Macedonian Section (Mk)

An independent Macedonian section was created in the 1970s. Before that, individual publications concerning Macedonia had been incorporated into the general Slavic section. After the Second World War, when the Central Macedonian dialect was recognised as the standard language and Macedonian literature thus received the prerequisites for its development, it began to be included in the South Slavic section and labelled with the shelf mark ‘J’. In the past, the Turkish supremacy hardly made literary production in the area of Macedonia possible. The first moralistic and didactic books did not appear until the first half of the 19th century; they were written by Kiril Peichinovich. The section contains their facsimiles. It also comprises works by Krste Misirkov, who at the turn of the 20th century expressed Macedonian national efforts (e.g. in the book Za makedontskite raboti (Sofia, 1903)), theatre plays by Anton Panov and Risto Krle, who began to win recognition already before the Second World War like the poet and journalist Kocho Ratsin and the poets Venko Markovski and Kole Nedelkovski. Concerning post-war poetry, the largest set in the collection is represented by the works of Blazhe Koneski, followed by Atso Shopov, Gane Todorovski, Slavko Janevski and many others. Prose is dominated by volumes of short stories (Vlado Malevski, Jovan Boshkovski etc.), but there are also novels that attracted attention abroad, such as Golemata voda by Zhivko Chingo and Sestrata na Zigmund Frojd by Goce Smilevski. The collection comprises extensive sets of works by the Macedonian literary critics Haralampie Polenakovich and Aleksandar Spasov. Scientific works on the Macedonian language, literature and history are accumulated in the rich collection of the production of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts.