Bora Ćosić
was born in Zagreb in 1932 and lived in Belgrade from 1937, where he
studied Philosophy. In the fifties he worked as an editor for various
journals and as a translator from Russian (Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov). His
first novel, »Kuća lopova« (t: House of thieves), was published in 1956
and is a surrealist examination of social reality in Yugoslavia. Soon
his name appeared on the »Black List« of authors whose works the
state's cultural bureaucracy were dissuading domestic publishing houses
from publishing. The stage adaptation of his satirical novel »Uloga
moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji« (1970; Eng. »My Family's Role in
the World Revolution«, 1997) provoked a publication ban that lasted for
years. As a protest against the Serbian government's policies Ćosić
left Belgrade in 1992 and moved to Rovinj in Istria, Croatia. During
his exile in Serbian official enemy territory he wrote »Dnevnik
apatrida« (1993), his »journal of a homeless man« which is filled with
meditations on Proust and the Franco-German war. In 1995 a German
Academic Exchange Service grant brought Ćosić to Berlin, where he
continues to live. As a Serbian author in exile he pleaded in 1999 (on
the occasion of NATO's deployment in Kosovo) for the release not only
of the Albanians but also of the Serbs from Milosević and »from
themselves«, that is, from their »delusion of nationalism«. The novel
»Nulta zemlja« (2002; t: The land zero) constitutes a swan song for his
homeland – »this is a point of closure for me«. Ćosić was awarded the
Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding in 2002.
Although his first satirical volume »Price o
zanatima« (1966; t: How our pianos were repaired) was published in
Germany in 1968, German publishers did not renew their interest in the
Serbian author until the nineties. Since then he has been celebrated by
critics in this country as one of the most significant and
idiosyncratic of writers. He owes this reputation in particular to his
novel »Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji« (1970; Eng. »My
Family's Role in the World Revolution«, 1997) which has become a
classic of subversion. This satirical and polemical family chronicle
depicting the time of the German occupation to the setting up of Tito's
regime unfolds from a child narrator's apparently naive perspective in
which everyday historical occurences are blurred into a grotesque
panorama. In this work, regarded in Serbia as a cult work, Ćosić only
implicitly chooses a role model by following the structure of »The Tin
Drum«, whereas in other books the playful exposure to writers, such as
Musil, Dostoevsky and Krleža, is programmatic. This is revealed by
titles that include »Musilov notes« (1989; t: Musil's notebook),
»Povest o Miškinu« (1991; t: Myshkin's story), or the fictitious
autobiography »Doctor Krleža« (1998). The »montage of stumbled across
materials«, as described by the critic Karl Markus Gauß, is in Ćosić
»the aesthetic principle of choice«. This is also true within his own
work, the product of an author who finds himself in a perpetual process
where the interconnections are numerous.
In recent years Ćosić has also been writing
poetry. The most recent collection is »Irena soba« (2002; t: Irene's
room), a series of prose poems which depict the author at large during
his exile in Berlin and where people, dreams and past events emerge in
the light of the present tinged with melancholy and fine irony. Most
recently Ćosić published »Die Reise nach Alaska« (2007; t: The journey
to Alaska), about his trip to the former Yugoslavia, in 2005, and the
question about how the terrible war could happen. Ćosić was awarded the
Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the »Albatros«, from
the Günter Grass Foundation.
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