Professor Svetozar Bulović on the Occasion of the First Edition of
The Fiery Mary of Livno
This is a book of mass testimony — a powerful accusation of genocide that took place half a century ago.
An accusation, but not a trial.
The book evokes the vision of an ancient theatre in which fossil-like figures parade before us — former people, yet still recognizable. It contains some successful literary passages and true narrative motifs, but its realist storytelling returns us to bloody reality, keeping the reader under strong emotional tension to the very end.
Until now, nothing has really been written about the genocide committed against the Serbian people in the last war. Camp survivors speak of crimes in the Livno region…
When the topic of “knives and pits” is mentioned, people usually think of Ivan Goran Kovačić’s The Pit. It is no coincidence that this literary work by our writer was created and promoted precisely in this Livno region.
But that is poetry, a grand metaphor for suffering and martyrdom. Although The Pit contains many realistic descriptions and many recognizable scenes from that apocalyptic episode of the last war, it does not offer the same experience, the same reality that we see and live through the confessional insight of the local camp survivors — most of them living witnesses — about which the global public knew little to nothing.
This is precisely where the importance of our non-fiction and of our nation lies, thanks in large part to Budо Simonović and his exceptional work The Fiery Mary of Livno.
In almost every chapter of his epic, the author uses the authentic language of his narrators and pit-dwellers, but what these elderly people recounted in the most horrific stories must be approached and heard with care. It is a true literary feat to organize this vast material into a coherent structure, to place the multitude of witnesses and testimonies in their proper place and to preserve the authenticity of the events that took place in the Livno region during those bloody days in the spring and summer of 1941.
Budо Simonović approached this complex subject with great responsibility and, it seems to me, succeeded in saving from oblivion a multitude of circumstances and events surrounding one of the most monstrous crimes in our history…
Finally, and perhaps at just the right time, we have received the long-awaited book about a crime that must not be forgotten.
(Translated by Sava Press from: Budo Simonović, Ognjena Marija Livanjska, 6. izd. (Beograd: Udruženje građana „Ognjena Marija Livanjska“, 2016), 573-574.)