Who is the author of the first published book in Bijeljina? This is Radivoj Sofronić, according to Mustafa Grabčanović and Slobodan Petrović, a descendant of a prominent Bijeljina family.
He was the son of Uroš Sofronić, who opened the first bookstore in Bijeljina, called "Uroš Sofronić and Sons", and was the publisher of that book. It was a short collection of stories under the title "Irony", and it was printed in 1926.
Radivoj Sofronic was born in 1900, worked as a teacher, and committed suicide at the age of 28. His work has been almost completely forgotten to this day.
Other people and other cities remember, Bijeljina forgets and rejects everything that was good, advanced, valuable, and that is the characteristic of primitive societies.
Radivoj Sofronić belonged to the generation that grew up during the First World War, which enthusiastically welcomed the final defeat of Austria-Hungary and the unification of the Slavic countries into the Kingdom of the Slovak Republic, and then saw the destruction of their hopes and ideals.
The new state, dreamed of for generations, was nowhere near what was expected. And it was not just poverty and misery, but the deep injustice on which the rule of the Serbian royal dynasty rested. The young teacher started writing social literature, which was a mirror of society at that time.
His collection of stories "Irony" was a first-rate cultural sensation in Bijeljina, because, as we said, it is the first book by a Bijeljina resident who lived in his own town. Those in the know say that it was, in its own way, a sketch for a future novel about the life of the people of Sember, a novel that was never written.
The Sofronić family was engaged in trade in Bijeljina. When the City Hall was built in 1910, the bookstore "Uroš Sofronić i sons" was located in a room on the left corner of the building, because it was very important for the city. Paper and all office supplies were sold there, as well as books by publishers from other cities of Yugoslavia at the time, mostly from Belgrade and Sarajevo. Back then it was a unique place in the city.
Radivoj Sofronić graduated from elementary and (then prestigious) trade school in Bijeljina, and then in Sarajevo in 1919 he graduated from Teacher's School. He started working as a teacher in his town, then a backward village, where trained teachers were a real rarity. In the collision with the primitive city environment, he felt defeated, so he transferred to the school in Crnjelovo, in order to get away from political games, in which he did not want to participate.
Among his acquaintances and friends at that time was Rodoljub Čolaković.
They tried to somehow wake up the dull palanquin environment, with theatrical amateurism, literary work, sports... But it all went very hard. Radivoj withdrew more and more into himself and ran away from people. The family tried to help him, they sent him to various doctors, herbalists, witch doctors, and even to the famous sanatorium Purkersdorf near Vienna, but in vain. In Milići near Vlasenica, where he came to work at a school, Radivoj Sofronić shot himself in the head with a pistol. He was not even 28 years old.
His book is almost impossible to find today. His name is not in any history books or lexicons. How and why - it's hard to explain. The answer can be seen in the fact that today the most important thing for the simpleton who occupied this part of the world is to incite hatred, to exalt differences, to perpetuate divisions of all kinds, to glorify crime and criminals, to revive fascism, single-mindedness and ethno-religious consciousness. , to remake history in accordance with his own intelligence and morality.
Books, artists, benefactors, creators of all kinds, builders who built bridges between people and nations, fighters for people's freedom - these are undesirable phenomena for them. The quiet and sensitive Radivoj Sofronić, author of the first book published in Bijeljina, was lost in the darkness that seeps from their heads and their hearts.
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