Bora Ćosić

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.