MACEDONIAN LITERATURE

literature written in the South Slavic Macedonian language. The earliest Macedonian literature, in the medieval period, was religious and Orthodox Christian. Under Ottoman Turkish rule, Macedonian literature suffered an eclipse, but in the 19th century there appeared original lyric poetry written by Konstantin Miladinov, who, with his brother Dimitrije, compiled a notable collection of legends and folk songs that contributed to the development of a nascent Macedonian literature. When Turkish rule was supplanted by Serbian rule in 1913, the Serbs officially denied Macedonian distinctiveness, considering the Macedonian language merely a dialect of Serbo-Croatian. The Macedonian language was not officially recognized until the establishment of Macedonia as a constituent republic of communist Yugoslavia in 1946. Despite these drawbacks, some progress was made toward the foundation of a national language and literature, in particular by Kosta P. Misirkov in his Za Makedonskite raboti (1903; In Favour of Macedonian Literary Works) and in the literary periodical Vardar (established 1905). These efforts were continued after World War I by Kosta Racin, who wrote mainly poetry in Macedonian and propagated its use through the literary journals of the 1930s. Some writers, such as Kole Nedelkovski, worked and published abroad because of political pressure. After World War II, under the new republic of Macedonia, the scholar Blaze Koneski and others were charged with the task of standardizing Macedonian as the official literary language. With this new freedom to write and publish in their own language, Macedonia produced many literary figures in the postwar period. Poetry was represented in the work of Aco opov, Slavko Janevski, Blaze Koneski, and Gane Todorovski. Prewar playwrights, such as V. Iljoski, continued to write, and the theatre was invigorated by new dramatists, such as Kole Caule and Tome Arsovski. Zivko Cingo became one of Macedonia's best-known writers of prose.