Kawan Bergeloet

Kawan Bergeloet

Cover, first edition
Author	Soeman Hs
Cover artist	Nasroen A.S. ()
Country	Indonesia
Language	Indonesian
Genre	Short story collection
Publisher	Balai Pustaka
Publication date	1941
Pages	50
OCLC	20651467

Kawan Bergeloet (Perfected Spelling: Kawan Bergelut; Indonesian for "Playmate") is a collection of short stories written by Soeman Hs and first published by Balai Pustaka in 1941. It contains twelve stories, seven of which were previously published in the magazine Pandji Poestaka, as well as an introduction by Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana. These stories are generally humorous in nature, and presented with a diction that shows strong east Sumatran influences.

Released in response to the commercial success of Mohammad Kasim's () collection Teman Doedoek, Kawan Bergeloet has been reprinted several times and received positive critical appraisal. Soeman, together with Kasim, has since been considered a pioneer of the Indonesian short story. The Dutch scholar of Indonesian literature A. Teeuw writes that the collection is Soeman's most interesting contribution to Indonesian literature.

Short stories and sketches in Malay have been recorded in Indonesia since the 1870s, and a short story collection—H. Kommer's Warna Sari—was published in 1912. These early stories used vernacular Malay and were often humorous or derived from fairy tales or detective fiction. Short story-writing developed further in the 1920s and 1930s, when short stories and sketches in a more formal register of Malay were widely published in such magazines as Pandji Poestaka and Poedjangga Baroe. The first collection of short stories in the Indonesian literary canon, Mohammad Kasim's () Teman Doedoek, was published by Balai Pustaka in 1937. This collection was a commercial success, selling 4,000 copies by 1941.