Inside Racin’s Perspective
paion / Dejan Jovanovski
Koco Racin is often credited with being the father of modern Macedonian literature. A socially aware and interested man, he wrote in Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian and risked his own freedom to put some of the rich oral folk history into print. He was a true socialist who joined the Communist party and worked tirelessly against the social injustices he encountered.
Passionate about the fate of his countrymen and his culture, one imagines him standing here – caught between the idealism of socialism and the reality of communism – his desire to ressurect the literary tradition of his people surely at odds with the communistic tendency to write new realities.
Maybe he was standing in a similar spot, studying this exact perspective, when he wrote the powerful opening words for Days:
Like necklaces around the throat
strings of cold stones
so have the days lain down
on our shoulders and weight heavy …
Moody and rich like Macedonian needlework, this photograph is both direct and subtle … there are layers here … much like Racin’s work.
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