The Orientalism of Jovan Ilić and the Beginnings of Modernism

Abstract

Jovan Ilić had published a handful of poems about dert (‘love longing and mourning’) and sevdah (‘love, ecstasy, passion’), in the collection Poems (1858), but the main period of his interest for the East was in the era of modernist beginnings, when he wrote the largest number of poems with Eastern topics, published the article “Sevdalia bosanska” (1889) (“Bosnian sevdalinka“; sevdalinka being a traditional genre of folk music originating in Bosnia and Herzegovina), as well as the poem collection Dahire (‘Tambourine’) (1891). In his first period, the motifs of sevdalinka were poetically approached in the tradition of oral poetry, whereas in his second period, dert and sevdah were thematically extended to the Islamic world in general, and the theme was treated with artistic expression (non-metric verse, striving for euphony, romantic irony and genre hybridity). This is related to modernist aspirations in literary elocution, different in the choice of cultural orientation and understanding of the function of art in society.