Serbia: The History behind the Name by stevan k. pavlowitch
London, C. Hurst and Company, 2002. 256 pages Hardback: £45.
Paperback: £14.95 The late Fred Singleton used to describe his
regular task of writing the entry on Yugoslavia for the Annual
Register of World Events as being rather like writing a very
long telegram. In the volume under review here, Stevan
Pavlowitch has written a very long telegram indeed! The
achievement of producing a book of historical essays on Serbia
within 252 pages is a remarkable feat of compression, but one in
which for the most part the condensed nature of the narrative is
not earned at the cost of intelligibility. There can be few
historical enterprises which are more daunting in this respect.
As Pavlowitch points out, it is difficult to write a history of
“Serbia”. The state bearing this title was destroyed by the
advancing Ottoman Empire during the fourteenth century, and
revived only during the nineteenth century. It was subsumed
after the First World War in a unified South