Exhibition on Serbian literature in WWI to open

BELGRADE - An exhibition titled Serbian Literature in World War I, scheduled to open on April 28 at the National Library of Serbia, will be the start of commemorations of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, a press conference was told on Friday.

The exhibition is the first in a series of events that will mark the centenary across Serbia in 2014, National Library of Serbia Acting Director Svetlana Jancic said.

Among the guests at the exhibition will be Max Kaiser, deputy director of the Austrian National Library, who headed a European project aimed at digitising all existing materials relating to the Great War.

The exhibition is dedicated to the wartime literary output of Serbs who fought on either side - a significant number of Serbian intellectuals and writers were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army.

Nada Mirkov-Bogdanovic, the author of the exhibition, said that the many months of work on the final concept of the exhibition were preceded by several years of work on digitisation, conservation and restoration of the enormous body of materials in the EU-funded project titled Europeana Collections 1914-1918: Remembering the First World War.

Europeana now contains a digitised library dedicated to WWI, with 465,000 library units, including 2200 submissions from the National Library of Serbia - 408 books, 60 original maps and other archive material.

The goal of the project is not to provide a factographic list of all literary phenomena between 1914 and 1918, but to portray the spirit of a literary epoch in the brutal context of war and point to the fact that Serbian literature has succeeded in maintaining its continuity, said the authors of the exhibition, which will be open until June...