The Death of the Scrivener

Smrtta na dijakot
Severna Makedonija
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Dragi Mihajlovski
No, it’s not for me to swing the sword! I must make the pen speak! Bravely, accurately, with a lot of feeling and a bit of restraint! And that’s it!

Dragi Mihajlovski made his name with the books of short stories and he managed to become one of the most published Macedonian writers of the middle generation. His novel Smrtta na dijakot – The Death of the Scrivener takes place in the 14th century, under the stone walls of the town Bitola which is under siege of the Ottoman conquering armies. This is a novel in which the author makes an attempt to reinvestigate human nature where crime and cruelty mix with honourability and holiness. In reference to individual characters in the novel these two extremes can be used only relatively, because the characters are most often shown as a mixture of both or are masked into one another. Under various circumstances holiness is being forced to manifest as crime, while the criminal nature may gain the appearance of undoubted honourability. This novel calls upon two of the greatest and most famous works of literature on the fall of holiness and the persistence of the demonic: Goethe’s Faustus and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Dragi Mihajlovski, short story writer, essayist, scholar, translator. Born on 16 October 1951 in Bitola. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. Ph.D. in Philology. Associate professor at the Faculty of Philology, Department of English Language and Literature. Professor of Theory and Practice of Translation.
Works: The Beehive (short stories, 1981), Sole Leather (1990), Uncrucified Gods (essays, 1991), Pole-vault Jump (short stories, 1994), The Tripolska Gate (short stories, 1999), Under Babylon – the Task of the Translator (doctoral thesis, 2000), The Prophet of Discountria (novel, 2001), The Death of the Scrivener (novel, 2002), Stories from the Sixth Floor (short stories, 2003). Translated many foreign authors, among others: Shakespeare (11 of his plays), Milton (Paradise Lost), Shelly, Keats, Byron, Worthsworth, William Blake, John Done, T. S. Eliot; the Nobel winners Kenzaburo Oe, Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott.