Momčilo Nastasijević

Momčilo Nastasijević (23 September 1894 – 13 February 1938) was a Serbian poet, novelist and dramatist born in Gornji Milanovac in Serbia, and whose work was issued during the interwar period. He spent most of his adult life, however, teaching at a Belgrade Gymnasium. During his lifetime Momčilo Nastasijević was less well known than some of his contemporaries, such as Miloš Crnjanski and Rastko Petrović, but lately, however, his work has begun to be noticed again. His literary output was not large, and it gained immediate appreciation only in a narrow circle of intimate friends. Poetry with its close affinity to music brought about a successful team-effort between poet Momčilo Nastasijević and his brother Svetomir Nastasijević the music composer. Momčilo Nastasijević was born in Gornji Milanovac in Serbia in 1894. He studied French and Comparative Literature at the University of Belgrade and spent most of his life in Belgrade working as a French teacher at a high school. Besides poetry, Nastasijević also wrote essays, fiction, and drama. He was also notably the sole friend of Gavrilo Princip - the assassinator of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Although he published poems regularly in leading literary periodicals such as Misao (Thought) and Srpski književni glasnik (Serbian Literary Herald), he remained relatively unnoticed. He privately published his one volume of poetry, Pet lirskih krugova (Five Lyrical Cycles, 1932). One reason for this lack of recognition was that—with his individual views of poetry and literature and the problems of the development of the Serbian literary language—he was outside the trends of expressionism and surrealist Marxism dominant in Belgrade at the time. Another reason was that his compression of style and his individual imagery make him an extraordinarily difficult poet, especially for those who seek a paraphrasable meaning in poetry. For this reason, according to Vasa Mihajlović, Nastasijević has been accused of being hermetic by some critics. He also attempted to formulate through his works a national and religious philosophy whose roots, again, he found in the dark recesses of the soul of his nation.

He died in Belgrade in 1938.