Skender Kulenović

Skender Kulenović
Skender Kulenović in 1943
Born	(1910-09-02)2 September 1910 Bosanski Petrovac, Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	25 January 1978(1978-01-25) (aged 67) Belgrade, SR Serbia, Yugoslavia
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav

Skender Kulenović (2 September 1910 – 25 January 1978) was a Bosnian poet, novelist and dramatist.

Skender Kulenović was born in 1910 in the Bosnian town of Bosanski Petrovac, when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kulenović family was a Muslim land-owning family, though Skender’s parents ran a rented hotel and a grocery shop. Skender was the third of four sons (one of whom died in infancy) and one daughter. In 1921, impoverished by the land reforms brought in by the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, his family moved to the central Bosnian town of Travnik, his mother’s birthplace. Here Skender Kulenović became a day-boy at the Jezuitska klasična gimnazija (the local Jesuit Grammar School). Here too, he wrote his first poems, culminating in the publication of a set of sonnets (Ocvale primule, or Withered Primroses) in a 1927–28 school almanac.

In 1930, the Kulenović family recovered a little of their former prosperity – enough to enable Skender and his sister Ćamila to continue their education. Skender registered to study law at Zagreb University – the main reason, as he admitted, being that the Law Faculty allowed students to do the bulk of their studying at home. When in Zagreb he became inspired by leftist ideas, joining the Yugoslav Communist Party (KPJ) of which his elder brother, the painter Muhamed Kulenović, was already a member, in 1935. In the same year he gave up his law studies to focus on journalism and literary work. Over the next four years he published essays and short stories in various journals, including Putokaz (Signpost), a journal of which he was a founder member.

This was a time of increasing political tension in the first Yugoslav state. Externally, the authoritarian Regency of Prince Pavle was trying to balance popular pro-French and pro-British sentiments with a need to maintain good relations with the country’s Fascist Italian and Nazi German neighbours. Internally, political life was becoming increasingly dominated by Serb-Croat hostility; in 1939, a vain attempt was made to defuse this by imposing a bipartite federal system, under which most of Bosnia became Croatian territory. In late 1939 or early 1940, Skender Kulenović was expelled from the KPJ for having refused to sign an open letter criticising the government and advocating autonomy for Bosnia and Herzegovina – a decision which prevented him from publishing in many of the journals he had worked with until then. In 1940 he married his first wife, Ana Prokop.