25 Mar

Talk:Milutin Bojić

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New pageMilutin Bojic (18 May 1892 - 8 November 1917) was a poet, literary critic and playwright, born in [[Belgrade]] and died prematurely in [[Salonika]] in 1917.
Milutin Bojic is the most famous of the many Serbian writers, poets and painters to die in the [[Great War]]. In his brief life he wrote works that reflect two major themes: the Serbs' powerful national pride and their agony during the disasterous war. Even more so than his plays and epics, the war lyrics in "Pesme bola i ponosa" (Poems of Pain and Pride), published in 1917 in Thessaloniki, made one of the most popular war poets. His personal suffering seemed to embody Serbian history at that juncture of greatness and disaster.
Milutin Bojic was a military mail censor during the beginning of World War I, and one of the promising poets of Serbia, according to literary critic [[Jovan Skerlic]]. One scholar described the generation: "With the war eating away the nation's youth, Serbian literature, like the Serbian nation, was bled almost to death." After the Serbian army's retreat through Albania (World War I) in winter of 1915-1916, the survivors who reached the Adriatic coast were transported to [[Corfu]] by French, Italian and other allied ships. Here and in the neighbouring island of [[Vido]] many of them died of diseases contracted while trecking across the treacherous, snow-covered, rocky mountains. They were buried at sea.
During the First World War, the island of Corfu served as a refuge for the Serbian Army that retreated there from their homeland ravaged and occupied by the armies of Austra-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgraria. During their stay, a large portion of Serbian soldiers died from famine, exhaustion, and different diseases. Their remains were buried at sea near the island of Vido, a small island at the north of Corfu port.
Bojic survived the Serbian army's retreat through Montenegro and Albania and the desperation of Corfu, and yet in the end succumbed to [[tuberculosis]] in Salonika. "Our church bells toll dead instead of hours," he wrote of seeing his countrymen dying around him. At the time of the retreat Bojic had been working on an epic poem, "Cain", in which he compared Bulgaria's attack on Serbia to the biblical Cain's attack on his brother, Abel. The poem was one of the few things that he carried with him in his knapsack as he made his journey over the Albanian mountains. Upon arriving at the Adriatic seashore only to see his fellow Serbs being thrown out to the sea for burial, he penned one of the most moving war poems of his generation: Ode to a Blue Sea Tomb or better known as ''Plava Grobnica'' (literraly translated Blue Graveyard), which asked the world:
Don't you feel how gently the sea swells
Not to disturb their eternal rest?
From the deep a sense of peace prevails
While an exhausted moon glazes at the sea.
I say a requiem like the heavens have yet to hear
Over these holy waters.

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