White Dawns


White Dawns is a collection of poems by the famous Macedonian poet Kočo Racin, published in 1939 in Samobor, near Zagreb, Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It is the third collection of poems published in contemporary Macedonian language, after Venko Markovski's Folk Sorrows and The Fire, published in 1938.

Publication and content

White Dawns was printed on 25 November at the printing house of Dragutin Schpuler in 4,000 copies. After the established communist practice, the title is printed in red. Since there was a danger in discovering the author's identity, Kosta Solev published the work under the pseudonym "K. Racin". According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the poetry collection explores the fate of impoverished Macedonians. The poems of the book were prohibited by the Yugoslav government. Per Preply, it is the most translated book from North Macedonia.
White Dawns comprises 12 poems in the following order:
  • Days
  • Sorrow
  • Rural toil
  • The tobacco harvesters
  • Lenka
  • Farewell
  • A ballad to the unknown one
  • Elegies for you
  • The morning above us
  • Tatunčo
  • To have a shop in Struga
  • ''The diggers''