„Lest We Forget”: Desanka Maksimović’s Remembrance Politics and Anti-War Engagement

Barać, Stanislava (2025) „Lest We Forget”: Desanka Maksimović’s Remembrance Politics and Anti-War Engagement. In: Peace, Unconditional! Peace Policies and Practices in Yugoslavia and Beyond. Belgrade : Institute for recent history of Serbia ; Ljubljana : Založba ZRC, Institute of culture and memory studies ZRC SAZU, pp. 357-386. ISBN 978-86-7005-206-2

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Abstract

The paper aims to conduct a broad contextual and close reading textual analysis of Desanka Maksimović’s novel „Ne zaboraviti” („Lest We Forget”, 1969). The novel is interpreted as the literary manifestation of Desanka Maksimović’s thoroughly thoughtout remembrance politics. The paper’s thesis is that this ultra-popular and best-selling Yugoslav poet and author established remembrance politics that corresponded with the official state antifascist remembrance culture after the Second World War. The novel „Lest We Forget” tells the dramatic story of the three days around the Kragujevac mass shooting of civilians on 21 October 1941. As Desanka Maksimović had already addressed the tragedy in her poem „Krvava bajka” („A Bloody Fairytale”, published in 1946), which was already well-known in Yugoslavia, the paper raises the question of why Desanka Maksimović wanted to create an additional and more developed narrative of the same traumatic event. The answer and the second thesis of the paper are that Maksimović was aware that anti-war engagement within the country’s official antifascist policy was not a finished enterprise in the Yugoslav community and that she, therefore, participated in the 1960s multi-medial dynamic of Kragujevac October’s remembrance practices. In other words, author constructively participated in the ongoing Yugoslav peace policy through continued literary engagement.

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