the classroom and subjected to a monetary fine. According to a classmate, the outburst changed Kočić, "turning him from an ambitious, disciplined student, into a truant and frequenter of kafanas and bars." Following an incident in which a visibly intoxicated Kočić and his friends verbally abused Muslim students in a hotel bar, Kočić was expelled from the Gymnasium. He found himself unable to enroll into any of the high schools in Bosnia, having apparently drawn the ire of the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Kočić was forced to continue his education in neighbouring Serbia and enrolled into a Belgrade high school, from which he graduated in 1899. Career Early writing and activism While in Belgrade, Kočić met the writer Janko Veselinović, whose popular short stories and novels romanticized Serbian peasant life. Kočić shared several of his poems with Veselinović, who recommended that he focus on prose instead. Kočić's time in Belgrade was marked by dire poverty. "Although Serbian," he wrote, the city was "a foreign world." 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. Letters to his father, pressing for money, also struck an abusive and manipulative tone. The notion of suicide began to appear more frequently in his notes. "I will kill myself," he wrote, "to put an end once and for all to all the sufferings and torments that have pursued me from my birth. My life in Banja Luka was hard and dark, in Sarajevo still worse, and in Belgrade, it reached the very climax of suffering." 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." Frequently homeless, Kočić took to sleeping on the street. One evening, he was woken by a kick to the gut. A policeman stood overhead, swearing and threatening to arrest him. Kočić fled but later recounted that he forgave the policeman because the kick had been administered by "the same soldier who will, sooner or later, carry victorious banners" into Bosnia. Historian Edin Hajdarpašić believes Kočić's response to this incident is emblematic of his nationalist philosophy. "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