Slavko Janevski's beginnings as a poet and the recognition of the language in which he composed his poems were almost simultaneous. His language, Macedonian, was spoken by the South Slavs of the Pirin Mountains and the Vardar region from ThessalonOki to Skopje; it had been used as a literary language since at least the second half of the nineteenth century, but it was not recognized as such until 7 July 1945. On that date it was acknowledged as the official language of the law courts and schools of the new Macedonian Socialist Republic, one of Josip Broz Tito's five Socialist Federated Republics of Yugoslavia. The Macedonian Socialist government remained in power for forty-five years until a vote for independence separated it from Yugoslavia in 1990.

With the recognition of the Macedonian language came the assertion that its literature was the most recent of the modern European literatures (and in the minds...