Blaže Koneski (Macedonian and ; 19 December 1921 – 7 December 1993) was a Macedonian poet, writer, literary translator, and linguistic scholar, who had a major contribution to the codification of the standard Macedonian language, for which he earned the reputation of father of the Macedonian literary language. He is the key figure who shaped Macedonian literature and intellectual life in the country. During his life and after his death, Koneski has been accused of deliberately serbianizing the Macedonian standard.
Biography
Early years Koneski was born on 19 December 1921 in Nebregovo, near Prilep, in the province of South Serbia, part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (current-day North Macedonia), in a pro-Serbian family. He belonged to the Ljamevci family, whose Slava (patron saint) was St. Nicholas Day. His maternal uncle, Serbian Chetnik Gligor Sokolović, was one of the champions of Serbian propaganda in Ottoman Macedonia in the early 20th century. According to Koneski himself, his village became oriented towards the Serbian propaganda in the early 20th century and Sokolović was responsible for this shift. However, per Koneski, this shift was not nationally motivated and his family did not raise him as a Serbian, rather he always felt as a Macedonian. Per the Macedonian Bulgarian authors Dragi Dragnev and Kosta Tsarnushanov, Konevski was born as Blagoje Ordan Ljameski or Ljamević in a family that was strongly pro-Serbian and identified as Serbian. According to historian Chris Kostov, in his youth, he regarded Serbian as his native language. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization revolutionary Traycho Chundev described him in his diary as a "Serboman" who insists on the Serbian alphabet.
He studied in his native village and Prilep. After receiving a Royal Serbian scholarship, he studied in the Kragujevac gymnasium or high school in central Serbia. In the gymnasium, he served as the editor of its magazine, wrote Serbian-language poems and completed his secondary education in 1939. When Koneski returned to his native village, he spoke a Serbianized language and was ridiculed for it by the locals, upon that he felt like he betrayed his people and started to re-learn the local dialect. In 1939, he studied medicine at the University of Belgrade, but switched to Slavic philology there in 1940, studying under Aleksandar Belić and Radovan Košutić, among others. In that period, he wrote his first linguistic work devoted to his native Prilep dialect, which was published in 1949. In 1941, after the defeat of Yugoslavia in Aufmarsch 25, and the subsequent Bulgarian rule of Macedonia, he enrolled in the Faculty of Slavic Studies at the Sofia University under the name Blagoy Konev, graduating in 1944. After the Bulgarian coup d'état in September 1944, he returned to his native land. In September 1944, Koneski was summoned to the village Gorno Vranovci, where he helped edit the newspaper Mlad Borec (Young Fighter) and translated content. Koneski also began working in the department for communist agitprop at the Main Headquarters of the Macedonian Partisans.
Early codification of Macedonian
A Commission for the Establishment of the Macedonian Language, Alphabet and Orthography was tasked with establishing an alphabet and a standardized language, with three linguistic commissions of ASNOM functioning from 1944 to 1945. At the age of 22, he was nominated to join the commission. He was the youngest member of the commission and had the most recent education in Slavic linguistics then. A conflict emerged between Koneski and Venko Markovski. The letter yer divided Markovski and Koneski, which the former supported and the latter opposed. Koneski advocated for the full adoption of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Slavist Victor Friedman has said that Koneski advocated for the adoption of Serbian Cyrillic on purely linguistic and pedagogical grounds."The next day, 28 November an open conflict broke out between Markovski and Koneski concerning the alphabet, when the latter affirmed: If we adopt the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, our language will remain Macedonian (…) This specifically deals with the letters: ћ, ђ, љ, њ (…) And, now, what are the reasons for accepting these two symbols: ћ, ђ? There are those who would opine that "tj" and "dj" are characteristic of Slavic languages, which developed in a varied manner in different languages, in Russian: ч, ж, in Serbian: ћ, ђ, and in Bulgarian: щ, жд. But in Macedonian, these characteristics can not be taken into consideration. This change in the Macedonian language has been achieved via the Serbian language (…)" For more see: Maciej Kawka (2016). Macedonian Discourses: Text Linguistics and Pragmatics. Jagiellonian University Press. pp. 29-30. Koneski argued that at the time most Macedonians were educated with this orthography and insisted that any other choice would make them illiterate."Koneski continued: The majority of the Macedonian literate population can use Vuk’s alphabet. If we do not include these letters, many of them will become illiterate. If we introduce 5–6 new letters, many of the people will become illiterate (…) Common people often write "quickly," without using the letter ъ, and this means that they can’t feel it, either. Others, I know a case from Gevgelija, who writes "трагнам" and "барзо" instead of "търгнам" and "бързо" (get off and quick, respectively). This means that their speech includes this ъ and they replace it with the sound closest to it, i.e. they replace it with "a." As I said, I personally consider the vocal r (р) to be absent, because I do not feel it, with lower vibration than the Serbian vocal r (р). Given all the reasons that I presented, I advocate keeping the letters ћ and ђ, in our alphabet and excluding ъ from the written language." For more see: Maciej Kawka (2016). Macedonian Discourses: Text Linguistics and Pragmatics. Jagiellonian University Press. p. 30. Most members of the commission wanted to create a distinct Macedonian alphabet. There were long debates over the dorsopalatals kj and gj. Koneski proposed the signs for their Serbian palatal equivalents (ћ and ђ), but other members perceived them as "too Serbian." Vasil Iljoski convinced him that he was being "politically naive" in endorsing the use of Serbian Cyrillic for the dorsopalatal stops on purely linguistic grounds. He participated only in the first day of the conference as he felt that the commission would not produce results and more younger people were needed in it.
According to Chris Kostov, there were heated debates among the members of the commission, where Koneski insisted on the replacement of Bulgarian words with Serbian as much as possible, while Markovski was opposed to this. Per Macedonian revisionist historian Stojan Kiselinovski, Koneski who was from a family which followed Serbian traditional values, engaged in conflict with Markovski whose family nurtured Bulgarian Exarchate traditional values. Much later, in his memoirs, Markovski will depict this conflict as a national one and that he was trying to save the alphabet from total Serbification. However, the stenographic transcripts of the debates show that this opposition was not nationally based, since Markovski, the future pro-Bulgarian and Bulgarian nationalist, even apprised the historical legacy of Krste Misirkov to the other members of the commission. A personal conflict also arose between Koneski and the teacher and linguist Gjorgji Kiselinov as Kiselinov had already developed a project on the Macedonian alphabet and grammar that was not considered by the commission, largely because of Koneski. Kiselinov later also interpreted this conflict as a national one, as he said that he was marginalized by Koneski because his family was pro-Bulgarian, while Koneski's was pro-Serbian.
The first version of the Macedonian alphabet was announced on 28 December 1944. The proposed alphabet was original and introduced special characters. Yer was preserved. Koneski ended up leaving the commission, apparently because he considered the other participants to be "linguistically naive" and insufficiently prepared. The proposal was rejected by ASNOM. In April 1945, the agitprop section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia invited Koneski, Markovski and Veselinka Malinska to Belgrade. According to the memoirs of Yugoslav politician Milovan Djilas, Koneski's proposals were accepted. On 3 May 1945, a new alphabet proposal was presented to the Macedonian Ministry of Education, which approved it. This proposal was signed by ten people, including Koneski, Markovski and Iljoski. Koneski has been accused of deliberately serbianizing the Macedonian standard.Kronsteiner, Otto, Zerfall Jugoslawiens und die Zukunft der makedonischen Literatursprache : Der späte Fall von Glottotomie? in: Die slawischen Sprachen (1992) 29, 142-171. A number of intellectuals considered the Macedonian alphabet as "too Serbified", such as Markovski, Vasil Ivanovski, Pavel Shatev and Panko Brashnarov. However, Koneski made sure to gradually correct errors, limiting the Serbian influence on Macedonian, by creating new words and an original lexicon. Koneski came up with the basic directives for the construction of a Macedonian vocabulary. His innovations were not promptly adopted by all Macedonians. Per Koneski, the newly created words, such as nastan (event) and prašanje (question), were initially perceived as "funny" by people. According to Koneski, opponents of literary Macedonian attempted to negate the influence of codification efforts by accusing them of being "Serbianizing".
Later work Koneski came up with a new interpretation of national history, distinguishing the Macedonian revival from the Bulgarian revival. Combining the Marxist socioeconomic analytical perspective with the post-romantic national discourse, Koneski sought to de-Bulgarianize history and language, perceiving the Macedonian national consciousness as antagonistic to the Bulgarian national consciousness. In 1945, he worked as a lector in the Macedonian National Theater. As part of the theater, Koneski translated Othello by William Shakespeare, the works by Ivo Andrić and Vjekoslav Kaleb. He also translated poetry from German (works by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich Heine), Russian (works by Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovsky), Serbo-Croatian (works by Petar Petrović Njegoš and Desanka Maksimović), Czech (works by Karel Jaromir Erben and Jan Neruda), Polish (works by Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Leopold Staff, Julian Tuwim, Tadeusz Różewicz), Slovenian (works by France Prešeren), and Bulgarian (works by Lazar Poptraykov and Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov). On behalf of the ministry, he was included in a group that was to arrange the establishment of the Faculty of Philosophy. In 1946, he began working as a lecturer at the Department of Macedonian Language in the newly established Faculty of Philosophy. He was a member of the Macedonian PEN Center, one of the founders of the Macedonian Writers' Association in 1947 and its first president.
After the Tito-Stalin split, the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party criticized the "Serbified language" of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1948. Koneski reacted to the Bulgarian accusations, regarding them as an attack on the Macedonian national identity. Bulgarian linguists also started claiming that the Macedonian standard was Serbianized in that period. In 1952, Koneski issued the Phonology of his Grammar of the Macedonian Language. In the same year, Bulgarian linguist Kiril Mirchev tried to prove that Macedonian was part of Bulgarian, but regarded its norm and lexicon as Serbified. Koneski issued a rebuttal in an essay.