Presentation of translation of Academician Vladimir Ćorović’s book

The English translation of Vladimir Ćorović’s book The Relations between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in the 20th Century published by the Archives of Yugoslavia, SASA Institute for Balkan Studies and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University will be presented at the SASA Grand Hall, on Monday, 28 October at 1 p.m. The speakers on this occasion will be Academician Vladimir S. Kostić, SASA president, SASA Foreign Member Jean-Paul Bled, Professor John Keiger from the University of Cambridge, Milan Terzić, PhD and director of the Archives of Yugoslavia, Professor Luciano Monzali from the University of Bari and Vojislav Pavlović, PhD and director of the Institute for Balkan Studies.

One of the very rare polymaths in the Serbian historiography, V. Ćorović based his analysis on the conflict of national movements and territorial ambitions of the dual monarchy’s petrified structures. His synthesis of Kingdom of Serbia’s foreign policy has been unrivalled in the local historiography to this day. A Vienna pupil, a representative of a brilliant generation of Hercegovina writers and historians, Vladimir Ćorović wrote his book based on the insight into the entire corpus of Serbian records of the period 1902-1914, a significant part of which is unavailable to contemporary historians since it disappeared during the Nazi occupation, but also based on being a witness, since from 1909-1914 he worked at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and in the Serbian company ‘Prosveta’.

Vladimir Ćorović’s book was banned both by Milan Stojadinović’s Government in 1936 and by censors of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia after 1945. Created in response to the 1920s revisionist historiography of mainly German origin, the book was not in accordance with M. Stojadinović’s Government policy of good relations with Germany. After the Communist Party rose to power, the problem no longer was in the book content, but in the personality of the author, a representative of ‘the defeated’.

The first edition of the book saw the light in 1992, and in 2018 the Institute for Balkan Studies and the Archives of Yugoslavia published the English translation. This monograph is undeniably of major significance for understanding the process leading to the Austrian-Hungarian declaration of war on Serbia, therefore, the publishers wanted to introduce the foreign public to the genesis of conflict which brought about Austrian-Hungarian attack on Serbia.