Dobrica Ćosić

Dobrica Ćosić (Serbian Cyrillic: Добрица Ћосић) (1922-) is a Serbian writer, as well as a political and national theorist. He was the president of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1993. Admirers often refer to him as the "Father of the Serbian Nation.", due to his influence on modern Serbian politics and national revival movement in the late 1980's.

Early life and career

Ćosić was born in 1922 in the village of Velika Drenova, in central Serbia, and before the Second World War was able to attend high agriculture school. He joined the communist youth organization in Negotin in 1939. When the Second World War reached Yugoslavia in 1941, he joined the communist partisans. After the liberation of Belgrade in October 1944, he remained active in communist leadership positions, including work in the Serbian republican Agitation and Propaganda commission and then as a people's representative from his home region. In the early 1950s, he visited the Goli otok concentration camp, where the Tito regime imprisoned thousands of its political opponents. Ćosić has always maintained that he did so in order to better understand the Stalinist mind. In 1961, he joined Marshal Tito on a 72-day tour by presidential yacht (the Galeb) to visit eight African non-aligned countries. The trip aboard the Galeb highlighted the close, affirmative relationship that Ćosić had with the Tito regime until the early 1960s.

In opposition

Until the early 1960s, Ćosić was devoted to Tito and Tito's vision of a harmonious Yugoslavia. As the Tito regime gradually decentralized administration of Yugoslavia after 1963, though, Ćosić grew convinced that the Serbian population of the state was imperilled. In May 1968, he gave a celebrated speech to the Fourteenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Serbian League of Communists, in which he condemned then-current nationalities policy in Yugoslavia. He was especially upset at the regime's inclination to grant greater autonomy to Kosovo and Vojvodina. Thereafter he acted as a dissident. In the 1980s, following the death of Tito, Ćosić helped organize and lead a movement whose original goal was to gain equality for Serbia in the Yugoslav federation, but which rapidly became intensely and aggressively nationalistic. He was especially enthusiastic in his advocacy of the rights of the Serbian and Montenegrin populations of Kosovo. Ćosić is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and is considered by many to be its most influential member. While Ćosić has been credited with writing the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which appeared in unfinished fashion in the Serbian public in 1986, he in fact was not responsible for its writing. In 1989 he endorsed the leadership of Slobodan Milošević, and two years later he helped raise Radovan Karadžić to the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs. When war broke out in 1991, he supported the Serbian effort.

During and after the Yugoslav wars

In 1992, he became the president of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consisted of Serbia and Montenegro. In 1993 Ćosić turned against Milosević and was removed from his position for that reason. In 2000, Ćosić publicly joined Otpor, an underground anti-Milosević organization. In congratulating Ćosić on his 80th birthday, the late Prime Minister of Serbia Zoran Djindjić called Ćosić the "Serbian Thomas Mann." At the same time, Ćosić was also congratulated by then President of Yugoslavija Vojislav Koštunica and current President of Serbia, Mr.Boris Tadić.

Literary life

Ćosić is a prolific writer who twice won the prestigious NIN award for literature, once for Koreni (Roots, 1954) and once for Deobe (Divisions, 1961). His novel Daleko je sunce (Far Away is the Sun, 1951), which concerned the fate of a partisan detachment in the Second World War, was an instant success when published; eventually it was translated into more than a dozen foreign languages. Koreni is a story of life in the Serbian village, written in a Faulknerian style. Deobe is a three-volume novel about Četniks in the Second World War; Bajka (A Fable, 1966) a futuristic fable that condemns all variants of totalitarianism. Ćosić's most beloved novel is Vreme smrti (Time of Death, also three volumes, 1972-1975), which describes the fate of the Serbian people during the first year of the First World War. Vreme zla (Time of Evil, 1985-1991), another three-volume work, treats Serbia's relationship with Stalinism, and the first volume of Vreme vlasti (Time of Power, 1996, his final, as-yet unfinished novel), examines communism in power in Serbia. He has also published non-fiction works, including Stvarno i moguće (The Real and the Possible, 1983), Promene (Changes, 1991), Kosovo (2004) and Prijatelji (Friends, 2005).

References

• Books of Dobrica Ćosić
• Slavoljub Djukić, Čovek u svom vremenu: Razgovori sa Dobricem Ćosićem (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 1989)
• Jasna Dragović Soso, Saviours of the Nation (McGill-Queens University Press, 2001)