''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia'' is a
travel book
The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs.
One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century CE. In the early modern period ...
written by Dame
Rebecca West, published in 1941 in two volumes by
Macmillan
MacMillan, Macmillan, McMillen or McMillan may refer to:
People
* McMillan (surname)
* Clan MacMillan, a Highland Scottish clan
* Harold Macmillan, British statesman and politician
* James MacMillan, Scottish composer
* William Duncan MacMillan ...
in the UK and by
The Viking Press in the US.
The book is over 1,100 pages in modern editions and gives an account of Balkan history and
ethnography during West's six-week trip to
Yugoslavia in 1937. West's objective was "to show the past side by side with the present it created". Publication of the book coincided with the
Nazi Invasion of Yugoslavia, and West added a foreword highly praising the Yugoslavs for their brave defiance of Germany. The book's
epigraph reads: "To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved".
The character of "Constantine" is supposedly based on
Stanislav Vinaver.
Anica Savić Rebac
Anica Savić-Rebac ( sr-Cyrl, Аница Савић-Ребац; 4 October 1892 — 7 October 1953) was a Serbian writer, classical philologist, translator, professor at the University of Belgrade. She wrote a number of essays and books about Njego ...
, under the name of ''Milica'', appears not only as a new friend, but also as the intellectual guide who eventually reveals to Rebecca West the rituals which would lead the author to the title metaphor of her vision of the Balkans.
[ Svetlana Slapšak]
Anica Savić Rebac (1894 – 1953)
Gegenworte - Zeitschrift für den Disput über Wissen, Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Lemmens Verlag, Berlin 2010.
Plot summary
The book details the six-week journey West made, with her husband, to
Yugoslavia in 1937. During the trip, West and her husband travelled to
Croatia,
Dalmatia,
Herzegovina,
Bosnia
Bosnia and Herzegovina ( sh, / , ), abbreviated BiH () or B&H, sometimes called Bosnia–Herzegovina and often known informally as Bosnia, is a country at the crossroads of south and southeast Europe, located in the Balkans. Bosnia and H ...
,
Serbia,
Macedonia and
Montenegro.
Legacy
It made the
Random House Modern Library list of the best 100
non-fiction books of the 20th century.
American writer
Larry McMurtry says in an essay that "there are only a few great travel books. Rebecca West's ''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon'' is one."
American writer
Brian Hall says in his book, ''The Impossible Country'' that "after four years of writing...and 1,100 densely packed pages...she succeeded only in representing the Serb viewpoint."
Sources
* West, Rebecca, intr. Geoff Dyer, (2006). ''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia''. Edinburgh.
References
Further reading
*
External links
Review from enotes.co
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Books about Yugoslavia
1937 in Yugoslavia
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