Poetičke i stilske funkcije mota/epigrafa u romanu Derviš i smrt Meše Selimovića
Poetical and Stylistic Functions of Motto/Epigraph in the Novel “Death and the Dervish” by Meša Selimović

Summary/Abstract: Selimović’s novel Death and the Dervish affirms the anti-ethics as its own poetical principle. Dervish is a hero who from his Sufi humbleness, enters the world and confronts it dramatically, thus discovering destroyed Virtue and devastation of any form of integrity in that world. In affirming Selimović’s anti-ethical poetry, which brilliantly operates in building of the novel’s dramatic quality, the author uses excerpts from Qur’an on the positions of his chapters’mottoes.During this process he recombines and alters the shape of the original text from Qur’an significantly intervening in its realm of ideology, but in compliance with his artistic freedom and translating reshaped material from Qur’an into the realm of esthetics. Motto in Selimović’s novel is reshaping itself in a variety of manners – even to the point when it is compelled to question its own “identity of motto”. The principle of authenticity in this manner, is not just getting expressed through the protagonist’s tragic fate, but even through the functioning of motto that author as the sacral text, emphasizing its sacredness via referential footnotes, divests of its sacred significance by using an elaborated schema of poetic methods and leading it to the position of the original’s ideological contrary, although he optimally adjusts it with tragic schisms in the protagonist’s conscience and his Attic confrontation with the world. Motto at the novel’s beginning actively communicates with texts that start other novel’s chapters, and in this manner, by frequent distribution, promotes the motto’s function in a particular sort of intertextuality, which – since it is about sacred text, refers to the complete variety of Islamic tradition aspects in the area of its history of literature, poetics to the semiotics of space and semantic linguistics.

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