Macedonian literature begins with the Ohrid Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire in 886. These first written works in the dialects of the Macedonian recension were religious. The school was established by St. Clement of Ohrid. The Macedonian recension at that time was part of the Old Church Slavonic and it didn't represent one regional dialect but a generalized form of early eastern South Slavic. The standardization of the Macedonian language in the 20 century provided good ground for further development of the modern Macedonian literature and this period is the richest one in the history of the literature itself.
History
The Macedonian language was not officially recognized until the establishment of Macedonia as a constituent republic of communist Yugoslavia in 1946. Krste Petkov Misirkov in his Za Makedonskite raboti and in the literary periodical Vardar helped to create the foundations of Macedonian language and literature. These efforts were continued after World War I by Kosta Racin, who wrote mainly poetry in Macedonian and propagated its use through the literary journals of the 1930s. Racin's poems in Beli mugri, which include many elements of oral folk poetry, were prohibited by the government of pre-World War II Yugoslavia. Some writers, such as Kole Nedelkovski, worked and published abroad because of political pressure.
Periods
The Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts divides Macedonian literature into three large periods, which are subdivided into additional ones. The periods of the Macedonian literature are:
After World War II, under the new Yugoslav SR Macedonia, the scholar Blaze Koneski and others were charged with the task of standardizing Macedonian as the official literary language. With this new freedom to write and publish in its own language, SR Macedonia produced many literary figures in the postwar period. Poetry was represented in the work of Aco Šopov, Slavko Janevski, Blaze Koneski, and Gane Todorovski. Janevski was also a distinguished prose writer and the author of the first Macedonian novel, Selo zad sedumte jaseni. His most ambitious work was a cycle of six novels that deals with Macedonian history and includes Tvrdoglavi, a novel articulating the Macedonian people's myths and legends of remembering and interpreting their history. Prewar playwrights, such as Vasil Iljoski, continued to write, and the theatre was invigorated by new dramatists, such as Kole Cašule, Tome Arsovski, and Goran Stefanovski. Cašule also wrote several novels. A main theme of his work is the defeat of idealists and idealism. His play Crnila deals with the early 20th-century murder of an IMRO leader by other Organization's activists and with the characters of both executioners and victim. Among the best-known writers of prose is Zivko Cingo, whose collections of stories Paskvelija and Nova Paskvelija are about an imaginary land where clashes and interactions between old traditions and revolutionary consciousness are enacted. His novel Golemata voda, set in an orphanage, shows the grandness and sadness of childhood. Other notable writers include Vlada Uroševic '' and Jovan Pavlovski.
Authors
Some of the well-known authors that contributed in the development of the Macedonian literature are:
