Univerzitetska Misao (Jan 2022)
The totalitarian social system and the thinking man in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovinian and Serbian romance prose
Abstract
In contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian and Serbian literature, the phenomenon of an imprisoned, frustrated and unhappy thinking man in a dehumanized and limited social space is present in a significant corpus of prose works. The artistic transposition of psychological - sociological and physical - temporal social data by which the thinker is conditioned and thwarted, is interesting case for our study. The aim of this paper is to prove through an interpretive method and phenomenological approach the presence of the problem of the tragedy of a thinking man in totalitarian systems in novels - Tvrđava, Meša Selimović, Prokleta avlija, Ivo Andrić, Koreni, Dobrica Ćosić and Feniks, Muhamed Abdagić. These works present totalitarian systems that seek to thwart the thinking man in his noble mission of humanizing social relations and finding opportunities for a more beautiful, meaningful and happy life of the individual and the collective as a whole. Selimović's hero Ahmet Šabo, Andrić's fra Petar and Ćamil efendija, Ćosić's Vukašin and Abdagić's hero Šaćir, thinking existences are trapped in totalitarian systems in which their intellectual person is opposed to cruel customs of government. The tragedy of their position grows into an archetype of human unrest and rebellion against the dehumanized system of government and efforts to general humanization of social space and interpersonal relations in it.
