethnic and social environment’ ‘to which the end of the Turkish Empire [...] is the end of what they were’. As such, the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ is a particular mnemonic phenomenon – a theme of a specific historical trauma, as well as a theme of a radical and comprehensive cultural transition or a theme of a complex and dramatic cultural transcoding, crucially important in the construction of identity and alterity policies of modern Bosniak and Bosnian Herzegovinian literature and culture as a whole. It is not surprising, then, that in the scope of the ‘Austro-Hungarian theme’ – along with other literary pieces – there appears the first Bosniak novel, Zeleno busenje [‘The Green Sods’] (1898) by Edhem Mulabdić (1862–1954), after whom the theme will later be addressed, especially in Bosniak literature, by a whole range of different authors, representing in various ways the late-19th century traumatic Bosnia’s encounter with Europe.

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