Athens, TN, U.S.A)

JEFFREY J. FOLKS (Athens, TN, U.S.A) AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MACEDONIAN SHOR T S TOR Y As Milne Holton noted in The Big Horse and Other Stories of Modern Macedonia, the literary history of modern Macedonian is a rather brief one. Despite efforts in the late nineteenth century by Grigor Prli?ev and the Miladinov brothers to establish a literary language, only after the Second World War did Macedonia emerge as an independent Republic of Yugoslavia, and only then did Macedonian literature truly come of age. An early collection of poems by Ko?o Ra?in, Beli Mugri (The Dawn), appeared in 1939. Following the war it was particularly the effort of Blaze Koneski in creating an alphabet and orthography for Macedonian, and in publishing poems and stories in the language, that began the literary movement which is strongly evident today. All of the writers in this collection are considerably younger than Koneski, although Meto Jovanovski, born in 1928, would have been old enough to remember the war. Indeed, war-the history of war and occupation that has been the history of Macedonia-is one of his central themes through several novels and many stories. The writPrc who followed Koneski, including the younger generation that has grown up in the fifth decade after the Liberation, are understandably interested in the exploration of personal and psychological issues as well as the historical and political themes of the first generation. They are also more influ- enced by contemporary experiments in fiction, particularly by the technical innovations of European and American fiction. Clearly, no central theme ties together the diverse stories in this collection, other than the fact that the authors share an experi- ence of having lived in the same time and place. The following collection is not intended to be fully representative, either as a cross-section of contemporary Macedonian writers or as a selec- tion of the best writers, although each of the writers included is an important figure in Macedonian letters today. Hopefully, an ex- panded version of the present issue will come closer to being rep- 128 ture should of course study Milne Holton's superb collection, The Big Horse and Other Stories. The generation immediately following the Second World War, including the important poet and prose writer Blaze Koneski, was much concerned with the establishment of Macedonian literary language and cultural identity. Some of this concern is evident in the work of Meto Jovanovski, who , served as President of the Yugoslav PEN Organization and has political concerns which include the issue of the status of Macedonian language and culture in Greece. (Born in Braj?ino close to the Greek border, Jovanovski has written novels, including the recently translated novel Cousins, which are set against the backdrop of this politically turbulent region.) What Milne Holton has termed the "lyric regionalism" of this first post-war generation is evident in many of Jovanovski's stories, which clearly demonstrate the author's concern for the survival of a particular way of life in Macedonia, although his stories also at- tain a universality beyond what is normally connoted by "regional." The resurgence of literature now taking place in Macedonia is certainly not limited to the short story. Most of the contributors to the present collection have published or written novels, but they have worked in other genres and media as well. Jovanovski's seven novels have been translated into Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, and (in the case of Cousins, translated by Sylvia Holton) into English. Distinguished collections of poetry have been published by Slavko Janevski, an academic whose many books of poetry and prose include the novel Kukulino, and by Petre Andreevski, a poet, playwright, and novelist whose best- known volume of poems is Denicia. Janevski, who fought as a Partisan during the Second World War, is well known for having published the first full-length novel in Macedonian, Selo zad sedumto jesenu (The Village Behind the Seven Aspens, 1952). His poems have been widely translated. Goram Stefanovski, the leading Macedonian playwright and perhaps the finest playwright in Yugoslavia, exemplifies the re- naissance of Macedonian letters in the post-war period. There is ample opportunity in Macedonia for both dramatic and film-tele- vision production, and fiction authors as well as playwrights have seen adaptations of their work for these media. Theatres in Skopje include the new National Theater, built in the early 1980's, as well as smaller theatres such as the Theatre of the .

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