The Death of the Scrivener

Смртта на дијакот
North Macedonia
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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 was noticed first of all by his books of short stories and he managed to become one of the most published Macedonian writers of the middle generation. His novel The Death Of The Scrivener is situated in the 14th century, under the stone walls of the town Bitola which at the moment is under siege of Ottoman conquering armies. This is a novel in which the author makes an attempt to reinvestigate human’s nature in which crime and cruelty mix with honourability and holiness. Actually these two extremes can only relatively be talked about in reference to individual characters in the novel, because they are shown as most often being mixed or masked one into/with 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 and passed away in 2022. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. Ph.D. in Philology. He was associate professor at the Faculty of Philology, Department of English Language and Literature and 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.