SLIKA ŠUMADIJE U SRPSKOJ KNjIŽEVNOSTI NA KRAJU 19. I POČETKOM 20. VEKA

Abstract

This research highlighted the space as an ambience that reflected the destiny of literary heroes and types of narrative consciousness. Šumadija’s villages and mountains in Milan Milićević’s stories stood out as humanized spaces of human will and imagination, Prince Miloš’s political power and community creative power, as spaces that participated in crea- tion a future Serbian cultural and historical identity. In Radoje Domanović’s rural tales, the narrative oscillation between idyllic and anti-utopian Šumadija revealed the narrator’s desire for vanished past and childhood. In Svetolik Ranković’s novels, the mountain was doubly marked, as a scene of real bandit events and as an ontological space of dreamed freedom, which mediated a literary turn in the experience of space – from mythopoetic to historical and psychophysiological perception of space. Since Čačak and Belgrade, as toponyms of psycho- physiological spatio-temporal intersection, expressed the irreconcilability of the heroes’ travel lines, Milutin Uskoković’s narrative in the novel Čedomir Ilić outlined a deep break in being and traces of homelessness within the modern subject. Šumadija became a point of discomfort and strangeness that needed to be overcome. Directing the interpretation towards the literary representation of Šumadija in Serbian prose of the late nineteenth and early-twentieth cen- turies, we noticed that the geographical and political-historical center of Serbian people did not coincide with Serbian literature and cultural topography: the center imaginatively eluded.