Born in rural northwestern Bosnia in the final days of Ottoman rule, Kočić began writing around the turn of the twentieth century, first poetry and then prose.

While a university student, he became politically active and began agitating for agrarian reforms within Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied by Austria-Hungary following the Ottomans' withdrawal in 1878.

The following year, he published his third and final short story collection, and won a seat in the newly created Diet of Bosnia (Sabor), where he became the leader of a faction of anti-Austrian Serb nationalists.

Petar Kočić was born into a Bosnian Serb[1] family on 29 June 1877 in the hamlet of Stričići, in the Zmijanje region, near Banja Luka in northern Bosnia.

In 1879, Kočić's mother died while giving birth to his younger brother Ilija, and his father decided to become a monk at the Gomionica Monastery, where he adopted the monastic name Gerasim.

At the time, ninety percent of Bosnia's population was illiterate, and storytelling took on a predominantly oral character, as exemplified by the tradition of the gusle, a one-stringed instrument used to accompany the recitation of epic poetry, which was the primary form of entertainment in Serb peasant communities.

Kočić's stay at the monastery, during which he was taught the history of the Serbs and became acquainted with Serbian tradition and lore, left an indelible impression on him, and was to influence his future writing.

In 1888, around the time Kočić arrived at Gomionica, his father was arrested by the Austro-Hungarian police for leading a demonstration against Crown Prince Rudolph during a state visit to Banja Luka, and sentenced to seven months' imprisonment.

[2] Kočić left Gomionica after two years and completed his primary education at the Eastern Orthodox religious school in Banja Luka, though he returned to the monastery every summer in order to spend time with his father.

During his first three years, he excelled in subjects such as mathematics, as well as Greek, Latin, German and Serbo-Croatian, which the Austro-Hungarians deemed the "language of the land" (zemaljski jezik), so as not to become entangled in local ethnolinguistic disputes.

Kočić's behaviour became extremely volatile, as exemplified in a letter he wrote his childhood friend and future wife Milka Vukmanović, threatening to kill her and then himself if she married another man.

The historian Robin Okey describes such passages as "a reminder of the stresses on young students in this first transition from patriarchalism, particularly without funding when illness and hunger were recurrent.

"Some roughness from one's co-nationals was understandable," Hajdarpašić writes, "but an 'alien' rule of law was intolerable since it violated, by default, the 'native' national sentiment that Kočić claimed as his position.

Though they were no longer legally referred to as serfs from 1878 onwards, their farmland remained the property of the Muslim landowning class, which emerged from the Ottoman withdrawal largely unscathed.

[5] Kočić understood that his political views could lead to restrictions being imposed on his liberty, as demonstrated in a letter he wrote Vukmanović in 1901: "I shall spend perhaps the greater part of my life in jails and prisons, because all us students are going to begin a struggle against the [Austrians], who plunder our nation, deprive it of its freedom, and destroy its happiness.

He made the mistake of writing an article for the Belgrade daily Politika that was critical of the local Serbian archimandrite, prompting his superiors to arrange a transfer to Bitola, which he declined.

His request again brought him to the attention of the Austro-Hungarian authorities, who compiled a secret internal memorandum branding him "a fanatical revolutionary" who led "an Austrophobic movement dedicated to organizing a pan-Serbian uprising in Bosnia.

The first issue appeared on 28 June 1907, during Vidovdan (St. Vitus Day), a holiday of great significance in the Serbian national consciousness marking the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo.

[23] Other officials were far less restrained in their criticism, branding Kočić a "well-known agitator", "extremist", "proselytizing subversive", "fanatical revolutionary", "destructive influence", "spiritus rector of disaffection", "boundlessly excitable demagogue" and the "most zealous champion of the Great Serb cause".

The main subjects of these speeches were the agrarian question and forestry rights, both of which disproportionately affected the Bosnian Serb peasantry, Kočić's primary constituents, who made up nearly half of Bosnia and Herzegovina's rural population at the time.

Kočić and his followers also had extensive ties to Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a South Slav nationalist student movement calling for an end to Austro-Hungarian rule.

[28] By 1912, the strains of politics were beginning to take a toll on Kočić's mental health, and he vacated his position on the Administrative and Cultural Council the following year.

[4] His stories were often satirical in nature and dealt with the everyday hardships faced by the Bosnian Serb peasantry, mocking the Austro-Hungarian administration and pointing out its flaws.

[37] "These features alone," Hajdarpašić writes, "the satirical tone, the complaints about the government, the comparisons to the Turkish yoke, do not stand out as particularly exceptional, suggesting in fact rather narrow targets of Kočić's critique."

"[20] Contemporary critics noted that Kočić's peasant characters deviated from the idyllic representations that were prevalent in 19th-century South Slavic literature, and that his stories instead depicted rural life as strenuous and hard.

An example of this can be found in Sudanija, in which the main character, an illiterate peasant named Ćiko Trubajić, incorrectly refers to the paragraphs in the Austro-Hungarian law code using a sociolect, paligrafi ("paligraphs").

[39] The authority figures who frustrate the powerless Serb peasant's calls for justice are faceless, nameless individuals who have trouble understanding the nuances and subtleties of Balkan life.

[41] Short stories such as Jazavac pred sudom inspired an entire generation of young South Slav workers, farmers and intellectuals to oppose Austro-Hungarian rule.

Kočić's cause was also taken up by South Slav nationalists such as Gavrilo Princip, the Young Bosnian who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914, precipitating the July Crisis and the outbreak of World War I.

[45] During the socialist period, which lasted between 1945 and 1991, Kočić's Serb heritage was deliberately understated in schoolbooks, and schoolchildren were taught to regard him as an exclusively Bosnian historical and literary figure.