Predrag Matvejević

Biography Predrag Matvejević was born in Mostar in 1932, at the time part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, modern Bosnia and Herzegovina, into a family of mixed ethnicity, to an ethnic Russian father, who had previously emigrated from Odessa, or in Matvejević's own words, father of Ukrainian ethnicity and Russian language and a native Herzegovinian Croat mother.

During World War II in Yugoslavia he briefly worked as a military messenger for the Partisans, and after the war he graduated from the Mostar Gymnasium and then went on to study French language and literature, first at the University of Sarajevo and then at the University of Zagreb, where he eventually graduated from. where he taught Croatian and Serbian literatures and language until his retirement at the age of 75 in 2007.

Defamation trial In November 2001, Matvejević published an essay-length article, "Our Taliban", in Jutarnji list. In that article he accused some writers of war mongering during the Yugoslav Wars, among them Mile Pešorda, who filed a defamation lawsuit; the trial started in March 2003. On 2 November 2005, Matvejević was found guilty on the charge of defamation. He was sentenced to five months' probation and ordered to publish the verdict at his own cost in Jutarnji list and to pay 5,000 kuna (circa $1000) in trial costs. Matvejević did not appeal. He stated that an appeal would be an acknowledgment of the verdict and the ones who issued it. On 20 December 2005, the verdict was upheld by an appeals court.

Selected works (Most of his books have appeared in Serbo-Croatian, French and Italian editions) Sartre (essay, 1965) Razgovori s Krležom (1969, with several reprints up to 1987) Prema novom kulturnom stvaralaštvu (1975) Književnost i njezina društvena funkcija (1977) Te vjetrenjače (1977) Jugoslavenstvo danas (Beograd, 1984) Otvorena pisma: moralne vjezbe (1985) Mediteranski brevijar (1987) Istočni epistolar (1995) Gospodari rata i mira (with V. Stevanović and Z. Dizdarević, 2000) Druga Venecija (2002) Le monde «ex» - Confessions (Paris, 1996) Poésie de circonstance (PhD Thesis 1967, Sorbonne) Pour une poétique de l'événement (Paris, 1979) La Méditerranée et l'Europe - Leçons au College de France (Paris, 1998) L'Ile-Méditerranée (Paris, 2000) Epistolario dell’altra Europa (Garzanti, Milan 1992) De la dissidence (essay, 1993) Sarajevo (Motta, Milan 1995) Ex Jugoslavia. Diario di una guerra (Magma, Milan 1995) Tra asilo ed esilio (Meltemi, Rome 1998) Il Mediterraneo e l’Europa (Garzanti, Milan 1998) I signori della guerra (Garazanti, Milan 1999) Un’Europa maledetta (Baldini e Castoldi, Milan 2005)