The Book Club Where We Read in Serbian: How I Discovered That Serbian Literature Is Anything but Boring
Some things happen quietly, without announcements or fanfare. One day you notice a new item on the schedule – Literature Club – and think, Why not? I'll give it a try. Before long, you realize that this is exactly what all those hours of learning Serbian have been leading to.
Every few weeks at the Slovo Language Center, a group of people gathers who want more than vocabulary lists and grammar rules. They want to hear the language – to discover how it breathes, how it thinks, and how it expresses emotion. And to do that, they turn to literature.
The club is led by Bojana Radošević – a philologist, poet, and one of our Serbian language teachers. She is the kind of person who makes literature feel less like a school assignment and more like a living conversation. Bojana is not only an enthusiastic reader and literary expert; she is also an accomplished writer with two published collections of poetry. She has a remarkable ability to pause over a single sentence and reveal the entire world hidden within it.
Reading Serbian Literature Together
This year alone, we’ve explored an impressive range of Serbian literature.
We began with The Woman from Sarajevo (Gospođica) by Ivo Andrić, discussing its unforgettable portrait of a woman whose obsession with saving money becomes her destiny, as well as the novel’s deep connection to Serbian history.
We also read Andrić’s short story On the Second Day of Christmas (Na drugi dan Božića), a brief but remarkably powerful work that lingers long after the final page.
More recently, we explored A Trip to Heaven (Izlet u nebo) by Grozdana Olujić, a story that quietly transforms the reader’s perspective and reveals entirely new dimensions of the Serbian language.
But the Literature Club is about much more than reading.
Sometimes we become writers ourselves. We compose short stories or poems in Serbian, experiment with literary translation, and discover firsthand that understanding a text and creating one are two completely different experiences. It is precisely in that gap that true language immersion begins.
A Novel That Changed Serbian Literature
At our latest meeting, we opened When Pumpkins Blossomed (Kada su cvetale tikve) by Dragoslav Mihailović.
Published in 1968, the novel immediately became a literary sensation. It tells the story of a young man growing up on the outskirts of Belgrade, written in language so vivid and authentic that it feels as though the narrator is speaking directly to you.
At the time, no one had written Serbian quite like this before. Mihailović filled the novel with Belgrade slang, everyday speech, and the rhythms of ordinary conversation – not as stylistic decoration, but as the very substance of the narrative.
Our discussion was fascinating.
I’ll admit it: the first time you open an authentic Serbian book – not a simplified textbook version – you feel a moment of hesitation. There are unfamiliar words, unexpected sentence rhythms, and dialects you’ve never encountered in class.
But that’s exactly where the adventure begins.
With Bojana guiding the discussion and the other club members sharing ideas, you slowly work through the text together – word by word, image by image. And then, almost without noticing, you realize something extraordinary:
I'm reading Serbian. Real Serbian.
No exam or grammar test can give you that feeling.
It’s something entirely different.
The Literature Club at Slovo is a place for regular meetings, thoughtful conversations, and discovering new vocabulary in its natural context. More importantly, it is where the Serbian language begins to reveal itself – not as a collection of grammar rules, but as a living world you genuinely want to be part of.
Join us. The books are already waiting on the table.
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