Biography Essay

Mateja Matevski is a central figure in the second generation of Macedonian poet-intellectuals who came to maturity with their nation in the 1950s and shaped the main directions of its contemporary literature. The founding generation of Macedonian poets who came before them—that of Blaze Koneski and Aco Sopov—had fought the battles for modernism beside their Serbian colleagues and against the Zdanovite realists of the early socialist days. Now a second generation, university poets educated after the war, brought a new complexity, an informed literacy, and a heightened symbolic complexity to that literature. Poets such as Radovan Pavlovski shaped Macedonian natural imagery to new surrealistic power; Gane Todorovski and Vlada Urosevic brought contemporary and urban subjects into the poetry, but it would be Bogomil Gjuzel and especially Matevski who would bring that poetry to a new formal and referential awareness, a sense of...