ABSTRACT: Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922–2010) addressed the wars of the 1990s in the territory of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in both his diary entries and public statements. This paper examines his writings about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as presented in his diaries Notebooks of Lanzarote, his reflections on Portugal’s future in light of the circumstances that befell Yugoslavia, translations of his books into South Slavic languages, as well as his interview published in the daily newspaper Politika. Particular attention is paid to the views this distinctly left-wing, publicly engaged intellectual expressed on the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and on Slobodan Milošević, shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

KEYWORDS: José Saramago, war, Yugoslavia, NATO bombing, Slobodan Milošević

SUMMARY: This paper primarily focuses on the written and oral statements of José Saramago (1922–2010), a Portuguese writer and publicly engaged left-wing intellectual, on the wars fought in the territory of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The chapter “Diary Notes on the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina” draws extensively from his Notebooks of Lanzarote. In these diaries, written between 1993 and 1995, Saramago expressed, among other things, his notably pessimistic perspective shaped by the war and its consequences, criticized European politics, and recounted a verbal incident at the Congress of the International PEN Club in Santiago de Compostela involving writers coming from the three warring nations, as well as his experience at a conference on Sarajevo organized at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The chapter “Iberia and Yugoslavia” links Saramago’s belief in the need for closer ties between Portugal and Spain—one of the motifs of his novel The Stone Raft—to the experience and fate of Yugoslavia, which he also discussed. The chapter “Saramago Among Us” traces the first translations of his books and their publication in South Slavic languages, primarily novels, and focuses on his 1998 interview for the newspaper Politika, in which he also spoke about the literatures of small nations and a possible reason for the fact that his books were translated into Serbian language relatively late. Finally, “The NATO Bombing and Slobodan Milošević” offers an analysis of Saramago’s negative stance toward the event from the spring of 1999 referred to in the chapter’s title. More precisely, shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, this longstanding member of the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português (PCP) was critical of both Slobodan Milošević and the European Union, and, in an explicitly anti-American register, of the NATO alliance, as is evident from the statements he made during his appearance at the 16th Galician Week of Philosophy in Pontevedra in April of that year, as well as from the interview he later gave for L’Humanité.