The exhibition “Serbian Literature and the Great War” was designed with the intention of showing the peculiarities of Serbian literature from 1914 to 1918, and to present our most important creators whose lives were significantly marked by the war, i.e. their works that deal thematically with the First World War. The presentation of “war literature” evokes the very phenomenon of war through the prism of literature.

The exhibition consists of three parts. The first segment has 17 posters in digital printing that present Serbian writers who participated in the war, either as soldiers at the front or as civilians crossing Albania, losing their homes and loved ones: Stanislav Vinaver, Sima Pandurović. The posters show their “wartime biography”, excerpts from works published during the war in periodicals, and excerpts from books with war themes that they published after the war. In addition to the renowned writers mentioned, the two posters also present less-known poets and unknown authors who, during the war, wrote poetry, sketch stories and short stories – often in position, on guard, between two battles. Also, the literary and artistic creations of our authors in Bizerte were specially shown.

The second part of the exhibition contains an overview of Serbian literature in periodicals published in Serbia, Croatia, Greece and France during the Great War.

A special exhibition segment consists of 42 original rare books published during and immediately before and after the First World War – from “Istorija nove srpske književnosti” by Jovan Skerlić (Belgrade, 1914), through the book “Iz ratnih dana” 1912–1917 by Ivo Ćipik (Thessaloniki, 1917) and “Jugoslovenska književnost” by Pavlo Popović (Cambridge, 1918), to “Utuljena kandila” by Dragiša Vasić (Belgrade, 1922). The collection was formed in cooperation with the Serbian Bibliophile Society.

The exhibition was shown in many libraries throughout Serbia, but also in Budapest, in The National Library of Foreign Literature in 2014, when a catalogue in Hungarian was also printed. In October 2016, the exhibition was hosted in Canada in the gallery of the Serbian National Academy.

At the invitation of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Serbia, the Directorate for Public Relations, the exhibition was set up in the small gallery of the Serbian Armed Forces House in November 2018. The same year, the exhibition was hosted at the XVI International Congress of Slavists at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade.