War’s Spoils Revive a Land’s Literature

For most Americans, the region where war is raging is known for obscurity, intractability and--harsh but true--irrelevance. “Balkanization” is code for a quagmire, a state of fragmentation.

Well-informed Americans will confess when pressed that they know next to nothing about Albania. What they know of Yugoslavia dates from the history of World War I, or from the splendor of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics.

But while struggling to comprehend a strange war in a little-known part of the world, Americans are discovering a surprisingly strong body of Balkan literature, both by Westerners who have visited the region and, in translation, by native writers who include a Nobel Prize winner, the late Ivo Andric. For years, these books gathered dust on publishers’ back lists.

Now, with the escalation of NATO bombing in Kosovo and the prospect that U.S. ground forces will be deployed, Balkan books are experiencing a sales boomlet. Publishers are hastily reprinting titles that until recently went forgotten. To capitalize on interest in the conflict, the publication date of at least one book on the region has been moved up four months.

1.5 Million Works Ruined by Bombing

At the same time, the heightened interest gives new hope to a group that has been working feverishly to restore the literary heritage of Bosnia. In a 1992 fire that burned for three days, Serbian nationalist bombs destroyed the National and University Library of BosniaHerzegovina--and with it, 1 1/2 million books, documents, maps and manuscripts containing the written record of centuries of coexistence between Christians and Muslims, Bosnians and Serbs.

NATO’s bombs and Serbian troops may be the devices of destruction in this odd, unsettling war, but books, these scholars say, could be the weapons of restoration. Amila Buturovic of Toronto’s York University and Harvard’s Andras Riedlmayer and Irvin Schick have organized the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project, a worldwide effort to locate copies of the written material eradicated when Sarajevo’s largest library, as well as smaller repositories of important documents, were razed. The Internet-driven effort links a loose network of Balkan experts who regard the annihilation of a country’s literature as cultural genocide.

They also see a powerful connection between the burning of Bosnian libraries seven years ago and the systematic stripping today of refugees in Kosovo of license plates, birth certificates and other tangible traces of personal history. “What is going on in Kosovo is exactly the same thing,” Buturovic said. “They are obliterating memory.”

As a geographic bridge between Europe and Asia, the Balkans have been outshone by both. Yugoslavia is remembered perhaps as the last outpost of good communism. Albania is viewed as an enigma, a primitive culture with an indecipherable language. The entire region is seen by many Americans as a political black hole, where borders are constantly shifting, and no one can keep track of who is in power.

Undergraduate history classes whisk past the Balkans, and graduate programs seldom emphasize the region. At the University of Chicago, professor emeritus William H. McNeill, a specialist in modern Greek history, said it fell to him to lead Balkan studies seminars because no one else wanted to teach them.

‘The Illusion of Complexity’

As a Balkans correspondent for the Financial Times, Laura Silber said Westerners complain that the area is incomprehensible. Rather, she said, “it has the illusion of complexity. One thing is that the last names are longer than ours, and they all end in ‘ovich.’ ” She recalled one friend who told her there were just too many “viches” in her book, “Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation” (Penguin), co-written with Allan Little.

“It turns people off,” she said. “The average citizen of the U.S. or anywhere else is not willing to go the extra mile to understand.”

Written as a tie-in to a BBC documentary, the Silber-Little book recently has gone back for two reprints of 7,000 copies each. Penguin also has ordered reprints totaling 12,000 copies of Misha Glenny’s “The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War.” At Viking, Robert Kaplan’s “Balkan Ghosts” has just gone back for a 10,000-copy reprint. By mass market standards, none of these figures is enormous, but for backlist titles, the numbers are impressive.

But it is the sudden sales success of a lush travelogue first published by Viking in 1941 that best reflects the appetite for information about the Balkans. “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” is a period piece of sorts, Irish writer Rebecca West’s rich, romanticized account of her journey from Serbia to Macedonia in 1937.

“It’s a $20 paperback, published more than 50 years ago, and suddenly we’re having a difficult time keeping it in print,” said Michael Millman, editor of Viking’s titles on the Balkans.

Viking also is giving new attention to the paperback edition of “Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo,” by a young Bosnian girl named Zlata Filopovec, as well as “Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime,” by Jan Willem Honig and Norbert Both and Slavenka Drakulic’s “Cafe Europa: Life After Communism.” The momentum of military activities prompted Viking to move the publication date of “Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s Story of the War in Bosnia,” by journalist Chuck Sudetic, from October to May 15.

At New York University Press, demand for information about the war zone has meant that British journalist Noel Malcolm’s “Kosovo: A Short History” has sold 14,000 copies since publication last May--three times the normal expected figure. NYU Press has high hopes also for Branimir Anzulovic’s “Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide,” released last month.

Fiction from the Balkans is providing another perspective. Vintage is promoting “The Three-Arched Bridge” and “Pyramid,” both by Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, whose writings so incensed his country’s authorities that he now lives in exile in France. Epic in proportions, Andric’s “The Bridge on the Drina” often is described as the essential Yugoslav novel. The book was published in this country 15 years ago by the University of Chicago Press after McNeill pleaded that the sweeping historical novel was “too good not to have in print.”

But Haverford College religion professor Michael Sells is less generous. Andric’s writing is superb, Sells said, and it is little wonder that he won a Nobel Prize in 1961. But his most famous work fosters the assumption that in the Balkans, ethnic warfare is timeless and inevitable.

“It’s a great novel,” Sells said. “But it would be like if somebody said we have to understand the Holocaust, so let’s go read Shakespeare on the Jews.”

Sells’ own book, “The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia” (University of California Press), was revised in 1998 to include a preface on Kosovo. It also faults West’s tome as anachronistic and riddled with naive stereotypes. Sells is more critical still of Kaplan’s “Balkan Ghosts,” calling it “a bad freshman paper that creates an image of Albanians as kind of subhuman monsters.”

Although cultural geography has never been an American strong point, Croatian writer Anzulovic, who lives near Washington, said ignorance about the Balkans is less distressing than misinformation. The notion that ethnic hatred is almost genetic to the region is especially worrisome, he said.

From Toronto, Islamic studies professor Buturovic agreed, noting that before the Bosnian war, 37% of marriages in Sarajevo were inter-ethnic. Churches and mosques stood face-to-face, said Riedlmayer, a specialist in Islamic art and architecture. Muslims were at home in the Balkans, he added, “a lot longer than there have been Anglicans in England.”

But records of this coexistence were obliterated with the Sarajevo library fires. “There are no precedents. This was the largest book-burning in history,” Riedlmayer said. “And now this is happening in Kosovo.”

Reaching out to researchers around the world, Riedlmayer’s Ingathering Project has been working painstakingly to track down copies of the lost documents. To date they have rescued about 700 pages of material, less than 1% of what was destroyed. Under the guidance of Schick, a mathematician and computer specialist, the data have been stored electronically.

Riedlmayer also has led a book drive through which dozens of university presses have donated more than 30,000 volumes to the new Sarajevo library, currently housed in the former barracks of Marshal Tito.

It is a potent plan to fight genocide, said Riedlmayer, a Hungarian who grew up in Chicago: “Bibliography,” he said, “as warfare.”