SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of Three Elegies for Kosovo, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 682-83.

In the following review, Elsie elucidates the plots and thematic concerns of the novellas collected in Three Elegies for Kosovo.

Nothing has been more central to the historical and emotional identity of the southern Balkans than the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. It was on 28 June, St. Vitus Day, of that year that a coalition of Balkan forces made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, and Romanians confronted an invading Ottoman army led by Sultan Mourad. Their defeat at the hands of the Turks led to five centuries of Ottoman rule and changed the face of the Balkans forever. The ghosts of Kosovo, where East meets West, where Europe meets the Third World, where the east-west axis of Islam meets the north-south axis of Eastern Orthodoxy, and where Slav meets non-Slav, have...