Stephen the Little – an Unknown and an Inspiration

Summary Stephen the Little (Šćepan Mali), one of the most interesting characters in Montenegrin history and, thematically, one of the most intriguing characters in literature, in the real world established himself as a leader interrupting the Petrović dynasty, which had reigned continuously for two centuries. He was the only person not from the Petrović family to ascend to the throne of Montenegro, a rule that then still had an almost completely tribal character. Not only that, he had major success in stamping out blood feuds – the cult-like tradition of revenge, present in Montenegrin society even into the modern era – as well as all forms of deviant behaviour: theft, raiding, violence and oppression. The rebuilding of the institutions of the system guaranteed him absolute and secure rule up until the arrival of Count Dolgorukov, an emissary sent by the Russian government. Our task is to prove, using Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish , that the punitive repressions favoured by rulers in the eighteenth century were mechanisms not only of repression, but also of correction towards those being punished. Punishment serves a complex social function, according to Foucault: it is an indicator of the social structures, but is also a political technique for consolidating power. Alongside all this, by using mythomania as a means to captivate the nation, Stephen the Little showed that he understood the epic conventions of Montenegrins’ lives, the way they adapted to strong leaders and their inclination towards being dominated by Russian influences. In order to explain the cultural dimension of his appearing, we will make use of imagological knowledge about the culture of memory and remembrance of a Balkan nation accustomed to an orally transmitted code of thinking. The plane of comparison between the historical person himself and the character in literature is a cross-section which, in fact, will provide auto-images and hetero-images, i. e. images of oneself and images of others. In the end, the focus of our study will be to reflect on an unusual mythology of authority in the insufficiently researched eighteenth century of Montenegrin history. In conclusion, Njegoš needed Stephen’s character, both in order to reconstruct the mythology and mythomania of the self-proclaimed ruler, but also to provide an allegorical image of the time in which the author himself was writing, which was threatened once again by ethnic dissolution and was therefore in dire need of a strong ruling structure and an authoritarian ruler. By incorporating another two works that analyse Stephen the Little, one by author Stefan Zanović, who was writing before Njegoš’s time, and one by Stefan Mitrov Ljubiša who was writing after Njegoš, in this paper we have attempted to reconstruct the direction their narrations were leading: the direction of entertaining storytelling with a rather didactic message, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, which Zanović belonged to, or with the purpose of contributing to historical authenticity – the approach that S. M. Ljubiša leaned towards.