The Letters of Milica Kostić Selem to Desanka Maksimović

Abstract

Almost everything we know about the Serbian author Milica Kostić Selem dates from the period beginning with the First World War (when she, a seventeen-year-old girl, published her first poems in “Beogradske novine” (The Belgrade Newspaper), issued by the occupation authorities), and spanning the 1920s and early 1930s, when her presence was felt in the cultural scene of Belgrade, and more broadly, Yugoslavia, through her publishing poetry and prose, and collaborating with major journals. Having married and moved to Split, however, Kostić moved away from the cultural mainstream and turned to family life and her work at the City Museum of Split. This is where she lived during the Second World War, and her pre-war leftist and communist friends often found shelter in her home. Until now, the years between the early 1950s and her death in 1983 have been mostly shrouded in mystery, with her literary output being limited to but a few poems and reviews, published in Rijeka and Zadar literary magazines. One fact that was known is that she worked at the Museum of the National Liberation War in Zagreb until her retirement. This is why the letters, spanning more than two decades, sent by Kostić Selem to her old friend, Desanka Maksimović, are of such great importance. This correspondence, kept by the Desanka Maksimović Foundation in Belgrade, is not only important for understanding the life of Milica Kostić, but sheds light on the cultural life of Zagreb, Croatia and Yugoslavia in general, in the period between 1958, when the first of the letters was sent, and 1979, after which Kostić, having had a stroke, stopped writing to Maksimović.