Prospect Magazine, Issue 1, October 1995 The Yugoslav tragedy by Aleksa Djilas |
From Foreign Affairs, September/October 1998 Imagining Kosovo: A Biased New Account Fans Western Confusion Noel Malcolm's previous books include a biography of a twentieth-century Romani an violinist and composer, a volume engagingly called The Origins of English Nonsense, a history of Bosnia, and a life of a sixteenth-century Venetian heretic who studied rainbows. Since he seems to select his literary targets at random, it is tempting to dismiss Malcolm as a popularizer or charlatan. But in Kosovo: A Short History, Malcolm emerges as a talented amateur historian, trying hard -- the book has 1,154 endnotes and a bibliography in a dozen languages -- to produce a serious book about Serbia's southern province, with its almost 90 percent Albanian majority. He is only partly successful. |
Prospect Magazine, Issue 51, April 2000 Lament for England by Aleksa Djilas |
Prospect Magazine, Issue 57, November 2000 Kostunica's shoes by Aleksa Djilas |
On novelty and oblivion: What we can learn from dissidents under Communism Belgrade, February-March, 2007 At the beginning of his essay “Of Vicissitude of Things,” Francis Bacon stresses the futility of all human endeavors: “… ‘There is no new thing upon the earth.’...all novelty is but oblivion…the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.” Who has not experienced such weariness? Everything changes but is eternally the same. Nothing is truly new – it only appears so because we have forgotten. And soon we realize this. Like the dead in Hades we drink from the river that makes us forget but, alas, oblivion is merely temporary, and novelty vanishes. |
EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES 4th Annual Serbian-American Lecture: Of Novelty and Oblivion, What Can We Learn From Dissidents under Communism Event Summary At the beginning of his essay “Of Vicissitude of Things,” Francis Bacon stresses the futility of all human endeavors: “… ‘There is no new thing upon the earth.’...all novelty is but oblivion…the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.” Who has not experienced such weariness? Everything changes but is eternally the same. Nothing is truly new – it only appears so because we have forgotten. And soon we realize this. Like the dead in Hades we drink from the river that makes us forget but, alas, oblivion is merely temporary, and novelty vanishes. |
Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, Volume 9, Number 3, December 2007 REVIEW ARTICLE |