Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia 9789633864685

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
List of Maps and Illustrations
Contents
Introduction
1. Cultural Baggage
2. Women's Contribution to the Oral Tradition
3. Women's Voices in the Middle Ages
4. The Nineteenth Century
5. The Turn of the Century: New Opportunities: 1900-1914
6. Between the Two World Wars: Modernization
7. The Second Yugoslavia: 1945-1991
8. Women's Writing in Bosnia Herzegovina
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Voices in the Shadows

Voices in the Shadows Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia

Celia Hawkesworth

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CEU PRESS

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Published by Central European University Press Okt6ber 6. utca 12 H-1051 Budapest Hungary 400 West 59 th Street New York, NY 10019 USA

© 2000 by Celia Hawkesworth

Distributed by Plymbridge Distributors Ltd., Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PZ United Kingdom

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 963-9116-62-9 Cloth

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available upon request

Printed in Hungary by Akademiai Nyomda

For Christy and Sophie

I am indebted to the British Academy and the British Council for the financial support which enabled me to undertake study trips to the region, and to the Director and Council of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies for granting me a period of study leave so that I could concentrate on my research. I wish to acknowledge the friendly assistance I always encountered in the libraries in which I worked, in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb. I am grateful to numerous colleagues, both in the UK and in or from the former Yugoslav lands for all their advice and suggestions. These are too many to list by name, but they include Zaga Gavrilovic in Birmingham, Slobodanka Pekovic, Vladeta Jankovic, Nada Milosevic-Djordjevic and Zlatan Doric in Belgrade, and Sena Mujic and Ferida Durakovic in Sarajevo. I would also like to mention Dr Wendy Bracewell and Dusan Puvacic in London who, in addition to giving me many invaluable suggestions, have both consistently brightened my professional life; Professor Zdenko Lesic, who has been a vital source of ideas and information, and an unfailing support; Svetlana Velinar:Jankovic, whose generous encouragement I have especially valued; and Dr Hatidfa Krnjevic, whose penetrating understanding of both Bosnia and Serbia and professional commitment to scholarship have been an inspiration to me. Above all, I would like to mention Jasmina and Biljana Lukic who, with exceptional generosity and warmth, let me share not only their knowledge and experience, but their Belgrade home and a little of the lives of Luka and Jelena. Finally, of course, I would like to thank my own family, who have been cheerfully tolerant of my preoccupation with this task.

The rise of the Ottoman Empire

4

The Yugoslav lands on the eve of the First World War

7

The Yugoslav successor states

7

A Cairn (Gomila)

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Peasant woman from near Bihac, Bosnia

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The first woman national ftUSle player in Yugoslavia

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The curtain embroidered by Jeflmija for Hilandar Monastery

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The inscription on the small icon given to Despotica Jelena's son

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WOM"AN, monthly magazine for women, edited by Milica

JasicTomic. Year I, 1 April 1911, no. 4.

131

Cover of Srpkinja, the almanac published in Sarajevo, 1913

133

The Charitable Society of Serbian Women in Irig (1913)

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Bosnian woman: Mrs Julka Srdic-Popovic

249

Peasant girl, Bosnia

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Milica Stojadinovic-Srpkinja, Isidora Sekulic

266

Anica Savic-Rebac, Ksenija Atanasijevic Jelena Dimitrijevic, Desanka Maksimovic Svetlana Velmar:Jankovic, Alma Lazarevska

Introduction 1 1. Cultural Baggage 17

2. ,¥omen's Contribution to the Oral Tradition 33 3. Women's Voices in the Middle Ages 63 4. The Nineteenth Century 89 5. The Turn of the Century: New Opportunities: 1900-1914 123 6. Between the Two World Wars: Modernization 159 7. The Second Yugoslavia: 1945-1991 195

8. Women's Writing in Bosnia Herzegovina 243 Conclusion 267 Bibliography 2 73 Index 279

lntr~~Ilt i~Il While the Central European countries have become steadily more familiar since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, to most West Europeans the South-East remains one of the least known areas of the continent. Where the 'Balkans' do have a presence in the Western imagination, the word may be said generally to have negative associations. The whole question of the manner in which the Balkans have been perceived in the West has been comprehensively discussed by the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, who analyzes how opinions were formed, particularly by travelers from the West, in various historical periods. 1 The concept of 'Balkanization' has entered the English language, with alienating associations of conflict and fragmentation, and is widely applied to the most disparate situations, from major political events to the trivial organization of local stmctures. At the same time, the Balkans have held a special fascination for many individuals over the centuries, as an area of often rugged beauty, with a bewildering mixture of inhabitants, whose ways of life are at once familiar and yet refreshingly different. Specialists in the region are familiar with works concerned with political and ecclesiastical history, studies of Byzantium and the Orthodox Church, of Turkey-in-Europe and 'the Eastern Question', and works about the Second World War and about the twentieth-century experience of Communist Party rule. At the other end of the scale, there are the abundant accounts of travelers to these 'exotic' lands from the seventeenth century onwards. There have also been studies of basic indigenous social structures, of traditional culture, and of the effects of Ottoman rule. The Central Balkan lands constituting the country which came into being in 1918 as 'The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes', and was later known as Yugoslavia, have been covered by scholars with particular thoroughness, and, indeed, it is part of this area that is the focus of the present study. There is a substantial body of works 1

devoted to the Yugoslav experiment, and a large and growing number analyzing the country's violent disintegration. However, the position of women in the Yugoslav lands has only recently become a focus of attention. The present study is an attempt to draw together elements of the experience of life in these lands from the point of view of women as it is expressed in works of the imagination, by giving an overview of the development of literary culture through the voices and from the perspective of women. Such an undertaking represents an innovation also in respect of the cultural history produced in the region itself, from which, until recently, women have been strikingly absent, women's writing having been underrepresented in traditional anthologies and literary history. By bringing women into the foreground and looking at their achievements in literary culture in a new perspective, this study seeks to contribute to the process of restoring women to the cultural history of the lands where they too have lived. There is an additional dimension to the work: in view of the present disastrous consequences of emphasizing 'heroic' patriarchal cultural values in the Central Balkans, it seeks to look into the shadows in order to examine the extent to which there may exist an alternative tradition. The aim of this investigation is not to suggest that such an alternative outlook is exclusively the province of women: on the one hand, acceptance of a mythic version of history constrains the entire population and, on the other, women have often been as eager as men to promote heroic values. But an obvious effect of these dominant values has been to reinforce gender stereotypes in which men play the active role of defending the homeland, while women are confined to the passive, private sphere, as nurturing-and often bereft-wives and, above all, mothers.

Scope of the Volume and Brief Historical Survey In order to give coherence to the volume, I have focused on one language group, speakers of the language still most simply referred to as Serbo-Croat. Since the break-up of Yugoslavia this term has been used mainly by people outside the territory; in the respective 2

states the language is known as 'Serbian', 'Croatian', or 'Bosnian'. (As this book goes to press, dictionaries of 'Montenegrin' have also begun to appear.) In addition, I have chosen to concentrate on one set of historical and cultural circumstances: the influences of Byzantine culture and the Orthodox Church, on the one hand, and of Ottoman rule, on the other. Before the Slavs arrived in the Balkan peninsula the dominant culture in the area was that of the Roman Empire, with a complex system of urban settlements, communications, exploitation of natural resources, and trade routes. The sixthcentury Slav invaders virtually obliterated Roman civilization. 2 For the first several hundred years after their arrival in the Balkans, the Slavs lived according to their traditional tribal customs and pagan beliefs. It was only in the Middle Ages, after embryonic states had begun to settle into stable structures with some degree of political and social organization, that a need was felt for the cohesive influence of European Christian civilization. When this happened, there were two distinct potential centers: Rome and Byzantium. The emerging Slav states vacillated between the two, according to their perceived interests. Eventually, geography and the declining power of the Byzantine Empire in the West resulted in the gravitation of the Western areas towards Rome, and the increasing importance to the emerging states in the South-East of Byzantium, Constantinople or 'The Imperial City' ('Tsarigrad'). By the time this process was complete, the Western Slavs had taken the name of the dominant tribe, the Croats, while the name of the Serb tribe had spread to the majority of the Slav groups in the South-East. The original provenance of the Balkan Slavs is obscure. There are many conflicting theories. But it is clear at least that the racial origins of all the Slav tribes which eventually settled in the Balkan peninsula are the same. There was thus no initial objective difference between the original Slav peoples who later came to be known by different names. All of them underwent similar processes of absorption of indigenous groups, such as the Celts and the Illyrians, and of earlier or subsequent settlers, that is, Avars, Saxons, Franks, Vlachs, and others. Later, the particular admixture of, for example, Italians, Austrians, and Hungarians along the Dalmatian coast and in the North3

West, and of Turks, Greeks, and Albanians in the lands under Ottoman occupation, resulted in different prevailing combinations. But the Balkan peninsula, like the British Isles, is essentially characterized by an inextricable racial mixture of peoples. The distinctions which in the end came to identify the Balkan Slavs as Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, and so on, are, then, the result not of race, but of religious and cultural allegiance, and historical circumstance. Perhaps the crucial aspect of the historical experience of the whole region is its nature as a border-land, with shifting frontiers, forming, over the centuries, various configurations for varying lengths of time. As throughout Europe, the driving force behind the formation of kingdoms of varying ethnic mixtures at different times between the ninth and fourteenth centuries was territorial expansion and commercial gain. The result was a kaleidoscope of states.jostling between several powers, subject to the fluctuating influence of the Roman Catholic West-notably Hungary and Venice-and Byzantium, with numerous smaller fiefdoms of varying size and importance. With the penetration of the Ottoman Turks into the peninsula, a relatively The rise of the Ottoman Empire N

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stable structure was established in the southern and central territories, with periods of internal unrest and constant friction along its borders. As Ottoman power began to wane, the influence of the Habsburg Monarchy increased: from the late sixteenth century onwards among the Serbs living in the Habsburg lands, and after 1878 in Bosnia. Until the end of the fourteenth century, the circumstances of life for the ordinary population of the region were broadly similar to those elsewhere in feudal Europe. But when the Ottoman Turks occupied the territories, they replaced the existing state structures with their own network of local landholders and provincial governors. While this ruling structure was, on the whole, benign, leaving the villages with considerable autonomy in running their own affairs, the development of the social and cultural life of the indigenous population was seriously affected, being left in the hands of representatives of the different religious groups whose own level of education was, on the whole, minimal. In predominantly Christian areas trade and urban activity were dominated by foreigners, mainly Greeks and officials of the Ottoman Empire. Even in Bosnia, where there evolved a large population of local Slav converts to Islam, the general educational and cultural level of the great majority remained low. It should also be stressed that, as a result of successive wars between the great powers in the region, in which the local population was inevitably caught up, the more prosperous and mobile local traders-the people with the most education, in other words-were those who tended to find refuge in neighboring countries, seeking greater stability and escaping reprisals. This mobility makes it hard to assess the quality of life in the towns which were most affected by the fluctuations of their inhabitants. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the case that the majority of the population of the whole region was largely confined to the countryside, where educational possibilities were minimal. As a result, the traditional social structures of village life hardly changed for 400 years. While urban life developed rapidly in the course of the twentieth century, the largely static state of the countryside meant that an increasingly sharp divide developed between the people in the towns and those in the villages, one which has endured to this day. 5

The scope of the present work is confined to the territories which are known today as Serbia and Montenegro (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as this book goes to press), and Bosnia Herzegovina. For a number of reasons, the Serb population is given the fullest treatment: on the one hand, a large-scale migration at the end of the seventeenth century led to the growth of a prosperous community in southern Hungary, where conditions for the development of culture quickly evolved in the context of the Habsburg Monarchy. In Serbia itself, an independent kingdom was established in the nineteenth century, and educational and cultural institutions were able to develop rapidly from the middle of the century onwards. The rugged mountainous territory of Montenegro, which was never completely subject to Ottoman rule, and where a tiny kingdom was founded in 1850, remained largely inaccessible to educational and cultural influences from the West, apart from the small communities in the coastal towns, notably Kotor, which came under Venetian influence, and the miniature capital, Cetinje, perched high in the mountains. This predominantly tribal society was deeply traditional, and the lives of the inhabitants, particularly the women-in the inland areas at least-remained largely unchanged from the Middle Ages until recent times. 3 The lands which constitute present-day Bosnia Herzegovina have had a complex history: having been an independent kingdom from the twelfth century, threatened continually by the kings of Hungary, Bosnia became the western limit of the Ottoman Empire, forming the border with the Habsburg lands. The population consisted of adherents of the two Christian churches, Catholic and Orthodox, and a large group of local Muslims. It was extremely unstable as a result of the constant friction between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, which caused waves of refugees from different ethnic groups to move in and out of the territory at intervals over the centuries. The catastrophic wars at the end of the twentieth century in the lands that were Yugoslavia offer a painful illustration of the instability of life in this region. The ruthless struggle for power through the control of territory which they represent is a vivid reminder of the violence of European life before the present pattern of nation-states 6

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began to settle. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reflected on a shocking scale the frequent movements of population that have characterized much of Balkan history, bringing home to us the misery and suffering entailed by such violent upheavals. The particular effects of war on women, subjected over the centuries to rape by invading armies, in addition to all the other hardships of struggling to sustain the life of their families, has been an important theme in studies of women's history. 4

Main Cultural Influences and the Role of Women The Slav tribes brought with them to the Balkans established beliefs and customs. Gradually, their gods were adapted to the new Christian ideas, but the old ways survived in many forms with remarkable tenacity. To a considerable extent, the Slavs resisted Roman civil law and continued to regulate family and community relations according to their ancient ideas ofjustice. As is the case with all pagan gods, the Slav gods were not grand forces directing the universe, balancing absolute categories of good and evil, but figures evolved from natural phenomena perceived as significant. The Slavs' gods were close at hand, intimately present in all aspects of daily life: in the fields, the home, and the family. One study of ancient beliefs among the Slavs in the Central Balkans, by Natko Nodilo, suggests that they are particularly inclined to preserve such popular beliefs. 5 A feature of religious life in the region which Nodilo sees as having had a particular influence on the survival of ancient belief was Bogomilism, the Christian heresy that took root particularly in Bosnia, surviving as a widespread phenomenon until the end of the fifteentl1 century: for example, in some areas-notably Herzegovina and Montenegro-the names of the ancient Slav gods have survived in personal names and the names of traditional heroes. Nodilo cites the example of the close relationship between the gods and heroes of classical Greece, concluding that this tendency among the Balkan Slavs preceded the domination of Christianity and Islam. He divides historical popular culture into two main phases: first, up to the fifteenth century, when 8

the various peoples had their own local rulers, and second, the period of Ottoman rule. In this second phase, the local rulers tended to be replaced in the popular imagination by highwaymen whose activities undermined Turkish administration and commerce, and from that time on the Slav gods were transformed into heroes. Ancient layers of popular belief may also be traced in traditional songs and stories, in which patterns of behavior and the characteristics of particular gods are transferred to the portrayal of individual heroes. These songs and stories are woven into every aspect of life in the Balkan villages, forming an intricate web of great cohesive power. Cultural activity among the small educated elite in the medieval states in the region varied in intensity, depending on political circumstances. In the Serbian states, in particular, the influence of Byzantium was strong: between the mid-twelfth and late fourteenth centuries, these states were sufficiently stable and prosperous for large numbers of monasteries and churches to be built, richly decorated with magnificent frescoes. A substantial body of writing was produced within the context of the administrative needs of church and state, including biographies of the rulers, reinforcing the main Nemanjic dynasty, which dominated Serbian medieval history. On the basis of these documents, treaties, trade agreements, letters, and so on, it is possible to build up a detailed picture of the lives of the ruling class, in which individual women played an important part. The last vestiges of an independent Serbian state disappeared in 1459. After that, monks continued to copy documents and so preserve a degree of literacy among an element of the population, but it was not until the great migration of 1690 into Habsburg lands north of the Danube that the conditions began to be created for the renewal of cultural activity. The focal point of Serbian intellectual life shifted to Belgrade in the course of the nineteenth century as educational and cultural institutions were gradually established there. By the end of the century, many young men-and a handful of women-were traveling to foreign universities to study and returning with a new, European outlook. In the twentieth century, cultural trends echoed those of the rest of Europe. In Bosnia Herzegovina, under Ottoman rule, the cultural life of the educated elite in the sixteenth and sev9

enteenth centuries was carried on in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. From the middle of the seventeenth century, writing in these oriental languages gave way to the new trend of writing in the vernacular, although the Arabic script was retained until the end of the nineteenth century. This literature was known as alhamijado, a corruption of an Arabic term meaning 'foreign'. While the development of written vernacular literature was interrupted by the Ottoman occupation, an oral tradition flourished throughout the territories under consideration. The contribution of women to this dimension of the region's culture is great and this will be the first focus of the present study. After that, it traces the written literature produced by women, from the first modest beginnings in the Middle Ages and the early nineteenth century to the turn of the century, when women were able to draw on the energy and experience of a broad international women's movement. The period up to the Second World War was a time of energetic intellectual activity for educated women throughout the Yugoslav lands. However, the achievements of this generation were largely overlooked in official socialist cultural and literary history. After the Second World War, in Yugoslavia as in most of Eastern Europe, we are confronted by a paradox: the prevailing ideology held that the 'woman question' had been solved with the establishment of a socialist government and that it was therefore inappropriate to explore the position of women in social, intellectual, and cultural life. And yet, as has been discussed in many studies of women in the socialist societies of Eastern Europe, the fact remained that women were still marginalized, saddled with the 'double burden' of employment and domestic work, their position in practice often being less favorable than that of many women in the period between the wars. It was not until the 1970s that women were again able to question the marginal role to which their creativity had been consigned, and it is possible to trace the beginnings of a new, alternative, consciously 'women's' voice in literature.

Women at the Margins of History and Culture In order to begin to understand the particular nature of women's experience in this part of southeastern Europe, and to establish a frame of reference for the individual topics of this study, we need to bear in mind the general social and cultural context of women's lives in the region. There are three main components in the cultural heritage of the Balkan lands: the influence of the Orthodox Christian Church, with its Byzantine background; the presence of Islam in the particular form it took in the Balkans; and the basic social structure of the zadrug~the patriarchal extended family farm, which set the basic pattern of life in most of the countryside, at least until the Second World War. The general tenets of Christianity and Islam in relation to women are too familiar to be repeated here. The zadruga has been extensively studied by sociologists and anthropologists. For our present purposes, it is enough to say that it varied in size from two or three families (the head of the family and his son/sons with their wives and children) to a maximum of 20 couples. The basic principle was that, while the male members never left the common home, women entered by marriage, and were thus disadvantaged from the outset by their lack of blood-ties to the family unit. The organization of the household was hierarchical, with every member having a definite rank, determined by age and sex, "the sex criterion being stronger than the age criterion: all males were superior to any of the womenfolk, particularly in regions with a fighting tradition". 6 The word of the head of the family was law, although it was possible for him to be removed if he proved unequal to the task. The duties of the appointed 'top' woman-usually the head's wife-were to make clothes for herself, her husband and children, and any widows in the household, to distribute tasks among the other women, and to ensure that all the needs of the household and workers in the fields were met. 7 Several studies of the system focus on the mechanisms for reinforcing the domination of the male-oriented group over its female members: for example, in public the man must be seen to assert his authority by walking in front of his wife, or riding the only donkey while the women carry heavy loads. 8 Other symbolic mecha11

nisms of this kind include seating arrangements on ceremonial occasions, and the frequent custom of the women of the household kissing the men's hands or, in some places, washing their feet. 9 I suggest that, whatever the private reality for individuals at various times, all these cultural influences have tended to reinforce an unstated but pervasive public perception of women's inferiority: underlying the three elements already mentioned, the women of the southern Slav lands share the common Judeo-Christian heritage of European women which has been thoroughly explored in numerous studies of women's history published since the 1970s. There is widespread agreement that the views of women in European culture which have dominated its history are largely negative, and that they have hardly changed since the days of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews. In common with other historical and cultural surveys, this study finds initial justification for this view of the roles of Orthodox Christianity and Islam in the Balkans in the fact that accounts of their history typically do not mention women, not even as a category, let alone as individuals who have played a role in the development of the region's religious life. Women in the region may thus be regarded, as has been documented in so many other historical and cultural works, as having slipped out of history, living somehow outside the world of masculine achievements. That women have been systematically neglected in the presentation of the history of this area was highlighted in an important article published in 1989, written by the Croatian feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky, and memorably entitled 'More Horses than Women'. The pressing issue it raised was that: "If generations of women and men are socialized through their process of education to believe that there were no women in the history of their nation(s), they are socialized in the myth of all-pervasive patriarchy. "10 Through her work in reassessing conventional accounts of women's roles in the history of the Central Balkans, Sklevicky contributed greatly to building confidence among younger scholars, and thus giving momentum to a new focus on women in their work. Nevertheless, the process of establishing women's studies on a secure footing in southeastern Europe has so far proved difficult. This is the result of a widespread tendency,

12

among educated men and women alike, to dismiss a focus on women as a laughable irrelevance. The word 'feminist' remains highly problematic, even at the end of the 1990s. Funds for gender-bas!!d research were thus hard to come by, even before violent conflict erupted in the Yugoslav lands. Nevertheless, easy access to information about feminist movements and theory in various Western societies, combined with the activities of the feminist groups founded since the late 1970s in the main urban centers of former Yugoslavia, and of a few individual journalists and academics, began gradually to influence younger generations of women scholars. In the course of the 1990s, despite the war, women's studies courses were set up at the Graduate School of the Humanities in Ljubljana, and as extracurricular subjects at the universities of Belgrade and Zagreb. Such courses were given a new urgency by the recognition that the 'new democracies' created in East and Central Europe since the collapse of Communism have a predominantly 'male face': women have tended once again to be marginalized in these transformations, at the same time as losing some of their basic human rights. In addition, most strikingly in the area under consideration, the economic and political crisis accompanying the period of transition has been marked by a deep-seated nationalism which tends to foster ideas of women as reproductive instruments for providing the nation with sons. The present work seeks to make a contribution to the growth of gender studies in southeast Europe. It does not, of course, pretend to provide a definitive account of women's contribution to verbal art in these lands, but it offers a framework for further study. The general approach adopted draws on some of the main achievements of women's studies, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. But it is hoped that the survey will also attract the more general reader, interested in broad questions of the construction of gender, and of social and national identities. By highlighting the existence of a neglected alternative tradition, to some extent counterbalancing the prevailing patriarchal, aggressive ethos currently dominating the region, I believe that this study can contribute also to strengthening the platform of all those, women and men, who do not subscribe to 13

the dominant values of the region in the late twentieth century, but who feel that they have no legitimate· ·or audible voice. Women's groups were particularly prominent in anti-war campaigning throughout the former Yugoslav lands, endeavoring to maintain links across the boundaries created by the various nationalist projects. One interesting instance of such links is a volume of letters between a group of four women, based in Belgrade, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Berlin and, later, Paris, exchanged by fax.from the beginning of June 1991 to the end of November 1992. 11 The collection is a particularly eloquent expression of the unbelief, resistance, and refusal to be included in the nationalist projects responsible for the war experienced by large numbers of people on all sides throughout the hostilities. It describes protest campaigns initiated in all the centers where the writers found themselves at various stages, practical measures to counteract the restrictions on movement and communication, and, above all, a spirit of defiance and the will to overcome all obstacles put in their way. It is to be hoped that, by highlighting such cooperative values, this book may offer the general reading public a different image of the region to that which has dominated the media in the last decade of the twentieth century. I have mentioned the important role of the oral tradition throughout this region. As we shall see in more detail in the chapter dealing with oral tradition, since the major collections were made in the nineteenth century, this tradition has been classified according to a broad division into the epic or 'heroic' and the lyric mode. Since the beginning of the process of liberation from Ottoman rule, the epic songs, sung predominantly by men and concerned, at least ostensibly, with historical events, have been privileged over the timeless, more private concerns of the lyric songs. As women's creativity tends to be associated with this lyric mode, it is inevitable that it too should continue to be marginalized, in the same way that women have been in the culture taken as a whole, until such time as it is accepted that the epic and the lyric can coexist peacefully as a necessary dialogue between two basic world-views, and, above all, when it is recognized that neither mode should be exclusively associated with one gender or the other. I believe that just such an apprehension lies at the heart 14

•of a remarkable work by the Serbian poet Desanka Maksimovic which , appeared in 1964. 12 Having begun to write in 1919, she was the first woman poet to gain wide acceptance in Serbian literature, and she did so largely by writing verse generally perceived as expressing a recognizably 'female' point of view. This volume is unlike the rest of her work in that it confronts the dominant mode directly, not as a clash of perceptions but, as she puts it explicitly in her subtitle, as a dialogue, a 'Conversation' with the Law Code compiled by the fourteenth-century Serbian ruler Tsar Dusan. Maksimovic took Dusan's Code as her startii:ig poiht in writing what amounts to her own very personal book of laws, seeking not justice but forgiveness and understanding for many human weaknesses, irtjustices, and sins. In the context of the mainstream tradition of Serbian literature, dominated by the male voice, this work seems to me to have the same startling quality as some of the brief articulations of a female perception that break suddenly into some of the traditional epic songs known to have been sung by women. The present study seeks to bring such perceptions out of the shadows and to give them a new centrality, complementing the dominant tone. Prompted by Article 10 in Dusan's Law Code, 'On Heretics'-"And should a man be found to be a heretic, living among Christians, let him be branded on the cheek and exiled, and should anyone hide him, let him too be branded"Maksimovic wrote the following poem, which may be read as a commentary upon all absolutist ideological systems: For Heresy I seek understanding for the heresy that is spreading in the territories ofYour kingdom that from it dates the world's beginning, for the heretic who states that before his birth there were no fires or volcanoes, no moonlight, or sunlight, no woods scattered with frost, no snow, that the rivers of history began bnt yesterday to foam and roar.

15

For the nobles who insist that there was no gentry before their time, nor golden chalices, nor monasteries. For all who are short-sighted and narrow-minded. For the young who think that mankind and the beauty which their eyes behold began only when they came to the world, that no one ever loved like them, that the great festival of human life began only with their arrival. For everyone's childish and heretical thoughts. 13

Notes 1 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. 2 Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 22. 3 See Milich, A Stranger's Supper. 4 See particularly war as a recurrent theme in Anderson and Zinsser, A History of Their Own; Vickers, Women and War. 5 Nodilo, Stara vjera u Srba i Hrvata. 6 Erlich, Family in Transition, 32. 7 Rihtman-Augustin, Struktura tradicijskog mis/jenja; Todorova, 'Myth-making in European Family History', 39-76. 8 Erlich, 236. 9 Denich, 'Sex and Power in the Balkans', 252-53. 10 'More Horses Than Women', 68-75, 69. 11 Ivekovic, Jovanovic, Krese, and Lazic, Briefe von Frauen iiber Krieg und Nationa/ismus. 12 Maksimovic, I Seek Clemency, 7-38. 13 Ibid., 16.

16

You should not tn1st a woman, a snake, or a cat, even when they are dead. 1 Women and land can never be kept. Never lend your wife, your gun, or your horse to anyone.2 A house does not rest on the earth, but on woman.

If I'm going to hell, I'd prefer to go on a young filly rather than an old mare. 3

One useful gauge of prevailing attitudes in a culture is provided by proverbs. The first striking feature of the collections of proverbs consulted for the purposes of this study is the fact that they tend to contain a separate category labeled 'Women' . This endorses the widely acknowledged observation underlying much recent research into women's history that, while men are seen as defined by class, occupation, nation, or historical era, "women have traditionally been viewed first as women, a separate category of being". 4 It is an equally common observation that this perception is in marked contrast to the reality of women's own experience of their individuality. Against the background of the social and cultural history briefly outlined in the Introduction, this chapter aims to consider in more detail the particular nature of the public perception of women in the region and women's own acceptance of the role assigned to them. Having surveyed in broad outline the region's history, I want now to tum to the meaning that has been given to that history and its implications for women. It should be stressed at the outset that, among the various cultural groups in the region, one set of meanings-that pertaining to the Serbs, which also includes the Montenegrins-has been elaborated more extensively than any other. This is because of the particular circumstances of Serbian history touched on in the Introduction. As the Serbs tend to see their history as forming the clearest pattern, it 17

is this pattern which will be considered in most detail. The implications for neighboring groups of so developed a sense of identity are obvious and an awareness of its assumptions is therefore equally important for understanding their situation.

The Emergence of a Serbian National Identity All peoples depend for their sense of identity on their interpretation of the particular story they tell as their 'history'. In every culture elaborate systems are developed to process historical information, to form it into a pattern, and to interpret events to fit this pattern. The political vacuum left among the indigenous populations by the Ottoman administration between the late fourteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Balkans offered fertile ground for the elaboration of a sense of identity, which crystallized in the course of the nineteenth century. Its main characteristic, emphasized in the circumstances of resistance to Ottoman rule at that time, was the stress on a sense of difference from the alien rulers and their supporters, an insistence on Christianity rather than Islam, a spirit of defiance, and a sense of the intrinsic value of the indigenous culture. Serbian history was seen to fall into a pattern with three main phases: the glorious days of the great medieval kingdom; the catastrophe of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which marked the beginning of Turkish oppression; and the long centuries 'under the yoke', characterized by resistance and ultimate liberation. The whole Kosovo myth which has evolved in connection with this interpretation of history is an exceptionally potent force in the region and is therefore worth dwelling on in more detail. Little is known of the battle itself, but the first reports suggested that its outcome was not decisive. However, it was guaranteed significance because both the Serbian ruler, Prince Lazar, and the Turkish sultan, Murad, were killed. From the outset, sermons, eulogies, and hagiographic writings of the time reflected a common purpose: to counteract the prevailing pessimism following the death of Lazar and to offer some hope to the Serbian people. This meant that the battle 18

itself and the death of the ruler had to be interpreted in such a way as to reflect a pattern of martyrdom as redemption and a guarantee of ultimate, eternal victory. So concerned are the earliest accounts with strengthening the cult of Lazar that they do not mention the death of Murad. In his study of the Kosovo myth, 5 Thomas Emmert suggests that the change came as more than 300,000 Serbs moved into the mountains in the decade following the fall of Constantinople in 1453: "The figure of Murad's assassin found a home in the culture of the exile, where his courageous deed could inspire respect and enthusiasm for continued resistance to the Turk. In this culturethe patriarchal Serbian village-the epic tradition developed its own periodization of history. Everything revolved around the great events which were seen to be important turning points in the life of the nation. In this tradition Kosovo became a crucial turning point in the popular consciousness and served as the dramatic watershed between independence and servitude." 6 All the components of the myth were present in the history of the Slavs published by Mavro Orbini in 1601. 7 This work played an important role in the spreading of the myth: a version of it was translated into Serbo-Croat and published in St Petersburg in 1722 from where it reached the Serbian population in southern Hungary and eventually all other parts of the Central Balkans. This version included also scenes and personalities not found in Orbini's original, but which were familiar to the author of the Serbo-Croat version from the popular oral tradition. From this account of the evolution of the story, it is clear that, since the facts of the battle itself were recorded only in sketchy and conflicting reports, from the very beginning the way the story was told was shaped by a need to interpret such facts as were known. Its function was to satisfy a number of different needs-social, cultural, and emotional-at once shared with the rest of the community and individual. Over time, the songs associated with the Battle of Kosovo began to gather around a set of ideas or imaginative kernels. The prominence of one or other of these ideas fluctuated according to the perceived needs of the community, as interpreted by the individual singer. The oral epic songs in general-and those about the Battle of Kosovo in particular-have been eloquently described by Svetozar 19

Koljevic as providing the Serbs with both a way of "coming to terms with history and a means of getting out of it". 8 To have transformed defeat into a source of pride and dignity is a triumph of the human spirit, an extraordinary achievement. And undoubtedly it has served the Serbs well whenever great demands have been made on themone might mention their resistance to the Habsburg armies in the First World War and to the Axis powers in the Second. This fact offers some insight into the prominence that this group of songs has had over all the other cycles of songs in the Serbo-Croat oral narrative tradition. The other cycles have functions of various kindsaesthetic, moral, comic, dramatic, or generally entertaining-but none of them has proved as effective as the songs associated with Kosovo in engendering a sense of patriotic allegiance, of commitment to a national cause. The first important aspect of the myth is that it makes the battle the decisive one in the popular consciousness, marking the downfall of the Serbian Empire, the definitive defeat of the Serbs. And yet this catastrophe, this definitive defeat, has been transformed into a triumph, a cause for celebrations on a massive scale to mark its 600th anniversary in 1989. The idea of Kosovo has become deeply rooted at the center of many Serbs' sense of identity and self-esteem, having a significance beyond the reach of reason. There would seem to be two key factors: one is the notion of the participation of a Christian God in the outcome of the battle. The defeat is presented as God's judgment on the self-seeking, fractious local lords who had so weakened the Serbian state by their own quarrels before the battle that defeat was inevitable. In addition, many key aspects of Christian belief have been woven into the story, such as the idea of Judas-like betrayal by a nobleman close to the Prince which sent the innocent Serbian rnler to inevitable death, the image of the Last Supper on the eve of the battle. These associations add depth to the myth. But arguably the crucial factor, which can be grasped and appropriated by every individual, is the central idea of confronting overwhelming odds, the notion of willing sacrifice for an ideal, the idea of choice. The quintessential expression of this central idea comes in a song entitled 'The Downfall of the Serbian Empire'. In this song the Serbian Prince Lazar is visited on the eve of

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the battle by a messenger from God and asked to make a choice between the Kingdom of Earth and the Kingdom of Heaven. If he chooses the Kingdom of Earth, he will win the battle, the Turks will be slain, and all the Christians will survive. If, on the other hand, he chooses the Kingdom of Heaven-symbolizing the enduring values of justice and righteousness-although he and all his men will be killed, in dying they will earn eternal life. The irrationality of Lazar's inevitable choice has an extraordinarily compelling power: the sense of inner pride and dignity, the expansion of the spirit it offers cannot be argued away, denied, or contradicted. The elaboration of the myth was an integral part of the struggle for liberation from Ottoman rule and the emergence of the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro in the nineteenth century. What is important is that the universal values contained in the 'Kosovo idea' were appropriated as specific to the Serbian nation, and that its heroic, epic ideals became the core of the Serbs' sense of national identity. The process of adopting the mythic version of their past as the national history was made the more straightfoiward in that the populations of these territories were largely homogeneous: the classic work of nineteenth-century Serbian literature, The Mountain Wreath by the Montenegrin prince-bishop Petar Petrovic-1'ljegos, offers a vivid account of prevailing attitudes to local converts to Islam, suggesting in powerful verse that only their elimination can guarantee the survival of the Montenegrin people. The virtual absence of any physical trace of Ottoman rule in the territories that made up the states of Serbia and Montenegro in the second half of the nineteenth century is striking. In such a context it was possible for the mythic version of Serbian history described above to become rapidly established as the single truth, and invested, in addition, with a compelling moral dimension: any questioning of its truth was seen as tantamount to a betrayal of the most sacred national values. One crucial factor should be borne in mind in discussing this process: the men who led the uprisings in Serbia and became the leaders of the new state were themselves villagers, whose education and cultural experience were, initially at least, largely confined to the oral tradition. Thus, for example, the first nineteenth-century Serbian ruler, 21

Milos Obrenovic:', was illiterate and, while efforts were made to introduce as rapidly as possible political and cultural institutions based on those of the Habsburg lands, the general level of education available to the majority of the population until the end of the century was extremely low. The situation in Montenegro was still,more extreme: there the mountainous terrain continued· to prevent the development of more than a few small urban.centers, and the culture of the population at large remained deeply rooted in traditional values well into the twentieth century. In such circumstances, the cultural frame of reference which became identified with the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro was coherent and cohesive. The situation of the mixed population of Bosnia Herzegovina had always been more complex, and when the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy took over administration of the territory in 1878, and the centuries of Ottoman rule there came effectively to an end, the population had to adapt. Catholics tended naturally to look to their immediate neighbor, Catholic Croatia, for their cultural models, while the Orthodox population looked to Serbia. The Muslim inhabitants were left to come to terms with their specific situation, only gradually evolving a sense of their own identity and pride in their Islamic heritage. Needless to say, this heritage was at the very least problematic in a culture dominated by ideas of liberation from alien, Islamic rule. Speaking the same language as their Catholic and,0rthodox fellowcountrymen and cut off from the cultural centers of Islam, they too tended to look to their immediate neighbors, the Serbs and Croats, for their educational and cultural models.

Women and Language One characteristic feature of women's heritage in these lands is reflected in the fact that in Slavonidanguages, as in ancient Greek and Hebrew, the word for 'woman' is the same as the word for 'wife'. It is worth observing that on the eve of the United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in August-September 1995, one commentator observed that the explanation for the feminist movement in the

22

West was the fact that there were not enough available husbands. Had there been enough men for them to marry, ran the argument, Western women would have been content to be 'wives' and had no need to be 'women'. 9 When one reflects that it is not possible even to make this reactionary statement in Serbo-Croat, because 'women' are simply assumed to be 'wives' and have no acknowledged role in society if they are not, it is easy to understand something of the role of language and unspoken attitudes in determining cultural perceptions. It is precisely the assumptions which are contained in language and give meaning to experience which are the focus of this study. Since Foucault, the relationship between power and language has acquired a central place in contemporary thought. Feminist thinkers have also devoted much attention to the question of language in relation to the subordination of women. A characteristic formulation is that of Deborah Cameron: "The problem is that men control the processes by which meanings are encoded in language and therefore language represents only male experience, excluding 'female' meanings."10 Recent work in countering the essentialism of some feminist approaches of the 1970s has found the consideration of particular points of convergence and divergence with Foucault particularly fruitful in reaching a less simplified view of women's situation, chiefly by focusing on specific circumstances. 11 In this section I explore the particular way in which I believe attitudes to women were encoded in the Serbo-Croatian language at the time it was standardized in the nineteenth century. As far as the position of women is concerned in all these territories, the impact of the new circumstances of emerging nationhood is crucial. We have seen that their role at the center of the home was clearly defined within the framework of the traditional social structures which provided the basic organization of life for the majority of the population from the Middle Ages onwards. While they were undoubtedly viewed as inferior to men, women were invested with a positive value in traditional society which recognized the interdependence of women and men and in which the concept of motherhood was particularly powerful. The survival of traditional village communities well into the twentieth century and the collections of oral traditional culture offer abundant material for observa23

tion of the norms of behavior established for both women and men, which were fixed through ritual and custom and through the songs that accompanied all social activities. The growth of nationalism in the nineteenth century modified these traditional patterns by offering men new opportunities for action and investing such public activity with new value. Women's central role in the private sphere then acquired different associations, the concept of motherhood now assuming crucial significance for the future of the nation. In order to explore the question of the expression of power through language in relation to the region under discussion, we need to consider the particular circumstances in which the SerboCroat language was established as a creative medium in the nineteenth century. The codification of the language was carried out in the first half of the century by both Croats and Serbs, who signed a joint agreement on the standardization of their common language in Vienna in 1850. The essential work was done in Serbia by a man of peasant origin, Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, who based his grammar and dictionary systematically and exclusively on the language of the villages. It is important to bear in mind that it was just at this time (the first half of the nineteenth century) that the Serbs were engaged in an-ultimately successful-struggle for liberation from Ottoman rule. This context was bound to be reflected in language use, particularly in view of the Romantic insistence on the importance of the language of the 'common people' and the fact that the standardization was based on the language of the vigorous oral traditional literature: stories, proverbs, spells, riddles, and, above all, song. As we have seen, the tradition of singing in this region is divided into lyric songs, usually sung by women-and therefore also classified as 'women's' songs-and narrative, epic or 'heroic' songs, sung on the whole by men. Given the circumstances outlined above, both historical and cultural, it was inevitable that a special value should be placed on the 'heroic' songs which became such an active agent in emphasizing the virtues of resistance to the Ottoman Turks, faith in the Christian cause, and the inevitability of ultimate liberation. By contrast, the 'women's' songs, concerned with more universal, enduring values, are timeless and not susceptible to enlistment in a patriotic cause.

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The lyric songs accompany all aspects of the life cycle, on the individual and communal level: from births, deaths, and family relationships, to seasonal work on the land and all aspects of local ritual. They provide the essential aesthetic experience of the villagers throughout their lifetime. In the second half of the century, writers in the new standard language, with all its potent associations with village life, used the verse forms and diction of the lyric songs to express some of the concerns of European Romanticism. At this time, therefore, the lyric mode, with its insistence on personal, private experience, may be seen to have coexisted on equal terms with the values of the epic, creating a favorable environment for the development of rich and varied poetry concerned with a wide range of themes. By contrast, when the first women writers began to appear in Serbia in the nineteenth century, they tended to favor rousing, patriotic verse, far removed from traditional timeless ritual and responses to everyday experience. In the circumstances in which they were writing, seeking to participate fully in the historical moment, such women tended to avoid modes of expression which could be associated with a 'feminine' perspective. These women had absorbed the dominant ethos so completely that concern with the world of their personal emotions seemed trivial, unworthy of their new sense of their own dignity. We may therefore conclude that by the time the oral tradition began to fade out in the face of increased opportunities for education and the growth of towns, the scope for the creative use of language for women was limited. While it was acceptable for male Romantic poets to use lyric forms, for a long time women poets tended to be treated differently: if they wrote directly about their own emotions, their work was immediately labeled 'feminine', with all the negative connotations of a culture in which 'manly' qualities were particularly prized. Considerable energy and time were required to reestablish a literary vehicle for a distinct women's voice, one which could express individual female experience, unconstrained by public expectations. One of the aims of the current study is to examine the extent to which, in the context of a dominant nationalist ideology, women have been 'trapped' in a fundamentally male perception of their

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history, culture, and identity. I suggest that, while the tradition of oral lyric song had existed until the nineteenth century side-by-side with the epic, after that time, although aspects of its style were adopted by individual poets, the oral lyric tradition itself tended to be marginalized and seen as inferior. I believe that this came about because of the particular circumstances of nineteenth-century nation-building in southeast Europe, in which the epic tradition-and 'historical' songs in particular-were favored. Once the concern with the private realm of experience had been appropriated by individuals who molded it to express their own individual personalities, the anonymous collective voice of women as a counterweight to the epic, heroic mode began increasingly to be seen as of interest only to ethnographers and folklore specialists, and as no longer capable of informing mainstream culture. For all these reasons, the associations of phrases such as 'feminine style' and 'female voice' were therefore loaded with meaning when they were applied, almost inevitably, to each new woman writer to achieve public recognition, well into the twentieth century. It is my contention. that the mythic interpretation of history, while imposing constraints on all members of society in the region, constituted a particular burden for women. The nature of that burden may be observed in the case of the first significant Serbian woman writer of modern times, Milica Stojadinovic. When she began to write in the early nineteenth century, she had evidently completely internalized the role laid down for her as a Serbian woman. Indeed, she was seen as such an embodiment of this role that the word for 'a Serbian woman'-'Srpkinja'-with which she signed her first published poems soon became inextricably attached to her name, and she is known in literary history as Milica Sto_jadinovic-Srpkinja. In my opinion, there is little doubt that her most important work is the diary she wrote in 1854 which also includes some letters to friends and fellow writers. As we shall see in greater detail in Chapter 4, the diary and letters are written in a fresh, lively, and at times witty style which suggests a real literary talent. It is therefore greatly to be regretted that Stojadinovic did not take this aspect of her work more seriously; no doubt she saw it as the musings of a 'mere woman' and believed that her true voca-

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tion and duty were to write rousing but mediocre patriotic verse. Her wholehearted acceptance of her role as 'a Serbian woman' as defined in the prevailing culture therefore had the effect of suppressing her real talent and confining her to the margins of literary history. The publicly accepted model of womanhood, as it was understood and accepted by Stojadinovic, is clearly expressed in a smvey of the history of Serbian women published in the first issue of a magazine called Serbian Woman which appeared in Sarajevo in 1912. The author is a certain Olga Kernic-Peles from Trebinje in Herzegovina. I quote almost the complete text because it seems to me to encapsulate the interpretation of Serbian history and women's role in it which I am seeking to describe:

Serbian Woman From time immemorial, the Balkan lands have been bathed in blood. Their position as a peninsula between two large, different worlds, between two contradictory cultures, has made them an eternal battlefield, where the sound of clashing weapons and shattered lances never ceased. The shores of the peninsula were plundered by pirates. Its soil rang with the hoofbeats of Alexander the Great's Bucephalus, it was trampled by the armies of Xerxes, Pompey's legions celebrated their victories there. Throughout human history, the Balkan peninsula was the stage of endless bloody changes, stormy games of fate and great stmggles for hegemony. The battlefield of east and west. With the sixth century, it became the condition of life of our Serbian history; it became the center of our homeland. The plow started to furrow through the exhausted, blood-soaked fields, white flocks to graze in the fresh green meadows, ancl the sound of the shepherd's flute began to echo over it, together with rich songs from young girls' throats. That was the time when the peace-loving Slav peoples moved south, under pressure from the Mongol hordes, seeking peaceful, happy harbors, a fruitful, fertile homeland. And the warlike agitation ceased immediately, for the Slavs sought happiness in labor, to the sound of the gus/,e and tl1e tamlmra, 12 witl1 song and music, with the plow and hoe. Gentle and peaceful, they wished to live in peace witJ1 all tlieir neighbors. They greeted all guests witli bread and salt, no matter who they were. The Serbs were of that blood, tliat tribe, and at tl1e end of the sixth and beginning of the seventh century tliey covered a large part of the Balkan peninsula ...

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And just as the whole Slav nation was clearly differentiated from the Latin, Germanic and Asiatic peoples, so the Serbs as a tribe stood out among the other Slavs. Peace-loving, but decisive, ambitious and self-willed, the Serb cared above all for his honor, loving justice and truth. He was unused and unwilling to be enslaved; nor did he show himself to others otherwise from what he was. Honest, sincere, reliable, faithful to his friends, for whom he would spill his own blood. Ever vengeful to his enemy, he was also magnanimous and patient. For honor and liberty, his own life was never too high a price to pay. Family life was sacred to the Serb, his wife was his support, his honor, and in this the Serb competed with the powerful Roman, for the Romans were the first and only people in their day to care for the family and give women an honorable place in the family and society. In the tradition of Serbian history, Serbian woman was thus always an important member of the family, and in this way she had significant influence also on public life. The Serbian people were not able to lead their lives in their homeland in natural unconcern for the rest of the great world. They too had to raise their heads from the plow, to rouse themselves from their pastoral peace and defend their borders, to stop their enemies from ravaging and burning their hearths. The power and might of the Arabs swept through Europe. The Balkans were the first victim, and the Serbs the only bulwark. At arms, day and night, with no pause or rest. In blood and slaughter, they struggled, fought, suffered for the holy cross and golden liberty. They rose to eagles' heights, they grew and advanced to the extent of mighty Dusan's empire. Then at Kosovo they broke their spears and buried freedom for many long years, bowing their heads beneath a foreign yoke. But again their strength grew, they shook themselves, and rose to wear a royal crown! All of that entailed great sacrifice, violent, bloody battle. The whole history of the Serbs is written in blood, but in it there are also golden words, and those golden words in Serbian history are the shining names of Serbian women. In earlier times, Serbian women were peaceful, they wrote their love of their homeland and their shepherd's life with their embroidery needles in the living patterns of their traditional motifs. By the hearth, beside the cradle, a woman was the happy spirit of her home. The people sang about her in their songs and swore by her name. And when the bloody times of battle and slaughter came, the woman stepped out of her family circle. She accompanied the armies to battle, tended their wounds, fed the wounded heroes with white bread and gave them red wine to drink. The people immortalized her in the song about the Maid of Kosovo. 13

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Mothers would see their sons off to battle with song, encouraging them, emboldening them, bequeathing us the eternal symbol of the Mother of the Jugovici, 14 and beside her then as today there were countless others. And how wisely and thoughtfully did Serbian women wear the royal _crown and help the armies under their rule-we have examples in Queen Milica, the Lady Rosanda, and PrincessJerina. 15 And how ready were Serbian women to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the homeland may be seen in the example of lovely Mara, the daughter of Prince Lazar, who married Bajazit, the son of her people's enemy ... And when the Serbian people, in the darkness of their enslavement, took to the green hills to avenge their honor as highwaymen, then too Serbian women played their part. They would clothe and equip the men, bring them food, hide them in the woods, say nothing and in their homes nourish their hawks of sons, their doves of daughters and nm their houses as though they were men ... Our traditional songs bear living witness to the way Serbian woman loved in the confines of her home, her family, among her kin and friends ... And in our modern, enlightened times, Serbian woman has remained true to the people's traditions, stepping out beside her people, caring for their honor, loving her homeland. Many a Serbian woman has earned her people's gratitude through the gifts of her mind and heart, her generous hand, with bequests and by the pen. Today too they stand in the first ranks in the cultured world. In science, in art, in carrying out important callings, you will find Serbian women ready, conscious and agile, so that the world must admire them. And here is this first issue of a journal plucked from the heart of Serbian woman, her first hot tear illuminated by her quick mind, her first thought filled with the fire of warm love of her homeland, her first wish imbued with living hope, it is being dispatched to all the cherished regions of the brotherly Serbian nation, to bear witness that in the future also Serbian woman will step out in honor and pride, caring for her faith, loving her people, and that, by her hearth, by the cradle, with her spindle and cooking pot, with her book and pen, she will know how to protect her honor, nurture her strength, character, the pure, fresh life of work and sacrifice for the sake of her Serbian people. 'Serbian Woman', therefore, go forth with the sacred, great idea of enlightening and strengthening in the first place the Serbian family, and then Serbian society and the homeland, all imbued with holy faith in God and hope in a happy, enlightened, industrious future, and from you, dear people, Serbian women shall hope for love and response. 16

It should be borne in mind that this text was written at the time of the Balkan Wars, when it was natural enough that the prowess of the 29

Serbian people as warriors should be stressed and the accepted, 'processed' account of their history foregrounded. Nevertheless, as a piece of writing which is essentially a statement of pride in the role of women in both history and contemporary achievements, the extent to which its author accepts the secondary, supportive role assigned them is revealing. One curious detail is perhaps particularly worthy of attention: in the short paragraph describing the "modern, enlightened times", the author uses the phrase "stepping out beside her people", 17 as though women were not in fact an integral part of the people, but somehow outside them, playing a secondary, supportive role. Is this not a true reflection of the way in which women in this culture, as in so many others, arc also perceived to be outside history? Where named individual characters are known and mentioned, as in this text, they occur in a limited number of clearly defined roles, and, strikingly, several of the named 'individuals' in such accounts are in fact fictitious figures from the oral epic tradition. What is of particular interest, I believe, is the discrepancy between the real achievements, the educational, cultural, and intellectual status of women of the generation of the author of this text and her acceptance of the mythic account of her people's history. This discrepancy vividly illustrates both the pervasive power of such interpretations and my contention in this study that it has represented a special burden for women in their search to find their own voice to express their own personal experience. What is more striking still is that after all the advances of the interwar period, when a considerable number of women achieved a prominent position in the intellectual life of their country, they were still unable to exert any influence on the accepted, generalized account of their role: it remained possible for them simply to be absorbed into it. An illustration of this is provided by the following brief statement, an account of the contribution of women to Serbian literary culture, which appeared in an anthology of Serbian women poets published in 1972. The volume was dedicated to Isidora Sekulic, one of the few women writers of the period between the two world wars to be acknowledged in the literary canon. The volume opens with some tributes to Sekulic by six established writers and 30

critics, including the novelist and academician Dobrica Casie, who was president of Yugoslavia (1993-94) at the height of nationalist fervor and the Bosnian war: In our history, in our collective inheritance and memory, the hero-woman has stood firm; the woman who has identified her destiny with that of our fatherland ... The arches of our history have stretched from the Mother of the Jugovici to the exploits of women revolutionaries and Partisan heroes, from the nun Jefimija 18 to Isidora Seknlic, from the young Gojkovic girI 19 to our contemporaries-in the span of these arches, Isidora Sekulic has a place visible from afar: she has entered our culture in her own way, honorably, encluringly. 20

When we come to consider the work of Isidora Sekulic in Chapter 6 it will become clear that there is nothing in her writing, or in her own intellectual status or interests-those of a sophisticated individual widely read in many different cultures-to justify the extraordinary juxtaposition of her name with those of fictitious characters from the oral tradition. As it could not have occurred to Casie to make such an analogy between Sekulic's contemporary male writers and even the greatest of the legendary heroes, I believe that the degree of conformity to a pre-ordained pattern expected of women was far greater than for their male compatriots and that it constituted the trap or burden I am seeking to describe. As we look at the specific achievements of women in the area of verbal art in these lands, I believe that we shall find a range of experience and its expression that is altogether richer, more individual, and more original than is suggested by the pervasive perception articulated by Dobrica Casie.

Notes 1 Vukovic, Narodni obicaji, verovanja i poslovice kod Srba, 272. 2 Stojicic, Sjaj razgovora. Leksikon s-,pskih narodnih izreka, 185. 3 Vukanovic, Srj,ske narodne poslovice, 66-68. 4 Anderson and Zinsser, A Histary of Their Own, xv. 5 Emmert, Serbian Golgotha: Kosovo, 1389.

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6 Emmert, 82. 7 Orbini, It Regno degli Slavi. 8 Koljevic, The Epic in the Making, 320. 9 Quoted in The Guardian (August 1995). 10 Cameron, Feminism and Lingnistic Theory, 116. 11 McNay, Foucault and Feminism. 12 Traditional musical instruments. 13 A character from the epic songs connected with the Battle of Kosovo. See Chapter 2. 14As above. 15 Medieval historical figures. See Chapter 3. 16 Kernic-Peles, 13. 17 'Uz narod' in the original. 18 One of the few women in medieval Serbia to have written poetic texts. See Chapter 3. 19 Another character from the oral tradition. 20 Radovanovic, Antologija srpskih pesnikinja od]efimije do danas. See Chapter 7.

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A lovely young lassie once asked Of the blacksmith in her home town: "I beg you, with all your great skill To forge me a hero of gold." When I was a maid in my mother's house, I lived like a hen fed on corn! But when I married my sweetheart, The very first morning he cursed me! The second day his mother reproached me: "If you were good, you would not have come!"

The third day I left his house, And found for myself another! 1

This chapter is concerned with two main areas of interest: the portrayal of women's roles in the oral traditional literature, and what may be concluded about the contribution of individual women singers to the tradition. The corpus for the first part of the investigation is provided by the shorter lyric songs, whose singers are generally unknown and which, in any case, do not vary greatly from one singer to another. By contrast, the second section will focus on the somewhat longer ballads and those epic songs known to have been recorded from particular women singers. It was clear as soon as systematic collections of songs began to be made that they fell into two broad categories: first, songs sung, generally in groups, to accompany different activities and aspects of village life, and second, those sung by known singers to an attentive audience and taking the form of stories. As we have seen, because the songs in the first group tend to be sung by women and those in the second are, in the main, concerned with heroic actions, the initial distinction made by Vuk Karadzic-the most important collector 33

in the nineteenth century-was between 'women's songs' and 'heroic songs'. This terminological imbalance is both interesting and typical: there is a pervasive sense in which the things that women do and sing about are perceived as qualitatively different from the 'action' of men. The categories were later redefined as 'lyric' and 'epic', which are more neutral terms, but something of the underlying distinction remains, and with it the relative value that tends to be associated with each genre. The vast body of short lyric songs fulfills several functions in village life: a first group marks the seasons of the year and associated rituals-songs greeting the arrival of spring, rain songs, carnival songs, and so on, and their Christian adaptations, such as Easter songs and Christmas carols; a second group consists of songs to accompany communal tasks, such as harvesting or spinning; finally, a third group

A Cairn (Gomila)

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is made up of songs marking the crucial stages in individual liveswedding songs, lullabies and laments, toasts, and songs to accompany dancing. In all categories, some of the songs contain echoes of ancient pagan ritual and mythological beings; these traces of many different layers of belief give them a particular resonance. They may thus be regarded as reflecting an inclusive attitude to historical experience, a means by which the community may recall its past and keep elements of it alive. Where events brought frequent, abrupt interruptions to a steady historical development, the traditional oral literature absorbed the new with the old, preserving layers of the past in increasingly mysterious, barely decipherable codes which hint at other experiences, other levels of existence. The same is true of the epic songs, but since it is of their nature to describe extraordinary events, these longer songs are less part of the fabric of everyday life than the lyric songs. There is an additional distinction to be made, between the shorter lyric songs and the longer narrative songs sung by women, first identified in the nineteenth century as 'in-between songs' or 'songs on the borderline', and later as 'ballads' and 'romances'. This will be discussed in more detail below.

Lyric Songs Being so much a part of daily life, the shorter lyric songs have a common purpose: to strengthen the bonds of family and village life, to root individuals firmly in the community. In so doing, they establish clear guidelines of acceptable behavior and warn against deviations. Their material tends to be generalized, and where characters are named they are given typical names, which do not refer to a specific individual, or else characters are simply identified by their function in the community, as 'youth', 'maiden', 'mother-in-law', and so on. The ballads and epic songs, on the other hand, describe unusual destinies: they are tales of individuals who have in one way or another stepped outside social norms and so earned a place in the collective memory. In keeping with this distinction, the shorter lyric 35

songs are less subject to change. This is in part because their brevity makes them more easily memorized and reproduced, but also because in many cases their ritual function requires that they retain exactly the same form. They may indeed be considered 'communal' in origin, because their original composers have been obscured by the passage of time and they have acquired their established form through centuries-long use by innumerable performers, many of whom are, in any case, groups. It is partly for this reason that the short lyric songs have been accorded far less scholarly attention than the longer forms. Once their function in the village year has been described and some attention given to the time, place, and manner of their collection, scholars have not seen much more to analyze. The scant attention they have received contrasts strikingly with that given to the epic songs, for which the bibliography of both local and foreign works is substantial.2 Two scholars in particular have contributed to an understanding of the nature and function of the lyric songs: Vladan Nedic" and, more recently, Hatidfa Krnjevic", who has taken on the task of highlighting the imbalance which characterizes scholarly attention in respect of the lyric and epic songs. Nedic was the editor of the standard anthology of lyric songs, and he introduced a precise system of categorization into their discussion. The first group he identifies contains songs which convey "a pagan sense of life", and includes ritual songs accompanying the seasons, the largest number being sung in spring and summer, when there were numerous rituals associated with the phases of the moon (often connected with the appearance of particular flowers). There is a separate category of 'devout' songs, in which Nedic includes both mythological and Christian content, a group of 'work songs', andthe most numerous category-love songs. The last category he identifies is of particular interest for our purposes: his 'family songs' group includes two sub-groups: 'soldiers' songs' and songs about men who have had to go far away to find work. These two groups highlight one way in which the destiny of men in the villages is differentiated from that of women: as with the heroic songs, they describe a life of 'action', to which the women's only possible response is to lament 36

the men's departure and anxiously to await their return. It is worth noting that, while the hardships entailed by this 'male' destiny have often been highlighted, the potential pain of the woman's position has not been given much attention: it is the inevitable fate of young girls who marry that they will move, often considerable distances, away from their families, and of mothers that they will have to watch their daughters leave. While there are many songs which describe the misery of a young girl being married against her will, such destinies are so commonplace that Nedic evidently did not feel it appropriate to accord them a special category. Hatidfa Krnjevic, whose important work in endeavoring to give the lyric songs more prominence was begun in the 1980s, stresses the intrinsic significance of the lyric tradition in the contrast it offers to complement the epic: Should the role that lyric folk song plays in our lives, in the broadest sense, be overlooked? After all, it is an organic part of human life, an art form that accompanies human actions from birth till death, from lullabies to lamentations. Oral lyric song contains the reality of everyday life and work, an entire galaxy outside the interests of epic singers. It also touches deeper layers of the human psyche: it has given form to man's primeval fear and impotence in the face of the miracle of the elemental energy of nature, and the mystery of the cycle of birth and death. Lyric songs do not speak of the glory of epic heroes from the past, they mold the inner life of human emotions and situations, both permanent and significant for all people and through all times. Lyric song is a form of the single universal language of humankind-as Erich Fromm defined the forgotten language of symbols ... What would our oral tradition be like if it contained only the monotonous sound of heroic hyperbole of the epic songs without the soft lyric melody that sings of both the beauty and the tragedy of man's short stay on earth? Heroic times are the past, the lyric is always the present. 3

This statement goes to the heart of our concerns in this book, notably the way in which the lyric songs have been marginalized precisely because they deal with the everyday, whereas their role in giving meaning to the everyday should be both celebrated for the aesthetic dimension it thereby introduces and analyzed to reveal the nature of that meaning. It is precisely the distinction that Krnjevic 37

makes between the respective roles of the 'heroic' and 'lyric' forms that is the main concern of the present study. The portrayal of family relationships in South Slav oral poetry-with particular emphasis on the position of women-is dealt with in a valuable work by Elka Agoston-Nikolova. 4 It represents a new approach to a familiar body of songs, 5 which is both refreshing and illuminating. Much of Agoston-Nikolova's attention is devoted to what she sees as the inherent conflict characterizing the place of the woman within the patriarchal family: "on the one hand, she is an outsider, coming from another family or clan, on the other hand, she embodies the reproductive life-giving force that keeps the family together. She is inferior to men in physical prowess, yet superior when in touch with the mystery of life. She is at once weak and strong, simple and mysteriously complicated." 6 "Women are of primary importance as both subject and object-the life force ensuring reproductiveness of the clan and at the same time the valued object of possession." 7 As Agoston-Nikolova sees it, the main conflict stems from the fact that the woman is 'foreign'-her loyalty to the family has to be proved. Women coming from outside are a potentially disruptive element in that they may cause tension between family members, particularly brothers. She draws attention to the hierarchical structure of norms in South Slav culture, where kinship ties are the foundation of the unity of the family and 'the folk'. Blood-ties represent the strongest bond: "wives, no matter how loyal to the family, are placed on a lower level than other female family members". 8 As if this were not enough to make the new wife's position difficult, there is in addition a prevailing belief in South Slav culture-expressed in many of the traditional proverbs-that women are not to be trusted; they are seen as easily beguiled and intrinsically deceitful. Agoston-Nikolova stresses the central role of women in Balkan Slav oral traditional poetry, but suggests that they tend to appear in one of two conflicting roles: the mother who sacrifices herself for her child or the treacherous wife who betrays her husband. AgostonNikolova points to an important early example of the double standard still familiar in our own day: "Why is it that throughout the 38

patriarchal culture represented in Balkan Slav oral narrative poetry, women transgress codes and are therefore severely punished, while the male heroes are never punished for their amoral behavior but are gently set straight?" 9 Agoston-Nikolova considers various family relationships as they are presented in the songs, focusing on the mother as the central figure in the lyric songs of the Balkan Slavs. She stresses that the mother's ties with her daughter are particularly close: the degree of the sorrow of parting from a mother on marriage may be gauged from the fact that lament songs sung at funerals often form part of the wedding ceremony, too. Another important relationship is that of brother and sister, which offers scope for emphasizing the primacy of blood-ties, the security of the clan against intrnders from outside. There is an important sense in which the lyric songs may be described as 'active', in their role in shaping an ideal orderly strncture of life, and in their function as a way of rethinking and recreating reality. As we have seen, this function has been discussed in relation to the epic songs by Svetozar Koljevic, 10 and described as "a way of coming to terms with history": the epic songs may offer a way of coming to terms with the major events of history, but it is the lyric songs which deal with the enduring effects of those events on the daily lives of ordinary people. As such they provide the essential context for absorbing the more dramatic themes. I should now like to turn to my own investigation of the lyric songs for the purposes of this study and to describe my main findings. In the context of the familiar roles imposed on women by patriarchal societies in general-and by the zadruga system in particular-I was looking for evidence of conformity to those models and possible deviations from them. The overwhelming sense I derive from a thorough reading of the lyric songs collected by Vuk Karadzic is of the constraints of everyday life and the various means devised by the imagination for escaping them. 11 The most radical forms of outlet are, for men, heroic action and, for women, magic. Apart from those extremes, it is striking that the great majority of the songs deal with love, set in the period between adolescence and marriage when there is still scope for dreaming. Altogether, the uncertainty sur-

39

rounding love and marriage, the possibility of choice, introduces an element which contrasts with the stability of family life. Several songs describe a young woman exercising real choice, which it is hard to imagine ever being possible in real life: for example, 'Girl for Sale' tells of a girl who rejects all her wealthy would-be purchasers in favor of a clean-shaven, comely youth with nothing to offer apart from a green apple. 12 Dreams are within the reach of all young people, but in reality choice is strictly limited by parental will: many of the songs, including some of the finest ballads, describe the tragic end of lovers whose parents have selected a spouse for them who is not the choice of their heart. It is striking that the opposition comes almost invariably from mothers, whose role is central in the whole tradition, whereas fathers play very little part-male characters have numerous roles in the tradition: they can be kings, knights, warriors, heroes, faithful servants, master-builders, outlaws and bandits, and brothers, but they are rarely seen as fathers. Female characters, on the other hand, are generally designated by their relationship to a man: as sister, wife, sweetheart, daughter, and, above all, mother. The emphasis on this unsettling stage in the lives of young people, as they prepare to change their status from offspring to parents of the next generation, serves to highlight the stability of the family unit as a factor of control in an individual's life. The desirability of such stability is unquestioned, but there is sufficient evidence in the songs of individual unhappiness within the family to suggest that the reality was often far from the harmonious picture presented by the tradition as a whole. Thus, some songs describe bad relations between sisters, the torment of marriage to a dnmkard, betrayal by a brother or aunt, and, worst of all, a faithless mother. It is certain that one of the main, if unconscious, aims of the tradition is cohesive: by emphasizing the value of communal life and action, it strengthens the bonds on which the social structure depends. The songs depict an intricate web of social norms and expectations, operating on many different levels of experience and covering all aspects of the life of the community. The image conveyed by the songs, particularly those sung on occasions of collective endeavorwhether to accompany work or to mark the seasons of the year-is 40

thus one of harmony, of a community sensitive to and in tune with both its individual members and the natural world. But the unspoken obverse of this picture is the implication of constraint: an individual seeking to follow her or his own path is inevitably seen as opposed to the community and therefore a threat. As Agoston-Nikolova stresses in her study, the arrival of an 'outsider' in the form of a new bride introduces just such an element of threat: she must be controlled and absorbed into the existing community as rapidly as possible so that the threat of disruption may be neutralized. Once she has been absorbed into the patriarchal family, or when she reaches a certain age within it, the young woman may express her individuality through her ability to perform the role allotted to her. And there is scope in the world of joint endeavor even for the expression of superiority: in several songs, young men and women are shown working together, with the girls outdoing the boys. A typical example is 'A lad and lass compete in harvesting', in which the young man cuts 23 stooks of corn and the young woman 24. At dinner, the young man drinks 23 glasses of wine, the girl 24. "When in the morning the white day dawned,/The lad lay, unable to stir or raise his head,/while the lass was sewing fine embroidery."13 Such prowess, however, does not afford the young woman any real advantage and she is obliged to rely on her wit, as shown by another song in the same group, 14 in which the boy promises the girl a flock of sheep if she outdoes him, while if he wins the girl herself will be his prize. The girl cuts 303 stooks to the boy's 202, but when she asks for her sheep, he replies that she has nowhere to keep them. The girl responds realistically-in keeping with the words of an English folksong, "my face is my fortune, sir, she said"-that she has a green meadow in her fine hair, water in the clear springs of her black eyes, and shade enough under her eyebrows. The woman is, in other words, left to rely on her appearance, her guile, and her intelligence rather than on the acquisition of material possessions. Many of the shorter lyric songs offer examples of women's limited opportunities for the expression of individuality. For the most part, however, they emphasize the homogeneity of the group, its collective function. 41

Peasant woman from near Bihac, Bosnia

42

The main paths open to individuals for the expression of their free will, as illustrated in the lyric songs, are heroism, magic, and love. This last category includes unsentimental sex-there is a substantial body of erotic song in the tradition. These songs are generally described as 'women's songs', as for example the volume of translations Red Knight. 15 Much has been made of the role of the women singers of such songs in subverting social norms-while the songs themselves are certainly subversive, it is more likely that they were composed by male singers as a kind of wish-fulfillment, depicting the way they would have liked the village women to sing. In this scheme, stories of heroism and magic are clearly outside the realm of the everyday; they express what may be seen as archetypes of qualities to which ordinary mortals may only aspire. The question of the supernatural female character-the vila or 'nymph' in the South Slav oral tradition-is a particularly fascinating one. Since there is no equivalent male spirit, it would seem that the vila came into being to express what may be termed a 'female' principle in South Slav culture which acts as a counterbalance to the emphasis on the archetypal 'manly' virtues of heroism and physical prowess. One of the most intriguing aspects of the phenomenon is the fact that, while real women were confined to tightly controlled roles, with very limited freedom of action, the vila, embodying the unrestrained female spirit, has absolute power. But, of course, she exists only in the imagination. Another-unanswerable-question is that of the origin of the songs: who composed these stories of unlimited female power? Can they be interpreted as either an instinctive desire for balance, evenhandedness, or even vengeance? Or are they simply an acknowledgment of the fearsome power of sexuality and, by extension, of women? In the shorter lyric songs the power of the vila is frequently enlisted for some quite innocent purpose: the song 'The vila's blood-sister' describes a young girl granted exceptional beauty by a vila, who crows with delight at her handiwork. 16 The notion of 'bloodsisterhood' is itself an interesting concept: the idea of 'bloodbrotherhood' among men is widespread in South Slav culturegenerally to guarantee support in dangerous exploits-but 'blood43

sisterhood' between powerless women would be of less obvious benefit to either party. Except, that is, when it enables an earthly being to tap into the potency of a magical one. This song also seems to suggest that some women's beauty is experienced as so powerful, indeed dangerous, as to be supernatural. In another song, 'The maid and the vila' ,17 a young girl is concerned about her sweetheart who is out in the rain in his fine clothes, but the vila stretches a silk tent over him to protect him. This is a rare example of an ordinary girl finding an ally in a cause in which she would otherwise be powerless. Several songs embody extreme instances of wish-fulfillment, such as 'The Sun's sister and the tyrant pasha', 18 in which the pasha sends for the strange girl whose magical beauty he has heard about, but she thwarts him by summoning three thunderbolts from her sister, the Sun, her cousin, the Moon, and her blood-sister, the Morning Star. Sometimes the girls have no magical power as such, but are seen to be in league with natural forces, such as thunderbolts, in a way that implies that women have mysterious otherworldly connections. On the other hand, a wily man can use the excuse of the vila's power to explain his idleness: 'The bitten shepherd' cannot guard his sheep because he has been bitten by a vila, abetted by his mother and his aunt, with both of whom she is-naturally, due to her female naturein league.1 9 Apart from the exceptional case of the vila, the world of women evoked in these songs is generally one of strictly dictated behavioral norms. The young girl has no appreciable status in her own home and little scope for her energies, other than to help around the house and property. Some songs eloquently evoke this boredom, in which the girl dreams of independence and economic power. There are hints that it may have been possible for some to acquire at least the elements of literacy: in one song, a lover of many years announces that he is to marry another because she is taller and prettier and has all sorts of skills; however, she cannot read, so he asks his old love to come and help her learn! There is a dubious moral message in this song, as the long-standing mistress has four illegitimate sons. Does this mean that learning-that is, stepping outside strict behavioral norms-is equated with loose living? Until marriage, the young

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girl is more or less a commodity, to be offered to the most appropriate suitor, often an older man. The bride's role is essentially to bear sons and keep house, and she is often the target of her husband's irrational humors. This pattern is constant across the social hierarchy, as may be seen in one song which consists of a conversation between two apparently privileged women comparing their essentially similar experiences: their lords may kiss them when they will, but they may just as readily strike them. The most terrible curse that can be pronounced on a woman is one that also sums up her social position: may she not bear a male child and, if she does, may he go to war and only his horse return. Many songs itemize the functions a wife is expected to fulfill-providing a dowry for the benefit of the whole household; bringing water and wine to her husband as he works; or holding his horse as he prepares to depart for battle. One song offers an extreme account of a woman's common fate: in 'A husband more compelling than a mother' ,20 the young wife has been separated from her mother for nine years and finally sets out to visit her. On the way, the news is brought to her of the death of one of her two daughters, then that of her two sons, and, finally, of her husband. She returns home, where she dies of grief, without ever having seen her mother. This song encapsulates a woman's torn allegiance between the home of her childhood and her new family, and her utter dependence on others for her happiness. A gentler evocation of woman's lot is reflected in a song advising people not to give flowers to married women because they have no time to care for themonly young maidens will be able to put them in water. Hard as a woman's life may be, however, the songs are far from painting a relentlessly dark picture. On the contrary, there are many which depict happiness in marriage, sexual fulfillment, and contentment, even as an abducted bride. All in all, these lyric songs of varying length offer a remarkably complex and many-faceted account of village life and interpersonal relationships which constantly slips through the web of social conventions and constraints to give a sense of individual personalities and destinies. Many short songs are, in effect, little ballads, which together cover a vast range of themes and emotions. 45

Ballads and Romances The large group of longer narrative songs generally described as ballads and romances deserves special attention. While the same basic story may be played out by characters with different names from song to song, they are nevertheless about named individuals whose destinies are unusual and memorable and felt to be worthy of being immortalized through song. Many of the ballads were recorded in Bosnia Herzegovina and have a Muslim frame of reference. But while such songs originated in a Muslim context, they have been absorbed by the wider Bosnian population. Among the mixed population of this region there may thus be seen to have been a sense of sharing in a common culture. It was one of the songs in this category, 'The Wife of Hasan-Aga' (Hasanaginica), that first caught the imagination of Europe, initiating a sustained interest in the oral traditional poetry of the South Slavs. It is therefore of considerable interest that, with some notable exceptions, these songs are not given greater prominence in anthologies and studies of the tradition. Why is it that songs concerned with action, with historical events, and their interpretation should receive so much more attention than songs which may be equally dramatic, but whose focus is the tensions and conflicts in relations between individuals? Answering this question is one of the main concerns of this study. The reaction of mid-nineteenth century Western Europe to the South Slav songs is instructive. The first prominent figure to respond to the publication of the ballad 'The Wife of Hasan-Aga' was Goethe, and the attention of such an outstanding poet did much to stimulate widespread interest in the tradition. But several commentators confirm that it was the lyric songs and ballads which appealed to Goethe, and not the songs of 'heroic' action. There is little doubt that more has been written about 'The Wife of Hasan-Aga' than about any other song in the South Slav oral tradition: there have been articles in many languages and a whole volume of essays has been compiled to cast light on this song, which is short and has an incomplete, fragmentary quality. 21 There are many reasons for the enduring interest the song has stimulated, one of which

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is precisely its sketchy, unfinished nature, which allows scope for the listener's imagination. The central conflict in the song is provided by the relations between a husband and wife and the constraints set upon their spontaneous affection by social custom. As Hasan lies wounded in his tent near the battlefield, he is tended by his mother and sister. But he wants his wife, although he knows that the custom of his society will not permit a woman unrelated by blood publicly to visit a man in such circumstances. Irrationally, but deeply hurt by her failure to attend him, Hasan sends word to his wife that he is divorcing her and that he should not find her at home on his return. His wife has no say in the matter and, despite her pleas, her brother arranges another marriage for her and comes to take her away. As she passes Hasan's house on her way to the wedding, her children come running out and ask her in. It is when she sees her baby that her heart breaks and she dies on the doorstep of what had been her home. The song suggests, rather than describes, a deep bond between two individuals, whose spontaneous expression is curtailed by the demands of social custom and as such it identifies an enduring tension between society and the individual. Furthermore, there is an understated dimension of social history in that Hasan and his wife come from different social strata, with the wife belonging to a somewhat higher level-this may also account for the speed with which her brother arranges the second, more advantageous, match for his sister. In addition-and most importantly-it evokes the potential for catastrophe inherent in such human qualities as pride and defiance, attributes which may be deemed 'heroic' in another context, but which are misplaced in interpersonal relationships. This is, of course, the kind of tension that lies at the heart of much classical tragedy. The song may thus be seen to offer a dense texture with resonance on several different levels of human experience. It has lent itself to expansion and adaptation into different media, such as drama, and it could well form the basis for elaboration into a novel. This raises a central question of this study, that of the status of the 'heroic mode' on a scale of values as they are reflected in the most complex and potentially subtle literary form, the novel. Tales of heroic deeds have their place in fiction, of course. But it is arguably the pages describ47

ing intricate human relationships in Tolstoy's War and Peace that lodge in the imagination, rather than the accounts of battlefield action. I want to suggest that this difference of emphasis is also reflected in the contrasting 'heroic songs' and 'lyric ballads'. The other ballad that has secured a privileged place in anthologies and school textbooks is 'Omer and Merima'-here again, the names of the protagonists bear witness to its Muslim origin-an archetypal tale of thwarted love and ensuing tragedy which has become a standard theme in West European culture. There are many songs with similar subjects in the South Slav tradition. Generally speaking, in these songs the focus is on the young couple and their personal tragedy, so that the reasons for their being denied permission to marry are not emphasized: there is rarely an objective barrier such as a family feud of the 'Romeo and Juliet' type, or different ethnicity, although this does occur. As a rule, the obstacle is simply that the bride preferred by the groom's parents can offer a more substantial dowry. The songs focus initially on the young man, since he and his family are the active agents in the drama. Objection to the marriage of the young man's choice is then embodied in the mother, who is the appropriate channel of communication for such domestic matters. In the majority of songs, the young man declares his firm attachment to the girl of his choice, no matter how superior in beauty, height, and wealth his mother's choice may be, maintaining that his determination to follow his heart is unassailable. One can imagine at this point that had the father been the one to try to impose his will on a stubborn son the outcome might be quite different, with the son continuing to assert himself and defy his father. As it is, however, the mother is able to wield an irresistible weapon by reminding her son of his duty to the one who gave him life and fed him with the milk of her breast. Faced with this agonizing conflict of loyalties, the son must acknowledge the imperative of the ultimate blood-tie and the superior force of his mother's claim. He therefore agrees to the marriage of her choice, but once he has fulfilled his obligation by going through with the ceremony, he once more feels free to follow the dictates of his own heart, either killing himself or dying of grief. His death is followed by that of his true love and the strength of their affection is acknowledged 48

by nature as the plants growing on their respective graves entwine. The different ethos characterizing 'heroic songs' and 'lyric ballads' is starkly revealed by the fact that in the former, when a son is faced with the choice of responding to his mother's private plea for him to stay by her side rather than go to battle, where he is sure to perish, and of acceding to the public demand for obedience to his country's call to arms, the mother's claim has no force. In addition to the songs' function as effective vehicles of communal bonding and determinants of behavioral norms they have another, purely aesthetic, purpose in the life of the village. In this dimension, a particularly important part is played by flowers, which also symbolize the close bond between human life and the natural world. The sense of an aesthetic dimension is cultivated, above all by women, in all aspects of the life of the village-particularly in the intricate embroidery that decorates the traditional costume-and traditional singing is a vital part of this. One other group of songs deserves attention: these are songs which developed on the basis of the lyric tradition but in an urban environment, particularly in Bosnia Herzegovina. Although they have lost their association with women's singing, they should be mentioned as they were originally part of that tradition. They are of particular interest, however, because, in the different cultural environment of Bosnia Herzegovina, their intense lyricism does not necessarily mean that they carry connotations of 'femininity'. These songs are known as sevdalinke, from the Arabic word sawda (black, black bile) by way of the Turkish sevda (love). The word acquired a final 'h' in Serbo-Croat and the concept 'sevdah' became part of the culture, particularly in those areas where the Turkish presence lasted longest and where there was a significant local Muslim population. The word is hard to define precisely, containing as it does both the pleasurable idea of love and the experience of 'black' melancholy often associated with it. The literary historian Muhsin Rizvic describes it in the following terms: "Our 'sevdah' is in fact as passionate and painful as it is melancholic, sweet longing ... when the pain of love can no longer be borne and is lost in an ecstasy of emotional intoxication which borders on dying; pain be49

cause love has no possibility of being satisfied and fulfilled, or because of obstacles of an individual, social, family, traditional or simply emotional and psychological nature." 22 Originating in Eastern melodies and singing techniques, and then adapted by local singers, it evolved into the refined expression of a special blend of 'orientalSlav sevdah' which the Serbian critic Skerlic considers one of the greatest creations in the language. 23 The form has been the subject of considerable attention and critical interest, both within the region and abroad. In his introduction to the work of Muslim writers in Bosnia Herzegovina, Muhsin Rizvic gives a lengthy bibliography of studies published between 1927 and 1970. Rizvic defines the content of these songs as having something in common with the ballad form and suggests that they could be described as "the emotion left behind" after the event which is the subject of the ballad. 24 It has been defined by another scholar as "a love poem in its content, lyric in its essence ... As a characteristic of its ethical code, Islam involved a regulated distance between a man and a woman, and at just the age when passion, the longing for the proximity of a dear face, is at its most powerful ... instead of profane contact, which was made virtually impossible, and which would have dampened both the rapture and the longing at the outset, love seeks a subtler expression, and eros speaks through the lines of the sevdalinlw." 25 The urban context of the songs is clear from the frequent references to windows, beneath which young women may glimpse their sweethearts, or where young men come to sigh. Krnjevic describes the songs as "patriarchal 'women's' songs intended for a narrow, intimate circle", 26 while Rizvic comments: "The 'sevdalinka' lived as a popular song in Muslim families, where it was sung every day, because its performance needed no instrumental accompaniment nor a particular audience." 27 Krnjevic suggests that the songs gradually extended their scope to include references to events and changes of general significance for the community, and the majority are connected with Sarajevo, singing of the fate of the city-wars, plague, fire, or floods-and of influential families. She stresses the importance of the musical phrasing which determines the effect of the songs.28 50

Individual Women Singers A significant, but at first overlooked aspect of traditional singing is the contribution of gifted individual singers. While the origins of most shorter lyric songs, romances, and ballads are unknown, the names of singers of several epic songs have been recorded. While the great majority of these are men, some of the best-known songs in the tradition were sung by women singers. The remainder of this chapter considers the particular contribution of these singers. Their work provides a link between the so-called 'little' and 'great' traditions, between traditional oral literature and written forms. There is always a danger in discussions of this kind of thinking of the oral tradition primarily as something which precedes written forms. Although in one sense it is true, given that it offered the first manifestation of verbal art in an illiterate culture, it is also true that the great majority of the songs in the South Slav tradition were collected in the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of years after writing became widespread. The interaction between oral and written forms is hard to trace, but it is certain at least that traditional singers had been regularly exposed to written forms, such as the liturgy. The point I wish to make is that a reading of these songs, which have of course reached us by way of the printed page, should not be colored by a tendency to think of traditional oral literature as 'primitive' in contrast with written literature. In the nature of things, it is more bound by convention: the songs follow a particular pattern and are built up through a system of standard formulae. v\lhen the singers themselves are asked to describe how they compose their songs, they will usually say that they simply repeat them as they themselves heard them. Nevertheless, there is scope within this convention for considerable sophistication, for the expression of a particular perspective, a sudden turn of phrase which is the individual singer's personal contribution to the tradition. Where such felicitous phrasing is deemed successful by its audience, it tends to become fixed and, in its turn, to affect the aesthetic sensibility of those who hear it. The great nineteenthcentury collector Vuk Karadzic grew up with the traditional singing in his village home and had a remarkably refined aesthetic sense. He 51

The first woman national g 1tsle player in Yugoslavia

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would travel miles in search of a better version of a particular song, or in pursuit of a particular singer with a reputation for especially fine singing. Several of these singers were women. I want now to consider some of their best-known songs, with the intention of trying to establish whether it may be said that the concerns of women singers differ significantly from those of their male counterparts. Men constituted the great majority of the singers of epic songs: while many people sang songs in the course of their daily lives, those who made their living from singing were exceptional and, to some extent, stood outside society. Many singers-like Homer-were blind, as singing provided a livelihood for people who could not work on the land. Other singers might be outlaws, having been forced to flee from their own land, generally following some violent conflict with local landowners or the Ottoman authorities. In the nature of things, women only exceptionally fitted these patterns. On the whole, their only route to 'outsider' status within the community and to enforced idleness was disability. Karadzic collected songs from four blind women singers: Zivana,Jeca (who was Zivana's pupil), Stepanija, and an unnamed blind singer from northern Serbia. It is instructive in this connection to consider songs of which several versions exist, some of which were sung by male singers and some by women. There is little doubt that there tends to be a difference of emphasis between them, reflecting different spheres of interest. This may be demonstrated by a comparison of two versions of the song 'The Wedding of Todor of Stalac' .29 Both represent variations on the conventional wedding theme, in which a party of guests is gathered to go to claim a foreign bride and faces all manner of obstacles along the way. The song contains the usual set-piece description of the preparation of the groom's splendid clothing and his horse, but its basic theme is the abduction of a girl who is already betrothed to another. In each case the sympathy of the listener is with the lone hero, but the terms in which his plight is evoked differ considerably. What is particularly striking is the fact that, in the version recorded from one of Karadzic's favored women singers, Blind Zivana, the song is dominated by three women characters who are able to make decisions which shape their lives. The singers' different perspectives emerge in 53

the first lines of the song. The earlier recorded version opens with a standard line: "Todor of Stalac is drinking wine ... " He is being served by his aging mother, who then asks why he has not yet wed and brought a wife to brighten his days and a daughter-in-law to take his mother's place. He replies that he has not yet found a girl who would be both to his liking and a friend for his mother. So far, the song contains only conventional elements. "When the son explains to his mother that the only girl who would suit them both is already betrothed, his mother advises him to forget her, but the son ignores her reasonable words and goes off to snatch his chosen bride. The girl herself takes no active part in the song, which ends with her abduction. The version recorded from Zivana differs in a number of ways. To start with, it is twice as long: 281 lines as compared to 141 in the other version. This gives the singer scope to develop her chosen themes. Zivana's song opens in an immediately more homely way, suggesting a closer, more equal and practical relationship between mother and son: "Todor is sitting at supper with his mother / ... They sup, they drink cool wine./ His mother begins to weep tears/ ... " She laments, in moving terms, that she no longer has the strength to run the household and receive her son's guests. She begs him to spend his money to find a suitable girl who would be able to help in the house. In a demonstration of manners appropriate to such a hero, he says nothing, finishes his food and wine, and gets up from table. Before preparing himself in the finery befitting a bridegroom, he dedicates himself before the cross and goes with a candle to the stable to feed his horse extra rations of oats and wine (in the tradition, heroes' horses have taken on something of their masters' heroic qualities: the horse of the great Prince Marko, for example, regularly consumes several goatskins of wine before any major endeavor). It is interesting that the singer should note the hero's silent departure from the table and the practical detail of his needing to take a candle. The preparation of the horse and groom in their ceremonial trappings is a conventional set-piece, occurring in much the same form in songs of any length in which the main theme is a marriage. Zivana's hero then sets off and, when the sun is high, comes across a group of young women washing clothes in the Danube. The girl who 54

catches his eye is sumptuously dressed, most unsuitably for such an occupation. The description of her clothes as she stands in the river illustrates one of the most prominent and engaging features of this whole tradition: the mixture of notions of feudal nobility accessible to the peasant singers only by hearsay and from the tradition itself, and their everyday experience of reality. Noble ladies and queens do the washing, bath the baby, and wear aprons to greet their noble guests at their castle door. (It is characteristic that these incongruities are most evident in connection with women's occupations: men of both noble and peasant birth may equally well be portrayed sitting over a jug of wine, but domestic chores chime oddly with nobility.) The subterfuge by which the hero induces the girl to leave the others so that he can pull her up onto his horse is described by Zivana in greater detail than in the earlier version, and again with practical touches. Once with the hero Todor, the abducted girl appears quite content to stay, although she has no choice in the matter of marrying him. A priest is pressed into action and the deed done with dizzying speed. It is after this that the song becomes interesting, for the hero fades into the background and the main action is left to the female characters: Todor's mother, his bride, and the woman,Jerina, who had originally paid for the bride's betrothal to her brother. Having dispatched some brave knights sent in vain by Jerina to retrieve the girl, Todor knows that he will be in trouble, and he asks his mother for advice. But before she can answer, his bride makes her own suggestion: she will take armed lancers and money and repay Jerina the brideprice she paid-a brave and honorable course of action. Jerina responds by taking the girl prisoner and forcibly marrying her once again, this time to her brother, as originally planned. But in the morning, when she goes to wake them, she finds that Todor's wife has slain her brother and the armed lancers rush to protect the young bride from Jerina's anger. The ultimate judgment is the king's, who reprimands Jerina for ignoring his advice not to take on Todor. She accepts his judgment and is reconciled with Todor's wife, who returns peacefully to her new home. The crux of this song, in Zivana's version, is the relationship between the two women who are ultimately defeated by the masculine culture of violence, abduction, and forced 55

marriage. In the end, Jerina abandons her attempt to emulate this culture and finds common cause with the young woman whom she could legitimately see as having wronged her, but to whom she in turn did a greater wrong by forcing her into a bigamous second marriage. As in so many of these songs, the intricate implications of the situation are not developed, but remain suggestive ground for the listener's imagination. What is clear, however, is the unusually balanced nature of the song, in the sense that the three female characters play an equal part in its development. It is Todor's mother who sets the action in motion and, at the critical moment of his life, it is to her that he turns for advice. While the bride's social role is essentially that of object or 'merchandise' she easily overcomes such constraints by her independence of mind and courage. Jerina, too, displays a readiness to accept an adverse situation which is unusual in the tradition, but not out of place in a female character. There are eight songs in Karadzic's collections which are confidently attributed to Zivana, and others which may well have been hers, although, unfortunately, documentary evidence is lacking. Her compositions are characterized by a strong story line, often with an unexpected twist, and striking emotional coloring, notably tenderness between individuals. She brings an immediate flavor of human relationships in her patriarchal environment which breaks through the conventional, feudal settings. Several of the songs are concerned with notions of justice which reflect the essentially democratic social structure of the zadruga, even where the characters concerned are kings and noble lords. In one song, for instance, a man, Ljutica Bogdan, serves a duke loyally for ten years for love of his horse which he finally steals. When the duke's brother comes after him, Ljutica Bogdan slays him and takes his horse as well. At this, the duke pursues him, on the mare which bore the two fine horses, and kills his erstwhile servant, lamenting over his body, in sorrow rather than anger, that he would gladly have given him the horse, had he known he wanted it so badly. The songs which perhaps best demonstrate the qualities of Zivana's singing are 'Momir the Foundling' and 'The Death of Duke Kajica', 56

attributed to her with some confidence. In 'Momir the Foundling', an 'Emperor' out on a lengthy hunting trip catches nothing, but finds an abandoned baby boy. He takes it up with delight and great tenderness, to be a brother for his only, and much cherished, daughter (in view of the conventional attitude towards girls in the culture, this detail may reasonably be read as Zivana's own input). When he returns to his palace, the ruler is met by his wife, who takes his horse's reins and asks: "'Did you hunt down fine game?' /The Emperor handed the baby boy to his Empress/ and the Empress took the baby/ in her beautiful silk apron." The song describes the Emperor's pride in his 'son' as he grows, lavishing on him such favors that in the end he provokes his courtiers to a jealous plot: they tell their ruler that Momir has been found sleeping with his 'sister'. The Emperor has Momir hanged and his sister follows him. The dry tree on which they die springs into luxuriant growth, a symbol of the young people's innocence triumphing over the barren destructiveness of the jealous courtiers, and shaming their desolate father's haste. The song contains many of the essential features of Zivana's singing: a story line which holds the listener's interest, detail, a sense of justice, and tenderness in the depiction of human relations. The other song mentioned, 'The Death of Duke Kajica', has a straightforward, but well-composed story line of feats of military prowess in which Kajica is slain by a jealous rival. The song comes vividly to life in the terms of endearment which the Serbian king Djuradj lavishes on his favorite young noble. These occur in two blocks in the course of the song and are then brought together at the end, when the young man is slain: Woe, Kajica, my dearest child! Ever my glory at my court! Ever my sharp sword on the field! And strength among all the nobles! Pure gold ofSmederevo! Right wing of the Serbian lands! How will your father recover from his griefl How can he leave you alone ...

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Karadzic recorded songs also from Zivana's pupil, Blindjeca. By contrast with Zivana's, Jeca's songs are all concise. One of them, 'The Death of Duke Prijezda', is particularly worth mentioning in this context as many other versions of it exist (13 in all). Jeca's is the most concise and in it the singer makes Prijezda's wife the most prominent character, whereas she was not mentioned at all in the first recorded version of the song. In acknowledgment of this, one Italian translator went so far as to call the song 'The Wife of Duke Prijezda'. The wife is mentioned in versions by other nineteenth-century singers, but Jeca's is the only one in which she is given a name. In addition to these named singers, who are a small minority among Karadzic's sources, three of the best-known songs in the epic tradition were noted down from women singers whose names have not been recorded. These are 'The Maid of Kosovo' and 'The Downfall of the Serbian Empire', sung by a blind woman from near the village of Grgurevci, and 'The Death of the Mother of the Jugovici', sung by an unnamed woman in Croatia. 30 All three songs are connected with the battle against the invading Ottoman army on the Field of Kosovo. It is noteworthy that, while several of Karadzic's male singers have been the subject of study-by both Karadzic himself and other commentators-virtually nothing is known of the lives of the women from whom these songs were recorded. The reason for this is at least in part a characteristic concern with the dramatic: some of Karadzic's singers were border-fighters or outlaws who had to flee vengeance from the Ottoman administration for some real or perceived offense, generally because they had killed a Turk in self-defense. It is also because, although Karadzic himself took an interest in the singers and was well aware of the particular contribution an individual could make, at the time of his collections-and all through the nineteenth centuryattention was concentrated on the songs themselves. There was still a prevailing sense that they were essentially communal products, individual singers being the more or less arbitrary vehicle for traditional materials handed down verbatim from singer to singer through the generations. Consequently, the contribution of individual singers was largely ignored and their lives not deemed to be of interest. Moreover, the life 58

of a blind peasant woman would be presumed to be predictable, lacking in external drama, and so unworthy of consideration. We must therefore content ourselves with a discussion of the three songs without further reference to their singers, despite the fact that their songs have undoubtedly played a significant role in the formation of the moral values and perceptions of the culture of which they are a part. 'The Downfall of the Serbian Empire' is an especially splendid song, the central image of which occurs in slightly different forms in other contexts, while its main theme is a memorable formulation of the essential 'Kosovo idea'. Any attempt to find evidence of a female viewpoint in this song would be quite artificial. It is, however, one of the finest of the epic songs concerned with Kosovo, and it is rarely explicitly acknowledged that its best-known version was recorded from a woman singer. As we saw in Chapter 1, the focus of the song is the choice to be made by the Serbian prince Lazar on the eve of the great battle, when he is told by a messenger from God that he could save his army if he chooses the Kingdom of Earth. When, as he must, Lazar chooses the Kingdom of Heaven, he is told that he should go out onto the battlefield and build there a church of silk. This image of fragility is at the same time an image of overwhelming power. The silk suggests both royal luxury and military banners, but above all it is an abstraction, impossible to achieve in reality and therefore unassailable. The 'church of silk' is the idea of righteousness carried, beyond reach, in the individual heart and soul. The somewhat more mundane explanation that a tent, a literal 'church of silk', would have been used on the eve of battle for the confession and absolution of the warriors does not, I think, detract from the power of this image since it is the idea of the church that has survived in the individual imagination through the generations. In the troubled times that preceded-and, for long periods, have followed-the Ottoman occupation the lot of women in the Balkans was to see their husbands and sons off to battle, anxiously await their return, and grieve at their loss. This bleak destiny is the subject of the two other songs to which I wish to draw attention here. Both of them apply this perennial destiny to the women left behind by the warriors at the Battle of Kosovo. The first, recorded from an unknown woman in Croatia, focuses on the mother of nine sons who all 59

accompany their father to certain death. In the first half of the song the mother tries to persuade her husband to permit at least one of their sons to stay with her. When they all refuse, she asks that at least her faithful sexvant stay behind. But, despite his master's instrnction, the imperative of participating in the battle proves irresistible and he too abandons her. The song then gives a cumulative account of the burden of grief which finally proves too great for the mother to bear. With a sure touch, the singer identifies her breaking point as the moment she is obliged to confront a concrete detail of her loss: her youngest son's hand, which she had clasped in a bond of love throughout his short life. It is arguably its final image of overwhelming loss and grief that has guaranteed this song a central place in the tradition and has given the figure of the mother the status of an archetype. In the narrative songs, which are built up through the use of formulae and formulaic expressions, it is the climax which is most subject to change and which offers the singer the most scope for her, or his, own unique formulation. Frequently, as in the song just mentioned, the images chosen for these occasions are among the most memorable moments in the whole tradition. The image which provides the climax for the second of the two songs, 'The Maid of Kosovo', is one which strikes a familiar chill in the heart of all who have been obliged to witness violence. In this song, a young woman searches for her betrothed and his companions among the bodies strewn on the field where the last great battle was fought against the advancing Ottoman army. The traditional singer does not spare the audience, describing the steaming blood up to a horse's knees, the scattered limbs and bodies ripped open, with bones and innards exposed. Finally, the girl comes upon a soldier who is still alive, though close to death, and goes to offer him water and what solace she can in his last moments. He tells her that her betrothed and all those she seeks are dead. In the intensity of her grief, she feels that her innocent body has absorbed the power to destroy even the most resistant aspects of indifferent nature and she cries out: Ifl were to grasp a green pine, Even the green pine would wither. 31

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It seems to me that this vivid image captures precisely the capacity of human beings to absorb physically other people's pain, so that the obseiver is forever changed, physically modified by the knowledge of violence and suffering. It is at least arguable that such an image could be conceived only by a woman with the capacity to identify imaginatively with the destiny of countless women grieving in the shadows of southeast Europe. It is worth quoting here an assessment of the contribution of women to traditional oral culture as formulated by a poet of refined sensibility, Jela Spiridonovic-Savic, writing in 1944. Her account differs from the descriptions discussed at the end of Chapter 1, in that it is concerned with an instinctive aesthetic response through which she sees women in her culture as having been able to transform the often tragic nature of their historical destiny into something creative and enduring: It is her fine, deep, female sensibility that has the task, in addition to ennobling woman's own character, of ennobling everything with which she comes into contact ... Among our people, that is really what women did. When our monks withdrew after the arrival of the Turks and literary creativity ceased; when our masterbuilders were dispersed and prevented from building white monasteries; when the fresco-painters left our churches-they remained: our women, to express, out of the people's pain, a purified lyricism in the poetry of their embroidery. On a white background, the most frequent song was red and black. Blood and death. With their wonderful woman's instinct, even before the gusle singers, they brought the national ship of suffering and pain, with their song of silken threads, into the harbor of beauty. The meaning of beauty for the human soul is enormous. It is an inexhaustible source of joy, pure spiritual joy. That joy ennobles us, helps us to step outside ourselves, identifying ourselves with works of art ... for art mises the individual above her small, personal life, leading her to a broader realm, forging a path to the greatest possible value and beauty: to an awareness of unive~ life. Hence the inexpressible value of art, and equally of woman's calling: to awaken that interest in beauty, in art.32

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Notes 1 Vukanovic, Srpske narodne poslovice, 67. 2 A bibliography of Sottth Slavic Folk Culture, edited by Roth and Wolf, covering works published in English, French and German, contains 27 pages on the epic, 6 on the ballad, and just over 2 on 'other genres'. 3 Krnjevic, 'The collections of oral lyric (women's songs) arranged and published by Vuk Karadzic', 69-70. 4 Agoston-Nikolova, Immured Women. 5 Helene Courtin has done similar work on Bulgarian folksong: 'Les personnages masculin et feminin tlans la chanson folklorique bulgare', in Revue des etttdes slaves, 60 (1988): 439-44. 6 Agoston-Nikolova, 1. 7 Ibid., 20. 8 Ibid., 43. 9 Ibid., 55. 10 Koljevic, The Epic in the Making. 11 Karadzic, Sabrana dela, vols. 1 and 5. 12 'Djevojka na prodaju', Karadzic, vol. 5,480. 13 'Nadznjeva se momak i djevojka', Karadzic, vol. 1, 175. 14 'Ovcar i djevojka' (The Shepherd and the Lass), ibid., 178. 15 Weissbort, Red Knight. 16 'Vilina posestrima', Karadzic, vol. 1, 156. 17 'Moma i vila', Karadzic, ibid., 159. 18 'Sunceva sestra i pasa tiranin', Karadzic, ibid., 163. 19 'Izjeden ovcar', Karadzi