Nikola Pasic in the anecdotes of his contemporaries

Abstract

In the anecdotes told by his contemporaries, а famous Serbian politician from the 19th and 20th centuries Nikola Pašić is depicted as both a cunning and a capable politician. Those who wrote the anecdotes and published them, chose those anecdotes that depicted Pašić in a way that aligned with their own political backgrounds. In this paper, I analyze two collections of anecdotes about Pašić: "Bajade – Anegdote o Nikoli Pašiću" (edited by a Montenegrin satirist Nikac od Rovina, and published in 1924 and 1996) and "Anegdote o Nikoli Pašiću" (eidted by a Serbian writer and satirist Milovan Vitezović and published in 2002). Using a basic thematic analysis and relying on methodologies suggested by Viktor Raskin and Snežana Samardžija, I analyzed the meaning of the anecdotes in the aforementioned collections, and placed them in the historical context in which they had been written and published. The analysis shows that the two collections’ function was to correct a dominating political discours of their time. While "Bajade" corrected a predominately positive stance towards Nikola Pašić among Montenegrian political group named "bjelaši" active in Yugoslavia in the interwar period, the second collection served as a correction of the dominant Marxist discours which ignored the historical importance of Pašić, and was falling apart under the influence of restored national sentiments during the last decade of the 20th century.