Vladislav Petković Dis
1880–1917 2 entries
Biography
Vladislav Petković Dis was a Serbian poet, one of the most original voices of Serbian modernism. Born in 1880 in the village of Zablaće, near Čačak, he never finished secondary school and worked as a village teacher and a customs clerk before settling in Belgrade, where he lived the uncertain life of a bohemian. His collection Drowned Souls of 1911 made his name as a poet of dreams, death and melancholy, whose dark, musical verse was unlike anything before it.
In poems such as Our Days he turned his bitterness against the moral decay of society and politics, and in 1913 he published the collection We Await the Tsar. During the Balkan Wars and the First World War he was a war correspondent, and in 1915 he shared the retreat of the Serbian army through Albania. In 1917 he drowned in the Ionian Sea when a German submarine sank the ship on which he was travelling, near Corfu. Poems such as Perhaps She Sleeps made him one of the best-loved Serbian poets.
- Quotes 2