The Narrative Prose of Grigorije Božović in the Light of the Tradition. The Meaning of the Threshold, the Fireplace and Earth

Abstract

In the works of Grigorije Božović, there is a layer of traditional culture that the writer transposed from the patriarchal environment in which he had grown up. This refers to examples of ritual and customary practice that played an important role in preserving the identity of the Serbian people in Kosovo and Metohija. The folklore subtext, which is very important for understanding the ethnopsychological community Božović writes about, is dominated by oral forms of collective heritage, such as lyric and epic poems, legends as well as other spoken folk forms.
The paper deals with the function of transposing archaic forms of collective consciousness, such as the threshold, the hearth and the earth, into a literary text. The writer conveyed these sacred places retaining the same form and meaning which they possessed in the collective consciousness of the patriarchal community. In other words, in Grigorije Božović’s opus, the threshold, the hearth and the earth have the same meaning they had in the ritual and customary practice. The author introduced an entire layer of folk heritage into his poetics, thereby creating a clearer picture of the collective community which managed to preserve its identity under Turkish rule for a long time by engaging in these forms of traditional culture.