Svetlana Tomić pulls no punches in this important book whose very first page calls out the “biased and incomplete picture of the past” (1) that is presented in official histories of Serbian literature and that, even more exasperatingly, refuses to change in light of new discoveries. The hidden history she uncovers spans, roughly, the second half of the nineteenth century, with the 1863 opening of the first Girls’ High School in Belgrade marking a turning point in the public visibility of women and their writings. The four writers in Part I include a teacher, a queen, an actress, and the first Serbian woman to travel the world, while Part II looks at two of their male supporters, a painter and another author who has himself been largely shunned by the gatekeepers of the canon for his liberal views. Part III examines the politics of memory through women's memoirs, their translations of foreign works as varied as the novels of Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale's nursing manual, and two firsts: a 1912 public monument dedicated to a woman, the poet Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja, and a 1913 album of famous women, also named Srpkinja. The album—which is what its publishers called this compilation of photographs, biographical texts, ethnographic essays, embroidery patterns—constitutes “an important source for reconstructing Serbian feminist history” (219), with a list of 152 women writers, and is available through the Belgrade city library in digital form.
The impressive array of women in Part I makes for a potent representation of the female point of view, from Serbia's neglected first female novelist, the teacher Draga Gavrilović, to the beloved Queen Natalija Obrenović, better remembered for being the first Serbian royal to divorce rather than the author of Serbia's first book of aphorisms. Milka Aleksić Grgurova drew on both her acting and nursing career to create strong female characters, while Jelena J. Dimitrijević, the most prolific of the four, acquainted her readers with the world through five travelogues, as well as poetry, short stories, and a novel that was translated into other languages during her lifetime.
Tomić writes in a way that makes the reader want to find these women's work and dive into it immediately. She leaves one feeling at once inspired and deprived when considering the impoverished literary canon we have been handed. The present reviewer, for example, remembers the short stories of Laza Lazarević fondly without ever having been aware that different narratives of local masculinity existed alongside his. Tomić names several short stories authored by women that answer Lazarević's abusive father figure with warmer male characters and another, true story about a disabled war veteran who finds love, unlike Lazarević's tragic soldier, who merely elicits pity. When it comes to authoring memoirs, on the other hand, as elaborated in Part III of the book, men tended to idealize family life, while women wrote more honestly about some of the ordeals their mothers endured at the hands of their fathers. These dissenting voices create a more complete picture of Serbian literary history and their inclusion, as Tomić envisions it throughout her analysis, “can broaden empathy and spread solidarity” (232) as well as “strengthen democratic values in the future” (193).
Another compelling feature of this book is how its women, both the author herself and the writers she investigates, draw upon a larger, international network of women. Draga Gavrilović, for example, not content to be limited to the role of teacher, modeled the misleće ženskinje (women who think) she created in her fiction on American and European women who had a broader spectrum of professions available to them. She even provided her fictional characters with international backing, as in her story San (Dream), in which an American female author confronts a Serbian male author. The more experienced Jelena Dimitrijević, wrote enthusiastically about suffrage in her travelogue about the United States and concomitantly observed that the vote had not improved women's lot substantially. Tomić herself relies on Celia Hawkesworth's similarly named Voices in the Shadows (CEU Press, 2000) while pointing out that “the very first book on [Serbian and Bosnian] women writers was written by a foreigner” (9) and that it was not translated into Serbian until 2017. Tomić's call for expanding the canon echoes other voices from the region and one can only hope that her Hidden History, which also enjoys an international backing through its US publishing house, will inspire further research and an even stronger push towards completing the picture of our literary past.
