The Depiction of War in the Documentary Prose of Pera Todorović and Vladan Đorđević

Abstract

In this paper, we sought to analyse non-fictional prose about the Serbo-Turkish War – The Diary of a Volunteer by Pera Todorović and Vladan Đorđević’s Memories from the Serbo-Turkish War – from the point of view of different literary characteristics in the type of text that pleads for objectivity and authenticity. The genres of diaries and memoirs, despite their documentary background, are also subject to literarisation. Subsequent stylisations, pronounced literarisation and subjectivity of the narrator show the positioning of documentary prose between historiographical and literary. In this paper, we sought to illustrate the openness of documentary genres to various types of discourse, the dominant one being polemical. Pera Todorović, an oppositionist, is very critical of the ruling regime in his diary, to which Đorđević belongs to, but political discourse is present in the works of both authors. Both in the memoirs and the diary the confrontation between the public and the private is often themed, as is the complete disintegration of the human being in war in general. The works of Pera Todorović and Vladan Đorđević show us this. Pera Todorović’s diary gives us an inside look from the point of view of participant, while Vladan Đorđević’s memoirs gives us the point of view of a witness. As a result, the depiction of war differs in the works of these two authors depending on roles they had during the war.