Excluding the phenomenon of play, on which Sjećanja contains little information,(2) the life of Alija Izetbegović (1925-2003) is thickly woven from at least the
four remaining phenomena of human existence and their manyfold planes. This
may precisely be the reason that reading his Sjećanja (Izetbegović, 2005, p. 31) can
hardly make anyone indifferent. The reasons behind this are many, which every
reader discovers in their own way, but the main ones can be linked to the fact that
Sjećanja defies being just read as a personal story about the past life of a man, in
this particular case the personal story about the life of Alija Izetbegović; instead,
the pages of this lengthy confession are sifted through and understood as testimonies of an epoch in its numerous sections and segments, particularly of the intense
times following 1990.

Various receptions of Alija Izetbegović’s Sjećanja share many similarities with
those looming from the An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
by Mahatma Gandhi (1927),(3) The Days by Taha Hussein (1979),(4) and many other
biographies of prominent persons of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their autobiographies are often powerful acknowledgements of the lives lived not only by them but
by the thousands or even millions of their contemporaries.

Life in Almost Nine Decades

Alija Izetbegović should be believed when he says the following about his Sjećanja:
“These are fragments of my life, because I have either forgotten whole parts of my
life or they are mine and mine alone. Even what is left is more of a chronicle rather
than a biography” (Izetbegovic, 2005, p. 17). This disclosure informs the reader that
the author has excluded two planes from Sjećanja: the forgotten parts of his life and
those parts that are personal to him which he did not share with others because he
saw no reason to.

This exact reasonability and purposefulness of his Sjećanja is what Alija Izetbegović explains in the introduction titled “A Short History of Bosnia and Herzegovina

(2) Alija Izetbegović mentions his mother’s homestead in Azići where he’d go with his peers during the
summer: “These summer days spent in the country are certainly the best days of my life.” (Izetbegović,
2005, p. 31). This is almost all that he conceivably said about the parts of his youth that also contained
the element of play.
(3) Published in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian in several editions.
(4) As far as we know, there are two translations of Days, an autobiography by Taha Hussein. The first
translation was made by Nijaz Dizdarević, published by Svjetlost in 1979, and the other one by Esad
Duraković, published by Svjetlost in 1998.