People like Meša Selimović

Mehmed "Meša" Selimović (pronounced [mɛ̌xmɛd mɛ̌ːʃa sɛlǐːmɔʋitɕ]; Serbian Cyrillic: Мехмед Меша Селимовић; 26 April 1910 – 11 July 1982) was a Yugoslav writer, whose novel Death and the Dervish is one of the most important literary works in post-Second World War Yugoslavia. Some of the main themes in his works are the relations between individuality and authority, life and death, and other existential problems.

Selimović was born to a prominent Muslim family of Serbian origin on 26 April 1910 in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he graduated from elementary school and high school. In 1930, he enrolled to study the Serbo-Croatian language and literature at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philology and graduated in 1934. His lecturers included Bogdan Popović, Pavle Popović, Vladimir Ćorović, Veselin Čajkanović, Aleksandar Belić and Stjepan Kuljbakin. In 1936, he returned to Tuzla to teach in the gymnasium that today bears his name. At that time he participated in the Soko athletic organisation. He spent the first two years of the Second World War in Tuzla, until he was arrested for participation in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement in 1943. After his release, he moved to liberated territory, became a member of Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the political commissar of the Tuzla Detachment of the Partisans. During the war, Selimović's brother, also a communist, was executed by partisans' firing squad for alleged theft, without trial; Selimović's letter in defense of the brother was to no avail. That episode apparently affected Meša's later contemplative introduction to Death and the Dervish, where the main protagonist Ahmed Nurudin fails to rescue his imprisoned brother.