Balkan Library

"The Death of the Apostle", Dragi Mihailovski

Dragi Mihailovski, 2002
Translator: Zdravka Iteva
First edition, 2005. Macedonian. 190 pages. Price 2,5 euro

Bitolia is under siege. The main characters – the besieged Ravu, and Timurtash – the conqueror. War is the work of Satan. Beelzebub is above everything. The gods are silent and idle, unlike their confreres from ancient plots. They are hard of hearing and responding neither to prayers, nor to blasphemies. God and Allah are in the book as much as they are in the characters’ thoughts. Whether there is or isn’t a plot in its trivial form is not so important in this case. The important thing is there is dialog which crucifies like a crucifix. A dialog – distant, intertwined only in the reader’s mind, while in the story the characters don’t meet. But their rebellious minds are stormed by events present in the book both as a background and as an instigator of heretic thoughts uncharacteristic neither of the loyal Christian Ravu – the apostle translator, scribe (calligrapher) and chronicler, nor of the Mohammedan Timurtash, the ever-victorious general of the Sultan’s army.

The book is modern prose. The topic is everlasting. The theses and antitheses burn in the furnace of reasoning of both characters – the besieged and the intruder. In the words of today – patriotism, in its ancient meaning, duels partly with the ideas of contemporary globalism. The synthesis is in harmony with the ideas of the contemporary man. And the novel has been written for the contemporary reader who will upon finishing it be convinced of its high artistic qualities.

The author of the novel, Dr. Dragi Mihailovski, is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature of the Philological Faculty in Skopje. He was born in Bitolia in 1951. He is a writer, translator, university professor and an author of numerous books.