![]() ![]() Silently, with unsteady steps we entered into the woods, amazed by that mysterious, deep stillness listening to the inarticulate whisper of fragrant flowers and the mute trees. His only lyrical text to have survived dates from 1911, preserved in the visitor’s book at the traveller’s lodge on Mt. When Andrić pressed him, Princip told him they had been destroyed. Apparently he talked about his poems to the Bosnian Croat writer Ivo Andrić-who was a little older than Princip and many years later a Nobel Literature laureate-and even promised to produce them. He showed Dragutin Mras, another member of the group and a poet, a poem about roses that bloom for the beloved at the bottom of the sea, but Mras did not care for the poem. Princip gave no evidence of talent when he was at liberty to write. He was held under harsh conditions at Terezín prison for three years and ten months he died of skeletal tuberculosis, which had been eating away at his bones and led to the amputation of his right arm. He received the maximum 20-year prison sentence. ![]() Under Habsburg law at the time of his conviction he’d been too young-by 27 days-to be sentenced to death. His last verses were written on the walls of his cell, a few days before his death, summoning forth the shadows that terrify the ruling classes as they sit quaking in their castles. Pappenheim, and decided to join the mladobosanci. ![]() So it’s extremely difficult for me now, without reading.’ Princip had acquired “the ideals of life” in 1911, he told Dr. Nearing his death in detention, Princip confessed to his prison doctor, Morris Pappenheim, that he was ‘always lonely, except in libraries…books mean life to me. Among his translations are works by Kierkegaard, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Poe.Įvery “ mladobosanac” wanted to be a poet. On the evening before, he was finishing a translation of Oscar Wilde. The journalist, Danilo Ilić, was translating until the day of the assassination. His list contains 26 books in all, and I have included several of them in the catalogue that follows. These were to be “read so as to know how to distinguish the truth from the lies that the priests tell” (at least two of the Young Bosnians were the children of Orthodox priests). Nedeljko Čabrinović, the typesetter, was a pedagogue: he had a shortlist of recommended texts for his colleagues and workmates, whom he considered to be his apprentice typographers. Some had a talismanic quality for these readers, as The Catcher in the Rye had for Mark Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon.īefore we come to the catalogue itself, a few words about some of the plotters’ literary habits. They moved from one jacket pocket to another long passages were committed to memory. When the Serbian authorities arrested the conspirators, Austria-Hungary issued the July ultimatum, and the rest is well known. The Mlada Bosna group was closely associated with the clandestine “Black Hand” movement, dedicated to the cause of “Greater Serbia.” Several of the plotters were members of both. Princip’s direct accomplices that day are less well known: Nedeljko Čabrinović, a typesetter Danilo Ilić, a teacher turned journalist Trifko Grabež, expelled from school into the wilds of Serbian nationalism Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a conspirator from the Bosnian Muslim nobility Cvjetko Popović and Vaso Čubrilović, both students. Gavrilo Princip was the young man who pulled out a pistol-after a grenade had failed to reach its target-and shot the Archduke and his wife Sophie at the northern end of the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. They had an appetite for books and uncompromising attitudes towards them over a game of billiards, the mladobosanci-some of them pan-Slavs, some ultra-Serbian-would talk incessantly about what they had read and, if they disagreed, the argument was usually settled with the rough and ready use of billiard cues. The selection was small: the titles in question could have been loaded into a backpack and read on a summer hike by any or several of the plotters. Nevertheless a small library that made the rounds of the Young Bosnians as they prepared for the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 suggested at the time, and later, that their reading influenced the course of events in that fateful year. T would be absurd to think a small library of books could incite young men to homicide, persuade them to accept the idea of suicide, or even precipitate a catastrophic European war. ![]()
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