Historical Hasan: Poetry and Revolution in Selimović’s Death and the Dervish
Historical Hasan: Poetry and Revolution in Selimović’s Death and the Dervish

Summary/Abstract: Meša Selimović is one of the defining Bosnian novelists of the 20th century whose 1966 novel Death and the Dervish, in formal innovation and narrative structure, heralds postmodernist developments in later years, not only in Bosnia, but Yugoslavia as a whole. In most general terms, Selimović’s novel seems to belong to the tradition of Bosnian historical novels most often associated with the likes of Ivo Andrić. And yet, Death and the Dervish is in many ways neither a properly historical novel, nor a modernist text akin to Andrić’s novels. Most often it has been read as one that uses the Ottoman era as a setting for a political allegory aimed at (Yugoslav) totalitarianism. Or, alternately, as a psychological portrait of the timeless corrupting nature of power. An existentialist novel, as Kasim Prohić has said, it defines Selimović as “a moralizing author, akin to Camus”.

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