Ismet Rebronja's “Bogovnik”

Abstract

Ismet Rebronja (1942-2006) belongs to the corpus of Montenegrin, Serbian and Bosniak literature. One of the main thematic-motive dominants of the writer's poetics is a myth. This paper has dealt with the Slavic neomythologism in the poetry of Ismet Rebronja in the books of poems Gazilar (1978), Sreda i sreda kći (1983), Paganska krv (1986), and Keronika (1991). The mythopoetic image of Ismet Rebronja's world consists of people, gods, animals, and plants. The “heroes” of the poems are pagans - the Slavs, but also members of monotheism (Islam). The key parts of the mythopoetic world of Rebronja's man are the gods and lower deities. Apart from the gods known from the literature, in this pantheon, there are also those who are the author's creation. Mythical creatures and shadowy animals play an important role. The man of this world belongs primarily to an agrarian culture, so plants (grains, medicinal herbs, sacred trees) also occupy a privileged place. This space is constructed in the form of clean and unclean places, and some timelines are tabooed (days/parts of days). The image of the Slavic world sometimes starts with written sources, which the author takes often in a polemical way, especially when it comes to texts that present the Slavs as the wild other. Rebronja sings about a Slavic man placed in a large spacetime span, contemplating the formation of his identity and place within and between different civilized and barbaric people.