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SERBIAN STUDIESJOURNAL OF THE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR SERBIAN STUDIES Vol. 26 2012 Nos. 1–2

Editors

Ljubica D. Popovich, Vanderbilt University, Co-Editor

Lilien F. Robinson, George Washington University, Co-EditorJelena Bogdanovi!, Iowa State University, Associate Editor

Du"an Danilovi!, Iowa State University, Book Review Editor

Editorial Board

Radmila Jovanovi!-Gorup, Columbia University

Jelena Bogdanovi!, Iowa State University

Svetlana Tomi!, Alfa University, Belgrade

Gojko Vu#kovi!, Los Angeles School District

Gordana Pe"akovi!, Argosy University

$or %e Jovanovi!, World Bank

Marina Belovi!-Hodge, Library of Congress


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North American Society for Serbian Studies

NSAS

S Executive Committee

President: Tatjana Aleksi!, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Vice President: Tomislav Longinovi!, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Secretary: Danilo Toma"evi!

Treasurer: Sonja Kotlica

Standing Committee

Nada Petkovi!-$or %evi!, University of Chicago Milica Baki!-Hayden, University of Pittsburgh

Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Monash University, AustraliaLjubica D. Popovich, Vanderbilt University Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, George Washington University

Past Presidents

Alex N. Dragnich, Vanderbilt University 1978–80Vasa D. Mihailovich, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 1980–82George Vid Tomashevich, New York State University, Buffalo 1982–84Biljana &ljivi!-&im"i!, University of Illinois at Chicago 1984–86Dimitrije Djordjevic, University of California, Santa Barbara 1986–88Sofija &kori!, Toronto University 1988–90Jelisaveta Stanojevich Allen, Dumbarton Oaks 1990–92Ljubica D. Popovich, Vanderbilt University 1992–94Thomas A. Emmert, Gustavus Adolphus College 1994–96Radmila Jovanovi!-Gorup, Columbia University 1996–98Julian Schuster, Hamline University 1998–2000Du"an Kora!, Catholic University 2000–02Lilien Filipovitch-Robinson, George Washington University 2002–04Ru'ica Popovitch-Kreki!, Mount St. Mary’s College 2004–06Ida Sinkevi!, Lafayette College 2006–08Milica Baki!-Hayden, University of Pittsburgh 2008–10 Nada Petkovi!-$or %evi!, University of Chicago 2010–12Du"an Danilovi!, Iowa State University 2012–14


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Membership in the NASSS and Subscriptions to Serbian Studies

The North American Society for Serbian Studies was founded in 1978 and has

published the Society’s journal, Serbian Studies, since 1980. An inter-

disciplinary peer-reviewed journal, it invites scholarly articles on subjects

pertaining to Serbian culture and society, past and present, and across fields

and disciplines. The journal also welcomes archival documents, source

materials, and book reviews.

Manuscripts should be submitted by e-mail to co-editors Ljubica D.

Popovich and Lilien F. Robinson at [email protected]. Articles must be in

English and, in general, should not exceed 8,000 words, excluding footnotes.

Formatting should be consistent with the Chicago Manual of Style. Graphic

and photographic images should be in jpeg format.

Serbian Studies is published twice yearly and is sent to all members of the

Society. Members also receive the NASSS Newsletter. Membership including

subscription to Serbian Studies is $40.00 per year for individuals, $50.00 for

institutions, $15.00 for students and retirees, and $10.00 for individuals inSerbia and former Yugoslav lands. Subscription without membership is

$30.00 per year.

Articles submitted and all correspondence concerning editorial matters

should be sent to Lilien F. Robinson, Co-Editor, Department of Fine Arts and

Art History, George Washington University, 801 22nd St. NW, Washington,

DC 20052 ([email protected]) or Ljubica Popovich, Co-Editor, 5805 Osceola

Rd., Bethesda, MD 20816. All articles considered to have potential for

publication will be subject to anonymous peer review by scholars in the field. Book reviews should be sent to the Book Review Editor, Du"an

Danilovi!, at [email protected].

All communications regarding membership, subscriptions, back issues,

and advertising should be addressed to the Treasurer, Sonja Kotlica, 1301

Delaware Ave. SW, #12, Washington, DC 20024 ([email protected]).

The opinions expressed in the articles and book reviews published in

Serbian Studies are those of the authors and not necessarily of the editors or

publishers of the journal.

Serbian Studies accepts advertising that is of interest to the membership

of the NASSS. Advertising information and rates are available from the

Treasurer of NASSS, Sonja Kotlica ([email protected]).


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Copyright © 2015 by Serbian Studies: ISSN 0742-3330

Permission is granted to reprint any article in this issue, provided appropriate credit is

given and two copies of the reprinted material are sent to Serbian Studies.

Technical Editor: Jordan Hussey-Andersen

This issue was published in July 2015.

Serbian Studies is produced and distributed by Slavica Publishers. Individuals should join the NASSS rather than subscribing directly to the journal. Libraries and

institutions should order Serbian Studies from Slavica; the institutional subscriptionrate is $50/year (two issues) beginning with vol. 14 (2000).

Slavica Publishers [Toll-free] 1-877-SLAVICA (752-8422) Indiana University [Tel.] 1-812-856-4186 1430 N. Willis Drive [Fax] 1-812-856-4187 Bloomington, IN 47404–2146 [Email] [email protected] USA [WWW] http://www.slavica.com/


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Contents

A Note from the Editors

I. Literature

Radmila J. Gorup, Columbia University

Boundaries and Crossings in the Works of Ivo Andri! .............................. 1

Radojka Vuk "evi!, University of Belgrade

A Study of #ilas’s Perspectives on Njego$’s Poet, Prince, Bishop ......... 17

Radmila J. Gorup, Columbia University

Literary Disputes of the 1950s and the

Demise of Socialist Realism .................................................................... 25

II. Politics

Vladislav Sotirovi!, Mykolas Romeris University

Who are the Albanians? The Illyrian Anthroponomy and the

Ethnogenesis of the Albanians—A Challenge to Regional Security ....... 45

Miroslav Svir "evi!, Institute for Balkan Studies, Serbian Academy of

Sciences and Arts

Serbian Radical Party 1881–1903: Ideology and Its Sources .................. 81

Vladislav Sotirovi!, Mykolas Romeris University

Separatism in Kosovo-Metohija and the Caucasus: Similarities and

Differences ............................................................................................. 107

III. History and Art History

Klara Volari!, Central European University

Carigradski Glasnik (1895–1909): Celebration of 19/31 August .......... 121


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Ljubica Popovich, Vanderbilt University

A Study of Actively Writing Standing Figures in Painting from

Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria .................................................................. 133

IV. Poetry

Biljana D. Obradovi!

That Double 0 Seven .............................................................................. 176

The Perfect Pears .................................................................................... 177

Mirjana N. Radovanov-Matari!

Novi Sad ................................................................................................. 180

The Old Mill ........................................................................................... 184

Chamomile ............................................................................................. 185

An Old Tree ............................................................................................ 187

%eljka Cvjetvan Gortinski

Three Serbian Ballads from the Collection of Vuk Stefanovi!

Karad&i! (Enclosure: CD recording) ...................................................... 189

V. Reviews

Nele Karajli!, Fajront u Sarajevo

(Svetozar Posti!) .................................................................................... 193

Djuro Zatezalo, Mihajlo Mika ! inovi" od Zmijskog polja

Milos Tsernianski, Migrations

(Branko Mikasinovich) ......................................................................... 197

Ivana Milankov, Dinner with Fish and Mirrors

(Biljana D. Obradovi!) ........................................................................... 201

Serbian Studies, Special Issue on Laza Lazarevi!

(Dubravka Bogutovac) ........................................................................... 203


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Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 26(1–2): vii, 2012.

A Note from the Editors

We are deeply saddened to report the passing of our colleague Miroslav

Svir !evi", whose work we have been privileged to publish in the past, and

whose last article, “Serbian Radical Party 1881–1903: Ideology and Its

Sources,” appears in this issue of Serbian Studies.

Born in Belgrade in 1970, Dr. Svir !evi" attended high school in Pan!evoand completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the Faculty of Law

at the University of Belgrade. There he achieved an average of 9.80 and was

awarded an internship at the prestigious Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., in

2009. His Master’s thesis, The Dawn of Democracy in Westminster , and his

doctoral dissertation, Development of Local Government and the Development

of the Modern Serbian State, were published in 2001 and 2011, respectively.

Dr. Svir !evi"’s professional appointments included that of Research As-

sociate at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences

and Arts, in which capacity he investigated the influence of Western Euro-

pean ideas on the development of legal and political institutions in Serbia and

other Balkan countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also pursued studies

of the development of modern libertarianism and the Austrian school of eco-

nomics. A dedicated and tireless scholar, Dr. Svir !evi" published dozens of

scientific papers in national and international journals, as well as reviews and

articles. He was a participant in numerous winter and summer institutes, sci-

entific symposia, and congresses on Balkanology and Libertarianism in Serbia

and abroad.Dr. Svir !evi" passed away on August 10, 2014.


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Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 26 (1–2):1–15, 2012.

Boundaries and Crossings: Bridging the Gap ofFragmented Identity in Ivo Andrić’s Prose

Radmila J. GorupColumbia University

Dictionaries give several denitions for the words “boundary” and “border,” allsuggesting a division or margin, the other side of something: a limit. Through-out history, crucial boundaries were often created not only on geographicalmaps, but also in the minds of people. These constructed boundaries shift withtime, but their symbolic signicance is often hard to erase.

In his 1924 dissertation, Ivo Andrić invokes such a division caused by theOttoman conquest of the Balkans:

So it came about that down the middle of the South Slavic lands a linewas etched…. This dividing wall split in two the Serbo-Croatian racialand linguistic complex, and its shadow, where four centuries of ghastlyhistory were played out, was to lie heavy on the landscape to either sideinto the far distant future.1

Complex divisions run deep within the Balkans and Andrić’s native Bosnia, butalso in the relationship between the East and the West, all results of legacies ofempires that dominated the region in the past. This fascinating area has been anenduring inspiration for the writer and served as a setting for most of his narra-tives, whose underlying theme was to reveal these lines of separation and seekto bridge the trauma caused by them.

The famed East-West opposition invoked by Andrić refers to societies thatco-exist side by side but are juxtaposed in the political, religious, and culturalsenses. Bosnia, which can be seen as a microcosm of the former Yugoslaviaand perhaps the whole of the Balkans, is a place where citizens are divided byreligion: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Islamic, and Jewish; cultural tra-

1 Ivo Andrić, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Inuence of Turkish Rule, ed. and trans. Želimir B. Juričić and John F. Loud (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991),17.


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2 Radmila J. Gorup

ditions: Byzantine, Ottoman, and central East European; as well as other minorattributes.

Several frameworks have been advanced for understanding the East-West

division, the most famous being the theory of Orientalism advanced by EdwardSaid, according to which the West constructed the Orient in order to deneitself against it with the intention of dominating and conquering it, both ma-terially and spiritually.2 Milica Bakić-Hayden introduced the concept of “nest-ling Orientalisms” as a structural variant of Orientalism according to whicheach Balkan imagined community identied itself with the West and located its

boundaries beyond its actual physical borders.3 In her seminal work Imaginingthe Balkans, Maria Todorova modies Said’s model to t the Balkans’ histor -

ical and geographical realities. Not only the Orient, but also the Balkans wereconstructed as Europe’s “other,” even though they were a geographical part ofit. For Todorova, the Balkan alterity, which she calls “Balkanisms ,” is similar,

but not identical, to that of Said’s Orientalisms.4 Several past colonial legacies have produced deep ssures in the territory

of the Balkans, but, according to Todorova, the 500-year Ottoman legacy is proving to be the most enduring. This legacy can be said to have the strongestinuence on the Western perception of the region, and it has been invoked inthe creation of the most recent stereotypes about the Balkans as a region of

primitivism and barbarity in the 1990s.Seemingly different, all these approaches treat the West as the standard ac-

cording to which the others are dened. The West invented not only the Orient, but also the other others, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which are seen as part of a broader Oriental other .

Tomislav Z. Longinović adds to this discussion by questioning whetherthe above models could account for the culture created by Ottoman-Balkan

juxtaposition. He points out that Said’s concept of Orientalism was based on

the premise of European domination of the East, while the Balkan types ofOrientalisms were the result of a reversed situation in which an Eastern powercolonized European territory in order to dominate and restructure it.5

2 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1997).3 See Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nestling Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic

Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917–31.4

See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).5 Tomislav Z. Longinović, “East Within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of IvoAndrić,” in Wayne S. Vucinich, ed., Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands, Research Se-ries (University of California, Berkeley), no. 92 (Berkeley, CA: International and Area Studies,1995), 124.


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Boundaries and Crossings 3

This idea of the borderline has been built into the creation of Andrić’s Ori-entalisms rst elaborated in his Ph.D. dissertation, in which he blames the Ot-toman legacy for the divisions and conicts in Bosnia as well as the region’s

exclusion from the West, and sees in it the origin of the ambiguity of the Balkanidentity.Andrić depicts Bosnia on the eve of Ottoman occupation as a country going

through a process of crucial transformation, poised to join the nations of theWest. Instead, it was conquered by an

Asiatic military people whose social institutions and customs spelledthe negation of any and all Christian culture, and whose religion, be-

gotten under other skies and social circumstances and quite incapableof adaptation, shackled the life of the spirit and mind in Bosnia, dis-guring it and molding it into an exceptional case.6

In his dissertation, Andrić is extremely critical of Ottoman rule, blaming itfor Bosnia’s backwardness and for its lagging behind the rest of Europe cultur-ally. The Ottomans could not “bring any cultural content even to those SouthSlavs who accepted Islam. For their Christian subjects, the Ottoman hegemony

brutalized customs and meant a step to the rear in every respect.”7 It dwarfedtheir progress. Ottoman rule was an absolute evil, a negative that introduced aset of values incompatible with Christianity and prevented Bosnia from fulll-ing its natural role of linking the two peripheries of the Serbo-Croatian element.It erected an impenetrable barrier to the Christian West. The dominant imagewas “dark Bosnia,” locked in self-imposed isolation, walled off from Europe.

Andrić’s dissertation was of a rather modest size. He produced it in a hurry.It was written in less than a year, and within a month after he submitted it to theKarl Franc University in Graz, Andrić passed the obligatory oral examinations

and was granted the title “Doctor of Philosophy.” He originally wrote his dis-sertation in Serbo-Croatian, with parts in German and French, but he translatedit all into German before submitting it.

For years very little was said about Andrić’s dissertation. This was not un-usual given that the author did not speak about his works but rather let themspeak for themselves. Also, Andrić might have felt that the topic of his dis-sertation was sensitive, and he never allowed it to be translated back into Ser -

bo-Croatian. A Serbo-Croatian translation did appear in 1982, seven years after

the author’s death, and several years later an English translation was published

6 Andrić, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia, 16.7 Ibid., 38.


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legacy.12 In other words, Islamic culture has its values and should be appreci-ated as long as it does not force these values on other people.

This article explores the ways in which the East-West divisions so stark -

ly highlighted in the dissertation are treated in Andrić’s ction, given that theencounter between the Ottoman East and Christian West remains the majortheme of Andrić’s short stories as well as his novels The Bridge on the Drina,

Bosnian Chronicle, and Devil’s Yard . In all these works, protagonists struggleto survive the consequences of Bosnian history, primarily the Ottoman legacy.They nd themselves between the two worlds wherein their identity is created.The author himself deeply felt the trauma of Bosnia’s fractured identity, whichhe blamed for recurrent Bosnian conicts. At the same time, as we shall see,

Andrić saw these ill-fated divisions as arbitrary and manmade.In The Bridge on the Drina, written almost two decades after the disserta-tion, Andrić does not stress divisions and isolation, but rather focuses on thesomewhat harmonious coexistence between the different ethnic groups in theBosnian town of Višegrad, where common experience bound together an eth-nically mixed community. To some extent, though it is not clearly articulated,the author credits this harmony to the presence of the bridge on the Drina River,a construction of rare beauty and endurance. Nonetheless, even here the lines ofseparation are discernable. Christians and Muslims live in segregated commu-nities, as each group clings to its own religion: Muslims assert their dominance

by perpetuating individual violence against the Christian serfs, while the Chris-tians retain their identities and dream of a national rebirth.

The largely absent character of Mehmed Pasha Sokolović, who is nancingthe construction of the bridge, carries the fateful division within himself. He isrepresented as a metaphor for Bosnian fractured identity. An ethnic Serb, hewas seized from his family when he was a boy, taken to Istanbul, and throwninto the category of the alien other. While he had achieved fame and successful-

ly appropriated another identity, his original identity did not recede but stayedactive, confounding him and causing him trauma. The Grand Vizier of the pow-erful empire remains both himself and the other . The pain of separation fromhis origin, like a dagger, cuts through his chest and keeps him aware of the other that is constantly part of him. Even the bridge he built to unite the placeof his origin with the place of his destiny did not alleviate his pain.

With the occupation and annexation of Bosnia by the Austro-HungarianEmpire in 1908, another alien other intrudes on Bosnia’s already colorful de-

mographic and religious milieu, and lines of divisions are once again redrawn.The former lords, Slavic Muslims, now have to share the fate of Christian serfs

12 Konstantinović, “O Andrićevom doktoratu,” 270.


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6 Radmila J. Gorup

as subjects of another empire. Andrić’s representation of Slavic Muslims be-comes more sympathetic now that they are no longer a ruling class and theyno longer subject the Christian rayah to various abuses. We see that clearly in

the character of Alihodža, the keeper of the bridge in The Bridge on the Drina,whom some critics consider to be Andrić’s voice in the novel. Alihodža is mis-trustful of all the changes the new empire initiates and suffers when the railroadis constructed and the bridge on the Drina no longer serves as a link betweenEast and West. Just like Mehmed Pasha, Alihodža feels stabbing pains in hischest when the bridge is bombed. He is lost when the bridge is damaged and theBosnian traditional way of life is imperiled.

Deploring the Oriental backwardness and savagery of the Balkans, the

Austrians enter Bosnia with a civilizing mission to forge modernity in a regionthey have already constructed as backward and violent. To do that, the enlight-ened Western empire resorts to a more systematic type of oppression, and in the

process, subverts the traditional way of life of the Bosnian ethnic communities,something that the Ottomans never did. In the end, the civilizing mission of aWestern empire proves to be as violent as the Eastern one.

Critics claim that the most signicant ideas on the fractured identity ofBosnia and the divisions between its ethnic communities are to be found in

Bosnian Chronicle (Travnička hronika). While The Bridge on the Drina emphasizes coherence of life in the town of Višegrad, Bosnian Chronicle, writtenfrom the point of view of two Westerners, stresses hostility and divisions be-tween various ethnic groups living in the town of Travnik. These divisions rein-force the idea of mistrust, misunderstanding, isolation, and exile. The Bridge onthe Drina thus allows coexistence between the people regardless of ideology,whereas Bosnian Chronicle emphasizes distrust and transience.

In Bosnian Chronicle, Andrić constructs the perspective of the West withina semi-Oriental milieu through his characters. The West is constructed around

the characters of two French consuls (and to some extent, the two Austrian con-suls) in their interaction with Turkish viziers, the heterogeneous local populace,and one another.

The relationship between different groups in the novel becomes more complex and divisions between them become more pronounced with the presenceof representatives from the Christian West: the rst consuls from France andAustria who come to Travnik, the administrative seat of the Bosnian pashaluk .The seven-year stay of the consuls (1807 to 1814) in Bosnia presents an ideal

opportunity to illustrate the reaction of Westerners inside an environment al-ready constructed as their other .

The encounter between East and West is seen primarily through the eyes oftwo French consuls. From the very beginning, the perception of Bosnia and its


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culture by the French consul Jean Daville is entirely negative. He feels fright-ened and isolated in “this God-forsaken Turkish province,” and he experiences

physical revulsion listening to the Oriental music or smelling the Oriental aro-

mas.13

The author quickly relativizes this negative perception of Bosnia. DesFosses, the new assistant consul sent to Bosnia, does not perceive it as negative-ly as his older colleague. He is considerably more open-minded and receptiveand tries to nd the reasons for Bosnia’s backwardness. While Daville looks ateverything around him with scorn, Des Fosses observes it all with curiosity andtries to learn from experience. Andrić thus seems to suggest that the difference

between the two consuls’ responses to Bosnia comes from the nature of the ob-server himself. Daville is a bitter and unhappy man, so his negative comments

should not surprise the reader. The young consul is also alien to Daville, asmuch as the local population.In the end, however, both consuls look at Bosnia as an alien other. Des

Fosses, too, has problems communicating even though he was sent to Bosnia because of his knowledge of Turkish. Neither the old consul nor the young one,who is really trying, is able to enter the world of Bosnia. They do not distin -guish between the various ethnic groups of Travnik; for them they are all Ori-ental. Even though to differing degrees, both consuls are constrained by theirimperial discourse, and both approach Bosnia and its culture from a perspectiveof superiority.

The two consuls experience the East as a culture that cannot be understood by foreigners, who get exhausted by constant attempts to decipher it. Moreover,the East is seen as a disease that corrupts the foreigner’s rational, enlightenedidentity, and in the end, destroys it. This is the classical construction of the East

by the European powers, which draw the opposing boundaries between Eastand West as barbarism versus civilization or backwardness versus progress.

It is, however, not only the foreign consuls who partake in the Orientali-

zation of Bosnia. The Ottoman viziers, representatives of the colonizing power, just like the Westerners, view Travnik and its population as the other . The threeOttoman viziers featured in Bosnian Chronicle are different, yet, just like theirFrench colleagues, they take a common stand toward the local population: theyview it with scorn and do not distinguish between Christians and Muslims. Forthem too, Travnik is an uncivilized wasteland, “a dog’s country.”14 Even thoughthey both view the Travnik population negatively, the Western consuls and Ot-toman viziers cannot understand each other’s cultures, thus remaining alien to

each other as well. Although the Travnik ethnic groups are perceived by out-13 Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, trans. Joseph Hitrec (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993),16.14 Ibid. , 112.


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8 Radmila J. Gorup

siders as homogeneous, relations between them are complex and historicallyloaded. Internal divisions have created a life of anxiety as people hide behind afacade of silence, which serves as a metaphor for these divisions.

As can be seen, boundaries between groups and people in The Bridgeon the Drina are not clear-cut, black and white, but are rather nuanced. Eventhough they are presented as manmade and arbitrary, the two-way division be-tween Christianity and Islam and the three-way division between the Westernrepresentatives, the East (i.e., the Ottomans), and Bosnia’s local population arereal within the groups.

All depictions of the Balkans and Yugoslavia, as well as Bosnia as its mi-crocosm, offer as their central characteristics divisions, hostilities, and a tran-

sitory character. At the same time, the Balkan Peninsula also invoked the imageof a bridge.15 For Vesna Goldsworthy,

individual Balkan identities were shaped over the centuries by the ideaof a frontier existence on which they based their own sense of impor -tance. Various Balkan nations symbolically dene themselves as beingat a gate, on a bridge, or at a crossroads between different worlds.16

Bosnia, perhaps, best represents this inner alterity that tends to be demonized.It is a perfect example of how complex the issues of boundaries and cross-ings-over can be. In fact, genuine crossings-over of religious and cultural

boundaries in Andrić are infrequent. One example from The Bridge on the Dri-na is often quoted: namely, the portrayal of the Višegrad population’s reactionto the great ood that occurred at the end of the 18th century. Surprised by asudden ood, the leading men of different ethnic communities of Višegrad rushto secure lodging for those displaced by the disaster. They place Muslims inMuslim households and Christians and Jews in Christian households, and only

then did Turkish, Christian, and Jewish elders intermingle:

The force of the element and the weight of the common misfortune brought these men together and bridged, at least for this one evening,the gulf that divided one faith from the other and especially the rayah from the Turks.17

15 Todorova, Inventing the Balkans, 15.16 Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New York:Columbia University Press, 2013), 7.17 Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. George Allen (New York: McMillan, 1977), 77.


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Crises and disasters tend to reduce socio-cultural differences and change cultur -al practices. The existential threat by natural elements, not ideology, makes thecontact between different ethnic groups possible. However, even here the con-

tact is temporary and the segregation of the population is thereafter maintained.Another example in which ethnic and religious barriers are crossed isshown within the character of a doctor. Fra Luka Danich, one of four Travnik“doctors” featured in Chapter Twelve of the Bosnian Chronicle, is one of a fewhappy characters in Andrić’s works. Not burdened by any dogma, Fra Luka hashis own vision of the world, which stresses the interconnectedness of all things.An atypical monk, Fra Luka is the best friend of another Travnik doctor, theJew Modro Atias. The local population views their friendship as a friendship

between “the Old and the New Testaments.” Fra Luka is freely crossing overthe ethnic and cultural barriers by treating patients of all religious denomina-tions in Travnik.

The character of Madame Daville, devoted mother and the wife of theFrench consul, successfully crosses barriers that religion and ideology erect.Even though she is a pious Catholic, her piety is free of any bigotry. By fo-cusing on family life, she is able to bring the consulate closer to the local pop-ulation, even though it does not approve of the presence of foreigners amongthem. She is admired by the local women of all religious persuasions. Theyshow great compassion when Madame Daville loses her child and rejoice whenher new baby arrives. In this example, what enables the contact between cul-tures is the humanistic attitude of the protagonist as well as the idea that no

particular ideology drives their relationships.There are several more examples in the novel in which a member or mem-

bers of a group lend assistance to members of a different group. In these situa-tions, the action is always motivated by empathy for a suffering human beingrather than an attempt to subjugate the person or attract him to one’s own side.

The relationship between the French and Austrian consuls, too, is subjectto ideology. The consuls are represented as rivals ghting for the interest oftheir own countries. However, their rivalry comes to light only in their ofcialcapacity. Whenever France and Austria are at war, the consuls break off anycontact. In times of good relations, they keep each other company and lamentthe destiny that brought them to this Oriental town. Even though they are bothmembers of the same enlightened Western culture, what drives their relation-ship is not personal afnity but the political relations between their countries.

In Imagining the Balkans, Todorova argues that there are two divergentinterpretations of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. The rst, which claimsthat it was “a religiously, socially, and institutionally alien imposition on Chris-tian society,” she dismisses from serious scholarship. The second one treats the


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10 Radmila J. Gorup

Ottoman legacy as the complete symbiosis of two traditions, the Byzantine andthe Balkan. What Todorova suggests is that the Balkans are imagined as an “in-complete self” due to race and religion, which grants the region at least partial

inclusion into Europe.18

It is not difcult to agree that several centuries of Ottoman dominationhad a great effect on Balkan cultural identity. However, the effect is mostlyseen in popular culture and everyday life. A frequently quoted example of thehybridized culture is the use of colored candles in place of colored eggs by theBosnian Muslims during Bairam in Andrić, or the celebration of St. George’sDay described in Meša Selimović’s Death and the Dervish.19 Religion did keepdifferent groups apart, and it was the foundation on which national identity was

constructed.While the religious complexity made the Balkan Peninsula especially proneto cultural hybridization, there is no culture which did not have a dialogue withother cultures resulting in change to a lesser or greater degree. The encounter

between Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam produced a culturein which certain characteristics between East and West were blurred yet neverentirely abolished. Seen from the outside, the Bosnian population presented aunied picture, yet to themselves they remained distinct.20 According to Long-inović, the local population continued to imagine itself as part of two worlds“between which there cannot be any real contact nor the possibility of agree-ment.”21 The Balkans and Bosnia never attained a denite otherness, and be-cause of this, Bosnian Muslims were seen as the other by both local Christiansand Ottoman rulers.

Indeed, the geographical and cultural reality of Bosnia produced a specialkind of border identity, and “being on the edge” has been a constant dimensionof Bosnian cultural mentality. Because they were within imperial areas—Byz-antine, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian—Bosnians felt a constant threat of being

overtaken and assimilated, which became a clear marker of their identity.

18 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 164–65.19 Ivo Andrić, “Razvoj duhovnog života u Bosni pod uticajem turske vladavine,” Sveske za-dužbine Ive Andrića, no.1 (1982): 255.20 I have a personal comment to add here. In the late 1970s my professor at Columbia was givena grant to travel and lecture in Yugoslavia. He did not know much about the country and asked me

to give him a short introduction. On his trip he visited all the republics except Macedonia and thethen Autonomous Region of Kosovo. Upon returning he told me: “Mrs. Gorup, all the differencesyou pointed out completely eluded me.” He halted for a while and added: “Perhaps, Sarajevo.”His outside gaze saw all the Yugoslavs alike.21 Longinović, “East Within the West,” 135.


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In the encounter with the East, the loss of identity is something all Andrić’scharacters, local and foreigner alike, experience. This loss of identity resultsin depersonalization. The author describes how those foreigners who come to

Bosnia to work or trade for some time, in most cases, succumb to an illnessConsul Daville calls this “Oriental poison.” Even a strong individual such asthe young French consul Des Fosses is affected by the Bosnian experience.Those who stay long are completely altered, hybridized into borderline charac-ters. They acquire from the Turks their negative and cruder characteristics andare unable to assimilate their better and nobler qualities and habits. While theyare perhaps able to understand the two worlds, they are still unable to bridgethem or establish a line of communication between them.

The three characters in the Bosnian Chronicle whom Andrić calls Levan-

tines articulate a collective identity that cannot be traced to a singular origin.As neither Easterners nor Westerners, they are hybrid personalities who havetranslated the effects of conicting cultural legacies. In effect, the Levantinesare a model of the “tragic” existence between East and West. These charac-ters are eternally homeless, doomed to a life on the border. Andrić’s trio— Cesar d’Avenat, Nicholas Rotta, and Giovanni Mario Cologna—is shaped by

both East and West but does not belong to either world. The members’ statusis profoundly ambiguous: neither European nor Oriental, they are essentiallyhomeless, tortured by their in-between position. Characteristically, all three areinterpreters, individuals who rely on their language skills on a daily basis andare expected to understand and explain foreign cultures.

The author elaborates that the Levantine is “a man with no illusion and noscruples and without a face of his own—that is to say, a man of several faces,forced to put on an act of humility one moment and one of boldness the next.”22 Lacking a clear self-identity, the Levantines are forced to live an ambiguousexistence.

Because they do not belong to any particular community, the Levantinesrepresent “the third world,” a world which has been created in the buffer zone

between the two civilizations, “a repository of the curse and damnation whichthe cleaving of the earth in two worlds has left in its wake.”23

The three Levantines are of mixed blood, and none had a very strong iden-tity even before their service in the East. As was typical, all three had changedtheir names. Two are rather negative characters. Cesar d’Avenat, formerly Ce-sare Avena, now called Davna by the local population, is also one of the four

Travnik “doctors” (“doctor without patients”) and works as a translator in the

22 Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, 33.23 Ibid., 262.


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12 Radmila J. Gorup

French consulate. Nicholas Rotta, formerly Scarparotta, works in the Austrianconsulate, also as an interpreter. Both have lost their Western identity and ac-quired the imagined Oriental master/slave mentality: they are arrogant to the

weak and servile to the powerful. D’Avenat’s only redeeming quality is that heloves his son and wants to secure a bright future for him. Rotta is portrayed asa conniving hunchback, an insolent, suspicious, compulsive, and pathologicalhoarder without any noble features.

The borderline reality is most successfully formulated by the character ofDr. Mario Cologna, the most fascinating of the three. He is a man “of uncertainage; of uncertain origin, nationality, and race; of uncertain belief and views;and of equally uncertain knowledge and experience.”24 He is consistent only in

his inconsistency. He mixes languages and speaks incessantly. He never signshis name in the same fashion. A man of contemporary ideas, a liberated andcritical spirit free from all prejudices, he is an enthusiast of all faiths but a phil-osophical skeptic. Cologna lives within the rift separating two civilizations, yethe sees the arbitrariness of their division: the people are divided by religion,allegiance, public position, or the accident of their birth. The doctor denes his

problem in two words — the “third world”— and sees it as a curse:

Such is a fate of the man from the Levant, for he is poussière humaine,human dust, drifting wearily between East and West, belonging to nei-ther and pulverized by both. These are people who speak many lan-guages but have no language of their own, who are familiar with tworeligions but hold fast to neither. ….They are a frontier people, bodilyand spiritually, from that black and bloody dividing line which, throughsome terrible, absurd misunderstanding, has been drawn between menand men, all creatures of God, between whom there should not andmust not be any such lines.25

Cologna is a spokesperson for the Levantine position, and he makes it hismission to intercede between the two worlds, to be a human bridge betweenthem. He sees all his efforts go in vain, yet he still hopes that in the end all thewandering people will meet and understand one another: “Un jour, tout sera

bien, voilà notre espėrance” (one day everything will be all right, that’s ourhope).26 Even if things seem to be disjointed and chaotic at the moment, they

24 Ibid., 227.25 Ibid., 262.26 Ibid., 263.


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are nevertheless linked together and interdependent. All of us are on the rightroad.

At the end of the novel, the character Jean Daville, the ercest critic of

Bosnia, expresses a similar hope to that of Dr. Cologna. On the last night of hisstay in Travnik, Daville is no longer frightened and lonely but feels “that some-where out there the right road exists…. And not only did it exist, but sooner orlater someone was bound to stumble on it and throw it open to all men.”27

For Zoran Milutinović, the character of Cologna is presented as someonewho is willing to step on the other side of a cultural divide in order to under-stand the other . That does not presuppose that he accepts uncritically all theelements of the other ’s culture. Instead, understanding the other presupposes

understanding oneself; the idea that one position meets the other ’s positionwithout submission of one’s position, what Milutinović within a broader framecalls “the third place.”28

The character of Cologna remains attractive to critics as a possible auto- biographical voice for Andrić. Cologna’s lament captures some facts of An-drić’s own life and mirrors the ambiguity of the cultural identity of Bosnia andAndrić’s incomplete self-identity. Being of mixed background, Andrić vacillat-ed between his Serbian national identity and his Roman Catholic upbringing.29 He grew up in ethnically diverse Bosnia. He spoke the ijekavian variant of Ser -

bo-Croatian until he moved to Belgrade. He wrote mostly about Bosnians. Henever openly chose one aspect of his identity, because, as he states, “to chooseone identity over the other presupposes a loss of the other.”30 To crossover fromone identity to another implies a loss; the love of one community requires hat-ing the other. That was something that Andrić could not choose. That is why hededicated his life to imagining “safe crossings” and trying to curtail the man-made differences brought in from the outside.

The merging of different cultural identities in one individual, as reected in

Dr. Cologna, is difcult to realize. Imagined as such, this multiculturalism is animpossible ideal for Cologna for the time being, and he cannot survive.

Just as we cannot nd Andrić in his dissertation, no single character in hisopus is a spokesperson for him. Cologna exposes some of the author’s lamentof Bosnia being ravished by invasions and oppressions. Yet, Cologna, “dottoreilirico,” as portrayed in Bosnian Chronicle, could not have been the ideal mod-el of what Andrić wished for the future of his homeland. He did sympathize27 Ibid., 427.28 Zoran Milutinović, Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture(Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2011), 249–60.29 Longinović, “East Within the West,” 136.30 Ibid.


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14 Radmila J. Gorup

with Cologna’s plight as someone living on the border, and his philosophy ofsyncretism and unity, but Andrić could not have been fond of Cologna’s lack ofdenition. That could not have served as the foundation for the imagined com-

munity of Yugoslavia of which the author had dreamed. His overt admirationfor language reformer Vuk Karadžić and the romantic poet Petar II Petrović Njegoš suggests that Andrić preferred characters of clearly dened identity.Andrić understood Cologna’s dream of a third world as a place of mutual un -derstanding where everything is connected, but he realized it was only a dreamfor the future. The best that one could hope for is a multiethnic state in whichdifferences are tolerated and precarious peace is safeguarded.

Andrić had worldviews consistent with a 20th-century, educated European.

He looked at the world from the point of view of the downtrodden, and theconstructed divisions between East and West in Bosnia, however ar bitrary inorigin, felt just as real to him. Located between the two constructs, his nativeBosnia was something else, a hybrid that did not allow for the construction ofa stable identity.

Alongside the fusion of different languages and the mixture of ethnicities,Andrić’s narrative transcends individual lives and speaks for his imagined Yu-goslav community. His ultimate goal is to structure a representation of a diversecoexisting community and to show that a unique voice can be found.

Critics see the author’s membership in the organization of Mlada Bos-na (Young Bosnia) as a key to understanding his anti-imperial attitude. Stilla high-school student in Sarajevo in 1911, Andrić became involved with thisanti-Austro-Hungarian organization, in which he fought for the liberation ofthe South Slavs from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was a erce advocateof the Yugoslav cause. This revolutionary movement called for the abolition ofreligious differences as the only way to overcome the legacy of the tragic past.The three-way religious division and the accompanying cultural division was

brought from outside and was the result of inuences from Rome, Byzantium,and the Ottoman Empire. For Mlada Bosna, the Yugoslav perspective was theonly choice for the people of Bosnia.

Everything suggests that Andrić believed that an understanding of the pastwas crucial for the future of the people in former Yugoslavia. The horror ofthe past is so powerfully present in his entire opus that it serves as a warningto what may be repeated in the future. While he fought to suppress the legacyof the Ottoman and other empires in his native land, he was acutely aware of

the unhappy past of his homeland and its discrimination against ethnic groups,something of which he was accused in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was fallingapart.


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We also cannot forget that Andrić wrote Bridge on the Drina and BosnianChronicle during World War II, in Nazi-occupied Belgrade. Uncharacteristi-cally for him, at the end of the Bosnian Chronicle he added the date and location

of the novel’s completion: “Finished in Belgrade in April 1942.” That was thetime when the horror of history had revisited his country and Yugoslavia wasdivided again by another empire along the same lines of earlier ssures, andwhen segments of the population became a ruling class and op pressor of their

brothers, again through collaboration and fratricide. Thus, the possibility wasraised that the term “Turk,” which Andrić uses to refer to the Ottomans, mayhave been used metaphorically and that he was writing about oppression closerto his time.

While national states are an invention of modernity, this concept was notapplicable to most of the Balkan people after they were left ethnically mixedand in ruins following the eclipse of the Ottoman Empire. That is because theBalkan nations had dened themselves in opposition to the Orient, not in op-

position to one another. Andrić hoped that the special make-up of this hetero-geneous mixture could produce a unique identity for Yugoslavia in the future.This could, however, only exist if it were all-inclusive. According to AndrewWachtel, “[t]he imagined community of Yugoslavia can exist only by the in-clusion of these competing, inimical, yet closely related groups, and it is ulti-mately the passion of their static yet ever-evolving relationships that appears inall of Andrić’s works.”31

Andrić rejected modern nationalism in favor of overcoming ethnic andreligious differences in a united state. The enduring communities that Andrićdepicted in his novels are a product of persistently intermixing cultures. Ifthey could be freed from religious differences, as advocated by Mlada Bos-na, the country the author envisioned would be possible in the future. Writtenduring World War II, Andrić’s great novels The Bridge on the Drina and Bos-nian Chronicle function to recreate such an imagined community. In these twoworks, Andrić depicts heterogeneous communities that, despite all hostilities,coexist.

31 Andrew Wachtel, “Imagining Yugoslavia: The Historical Archaeology of Ivo Andrić,” inVucinich, Ivo Andrić Revisited , 98.


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Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 26 (1–2): 17–24,2012.

A Study of Milovan Ðilas’s Perspectives on Njegoš in Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop

Radojka VukčevićUniversity of Belgrade

Milovan Đilas’s study Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop occupies a special place inthe reception of Njegoš in the U.S. because its publication in translation fromSerbian, (with a preface by Michael Petrovich and an introduction by WilliamJovanovich) constitutes a major event in Njegoš studies.1 Both Petrovich andJovanovich point to the multitude and completeness of Đilas’s perspectives on

Njegoš in his roles of writer, ruler, and religious leader. Moreover, they notethe fact that Đilas was the most famous prisoner from the former Yugoslavia,something that must have intrigued Americans at the time. Both Petrovich and

Jovanovich claim that the gure of Njegoš and Montenegro itself are no lessintriguing. The reasons, of course, are many! Đilas had previously attractedAmerican audiences with his political texts, such as The New Class (1957) andConversations with Stalin (1962). Jovanovich points to Đilas’s criticism of Yu-goslav communist society and his brave behavior both when he was removedfrom his very high political position and during his trial. What distinguisheshim from many other dissidents and from other European pro-Communist writ-ers is the fact that he himself was a pre-WWII Communist and warrior, thensubsequently one of the most powerful men of the Communist Party, braveenough to accept the consequence of his rebellion. Jovanovich is convincedthat later two of his books faced Đilas both with himself and Njegoš: Landwithout Justice (1985) and Montenegro (1963).

Njegoš had attracted American scholars with his poetic and epic works,such as Mountain Wreath, which resulted in six translations in English. Whencompared, the two authors have more that differentiates them than connectsthem: Njegoš was a hereditary ruler, while Đilas was a revolutionary ruler;

Njegoš was an Orthodox bishop, Đilas was an atheist; Njegoš was an idealist in

1 See William Jovanovich, preface to Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop, by Milovan Đilas (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), xix; and Michael Petrovich, introduction to Đilas,

Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop, xiii.


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18 Radojka Vukčević

philosophy, but Đilas was a representative of dialectic materialism. Neverthe-less, both were in power and both were “poets.”

American interest in Njegoš and Đilas is also conrmed by European au-

thors and evidenced in Svetozar Koljević’s very illuminating study Njegoš uengleskoj i američkoj kulturi (Njegoš in English and American Culture).2 Kol- jević agrees with Michael Petrovich’s statement that Đilas could write about Njegoš because they had much more in common than not: being himself fromMontenegro, he shared with Njegoš the totality of experience. However, Kolje-vić raises some of the contradictory questions encountered in Đilas’s masterfulwork: e.g., Đilas’s play on and exploration of identity, nationality, and state. Forexample, at that time Đilas protested that he was not a “Montenegrin,” but rath-

er a “Yugoslav.” Koljević reminds us that what we must keep in mind is the factthat Đilas was the rst translator of Milton’s Paradise Lost and that this musthave inuenced his preoccupation with the struggle between “good and evil.”3

Koljević’s study traces the reception of Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop inAmerican culture from the very rst anonymous notice in the New York review

Kirkus in 1966 through the following three decades.4 This critique, published before the book’s ofcial publication, points out that it was the third of Đilas’s“prison books,” which, at the same time, could be his last book. The authornotices that the book has some passages full of Đilas’s re and some momentscapturing the elevated dignity of an unhappy country and its people. However,it still lacks spontaneity of expression and the historical criticism necessary tomake a piece of art more than regional, concludes this unknown author.

This review illuminates many of the future contradictory perspectives onĐilas’s study: on the one hand, negative ones, but on the other, some very pos -itive ones, such as that of Philip E. Leinbach (1966),5 who evaluates Đilas’swork, without any political insinuation, as an excellent biography of one of theleading Balkan gures and interprets it as an intimate portrait of Njegoš and

his people, written in an exciting and concise style and based on rich sources,which recommends it to be included in collections of Slavic history and liter -ature.

Vasa D. Mihailović, one of the most respected Slavists, also evaluatedĐilas’s study very highly in his 1966 review as “the most ambitious and inter -

2 Svetozar Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi (Podgorica: Oktoih, 1992).3 Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 118.4 Ibid., 119.5 Philip E. Leinbach, “Djilas, Milovan. Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop,” Library Journal , 15 April1966: 2048. Cited in Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 119.


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A Study of Milovan Ðilas’s Perspectives on Njegoš 19

esting book of all of his prison books.”6 He views it as a complete perspectiveon a great poet who was complex and mysterious.

Bogdan Raditsa’s review (1966) takes a political standpoint and, after crit-

icizing both Đilas’s and Njegoš’s narrow Serb-Yugoslav orientation, concludesthat Đilas’s book would contribute to a better introduction of Yugoslav litera-tures in English-speaking countries where such a study was necessary. He viewsĐilas’s study as a standard work about a great Montenegrin poet that representsa contribution to Yugoslav literary criticism and national historiography.7

Dragan Milivojević’s review (1968) emphasizes the detailed historical and political aspects of the study. Milivojević points out that the book is based onrich documentation, but, as he says, it also shows how Đilas “feels Njegoš,”

and Milivojević illustrates this by comparing Njegoš’s disappointment in Rus-

sia with Đilas’s feelings after the break with the Soviet Union in 1948. In spiteof a style that is too illustrative, the book is a very successful subjective inter -

pretation of one of the greatest Yugoslav writers (Njegoš), according to thiscritic.8

Charles Dollen, in his 1966 review, offers the most critical discussion of the book from the perspective of religion. He negates any possibility of Đilas, anatheist and a Communist, being able to understand Njegoš in all his complexitywithin the sphere of religion itself. Although he states that Đilas did a lot for theWest by the very fact of pointing out the greatness of the Montenegrin national

poet, Dollen does, in the end, conclude that Đilas failed to actually illuminatethe great genius of Njegoš as a poet, ruler, and bishop because he had neither

poetic vision nor any understanding of religion to map Njegoš’s horizons.9

Koljević mentions one more sharp and negative review of Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop from 1966 by an anonymous writer who simply asserts thatĐilas’s study is not good enough to be read seriously in the U.S.10

However, this is not the end of the critical reception of Đilas’s study of

Njegoš in the U.S. These reviews only paved the way for some more critiquesin 1966, such as Elizabeth Pond’s text “Montenegro’s ‘Flash of Lightning’”in the Christian Science Monitor .11 Ponds makes a strong distinction between

6 Vasa D. Mihailovich, “Milovan Djilas. Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop,” Books Abroad, no. 40(1966): 459. Quoted in Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 120.7 Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 120–21.8 Dragan Milivojević, “Milovan Djilas. Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop,” Slavic and East Euro-

pean Journal , no. 12 (1968): 86. Cited in Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 121.9 Charles Dollen, “Djilas, Milovan, Njegoš,” Best Sellers, 1 May 1966, 42. Cited in Koljević,

Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 123.10 Koljević, Njegoš u engleskoj i američkoj kulturi, 124.11 Ibid.


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Montenegrin and American culture and points out that Đilas did not succeedin presenting what matters for Western culture: issues such as Njegoš’s gure,his personality, and his differing roles in his impoverished society and his very

rural culture. In conclusion, she claims that Đilas was successful in presentingwhat was less important: his own political views.However, this is not the end of the conicting critiques in the U.S. Another

scholar, John Simon, in his text “The Shepherd Prince” (1966), says that Đilas,though the best political gure in communist Yugoslavia, is not a good histo-rian, biographer, or critic. His style is not rened, while his Marxist ideology,combined with his rural wisdom, produced poor literary results.

Koljević interprets most of the negative criticism in the light of cultural

misunderstandings. This is the case with the text “The Case for Headhunting,”authored by Anthony West, an Irish writer, and published in The New Yorker in 1966. West discusses both Njegoš and Đilas’s Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop from the position of liberal humanism, notes Koljević, which led West to con-demn both Đilas and Njegoš as war criminals because, as he says, both of them

justied the idea of “the Inquisition of the Turkicized.”Đilas’s study continued to attract the attention of scholars after 1995, the

year by which Koljević concludes his research. Unfortunately, not much ofAmerican literary criticism on Đilas’s study can be found since 1995, or evenin the period between 1968 and 1995, the year which Koljević takes as key forthe latest reception of Njegoš in Britain and the U.S.

Further research of this reception since 1995 demonstrates that, in a way,the reception of Đilas’s Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop in the U.S. paralleledthe weakening of the reception of Njegoš’s works in general. As in the case ofthe reception of Njegoš’s works, the focus of criticism shifted from the liter -ary to the political and cultural. In the period since 1995, the focus was again

placed on Đilas’s political texts due to the 1991–92 war and the disintegration

of Yugoslavia (Dennis Reinhartz, “The Nationalism of Milovan Đilas”; C. L.Sulzberger, Paradise Regained: Memoir of a Rebel 12).13 Apart from the strongreception of Đilas’s political texts in Europe, especially in Germany, where agreat deal of academic research deals with his political studies, it is worth men-tioning the latest study by the Chinese author Zuo Tao Xiang, Evolution of the

Political Thought of Milovan Đilas (published in Peking in Chinese in 2012).Aleksa Đilas, the author of Đilas’s “Chronology and Selected Bibliography,”

12

Dennis Reinhartz, “The Nationalism of Milovan Đilas,” Modern Age, July 1985, 233–42; andC. L. Sulzberger, Paradise Regained: Memoir of a Rebel (New York: Praeger, 1989).13 This part of research is based on Milovan Đilas’s selected bibliography, published in MilovanDjilas, Milovan Đilas, ed. Miro Vuksanović, Deset vekova srpske književnosti, vol. 67 (NoviSad: Matica srpska, 2013), 464–65.


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also presents a number of Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations written inthe U.S., all dealing with Đilas’s political texts.14

This was not the case at home in Serbia and Montenegro, where the re-

ception of both Đilas’s literary and non-literary texts since 1990 has been in-creasingly stronger. After a gap of almost 40 years (Članci, 1941–46; Legendao Njegošu, 1952), many of his literary texts were collected and either pub-lished for the rst time or reprinted, as for example Njegoš: Pjesnik, vladar,vladika (1988); Izgubljene bitke (1994); Lov na ljude (1990); Gubavac i druge

priče (1989); Crna Gora (1994); Ljubav i druge priče (1990); Svetovi i mostovi(1997); Rane pripovetke (2000); Najlepše pripovetke Milovana Đilasa (2003);

Besudna zemlja (memoari) (2005); and Problemi naše književnosti i drugi

međuratni članci (2009). New studies of his works have been written as well:Živko Đurković, Đilas i Njegoš (2008); Ilija Pavićević, Đilasova umjetnička proza (2005); Branislav Kovačević, Đilas,heroj-antiheroj (2006); MomčiloCemović, Đilasovi odgovori (1997); Veselin Pavlićević, Đilas i članci; MilošMilikić Mido, Ratnim stazama Milovana Đilasa; Veselin Pavličević, “ Lijeve

greške” Milovana Đilasa ili partijski silogizam, to mention only a few. Thelatest biography by Borislav Lalić, Milovan Đilas: Vernik, buntovnik, mučenik(2011), is worth mentioning. Moreover, conferences on Đilas have been heldand proceedings published, e.g., Djelo Milovana Đilasa (2003) and Zbornik ra-dova o Đilasu (1996).15 Đilas seems to have become a cottage industry! Manyof these studies reveal some new perspectives on Đilas’s Njegoš: Poet, Prince,

Bishop, offering a fresh perception of this pivotal study for the understanding of Njegoš in the English language. Among many, we have singled out Đurković’scomparative study Đilas i Njegoš to discuss more thoroughly.

Živko Đurković, in his Đilas i Njegoš , follows the genesis of the varied perspectives on Đilas and points out the fact that Đilas wrote his rst text on Njegoš “from the new Marxist position, with the purpose of opposing bour -

geois ways of interpreting Njegoš’s poetry (after he became a Communist andserved a sentence of three years in prison) and getting the young Communistsinterested in Njegoš.”16 His interest in Njegoš never stopped, and during 1952,while ghting with the well-known Serbian writer Isidora Sekulić about theways to interpret Njegoš, he published these polemical texts in his book of es-

14 Ibid., 465. These include Vera P. Gathright, Milovan Đilas: A Political Biography (George

Washington University, 1980); and John J. McKay, The Party Career of Milovan Đilas (Univer -

sity of Washington, 1992).15 Djilas, Milovan Đilas, 462–66.16 Živko Đurković, Đilas i Njegoš (Podgorica: Crnogorska akademija nauka i umjetnosti, 2008)179.


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says A Legend about Njegoš ( Legenda o Njegošu).17 Đilas took the position ofhistorical materialism, reminds Đurković, trying to show the superiority of theMarxist approach, even in studying Njegoš and his works.18 Still, this did not

prevent him from becoming a “Njegošologist” (Njegoš specialist) as his studiescould not be overlooked among many others written in the 20th century, saysĐurković. Đurković introduced these two terms in Serbian: Njegošolog (Njegošscholar) and Njegošologist . As a matter of fact, it was Đilas’s very comprehen-sive study, Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop, which he wrote in Sremska Mitrovica

prison from 1957 to 1959, that earned him this place in “Njegošology” (Njegošscholarship), according to Đurković.19 In his analyses, Đurković focuses onthe three lines Đilas followed while writing his study: historical background,

Njegoš’s biography, and his works, with an emphasis on The Ray of the Micro-cosm, The Mountain Wreath, and The False Tsar: Stephen the Little. He claimsthat Đilas wrote about Njegoš from a lot of perspectives while applying histor -ical, biographical, and aesthetic approaches, covering both Njegoš’s personal-ity and his complete opus, and especially the three aspects of Njegoš’s publicfunctions—those of a poet, ruler, and bishop.

This study came as Đilas’s ideological reaction to the previously men-tioned A Legend about Njegoš , explains Đurković. This time Đilas approached

Njegoš’s works not from the position of class relations and class struggle butinterdisciplinarily, taking into account history, sociology, ethnology, anthropol-ogy, psychology, and many other disciplines, which enabled him to providea very comprehensive insight into Njegoš’s works. Still, Đurković identiessome digressions, contradictions, and rash statements in Đilas’s key study,which nonetheless do not negate its high value for literary criticism, but estab-lish for Đilas a rightful place in “Njegošology.” However, there is somethingmore that Đurković posits: Đilas is not a Njegošologist (Njegošolog—Njegoš17

See Milovan Đilas, Legenda o Njegošu (Belgrade: Kultura, 1952); and Isidora Sekulić, Njegošu: Knjiga duboke odanosti (Belgrade: Ethos, 2009).18 See Đilas, Legenda o Njegošu. The following collection of documents is worth consulting:Branka Doknić, Milić F. Petrović, and Ivan Hofman, eds., Kulturna politika Jugoslavije (1945– 1952): Zbornik dokumenata, bk. 1 (Belgrade: Arhiv Jugoslavije, 2009). In the introduction theeditors discuss the role of Milovan Đilas in the policy of Yugoslav culture, the role of PetarLubarda and his exhibition, and the role of journals Delo and Savremenik in the liberalizationof culture. Dr. Julian Huxley, a general director of the United Nations for culture and education,

played an important role in the cooperation between Yugoslavia and the UN. The most importantmoment for the liberalization of culture in this period was the contract between Yugoslavia and

the U.S. in 1952 which enabled the import of lms, music, etc. (ibid., 37).19 Đilas’s conict with the party leaders of the state because of his supporting the developmentof social democracy in Yugoslavia at that time ended in January 1954, when he was releasedfrom all his functions and positions. He was sentenced several times later on because of his textsagainst the existing system and some sensitive political issues, published abroad (ibid., 180).


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scholar) only, but a Njegosian ( Njegoševac —Njegoš exemplar) as well. He is a Njegosian because Njegoš showed the way to Đilas: he was his destiny. Đilasaccepted him as his ideal and role model, concludes Đurković, and “he even

called him universally human, the most tragic and the most moral personalityof our entire history and raised him to the mythical heights and spaces.”20 As demonstrated, the perspectives on Njegoš and Milovan Đilas are many,

no matter how different they are and from where they come! Nevertheless,there is one perspective on Njegoš that many of the authors might agree with,and it should be singled out. It is expressed by British scholar Edward DennisGoy in his most illuminating study on Njegoš, The Sabre and the Song. HereGoy defends Njegoš from the critics who accuse his Mountain Wreath of be-

ing a work which triggered hatred and caused genocide in former Yugoslaviaduring the 1991–92 war. He simply says that The Mountain Wreath is not justa “work of animated ideas, but rather a poetic expression of man in the generalsystem of nature through the portrayal of an event and the attendant sufferingand contradiction which it entails.”21 It is by no means a political afrmationof nationalistic fervor, for if it were, nobody would be interested in reading it.On the contrary, says Goy, if one “ignores the specic historical background,then it belongs very much to our present time and the modern view of man andhis existence that still represents the latest attempt to examine our real positionin life, before the pseudo-scientic evasions and crass jargon of some laterschool.”22

Among many perspectives on Đilas, there is one more to be agreed withand singled out: Albert Lord’s perspective on Đilas’s study23 as expressed inhis review “Father of Serbian Literature” (1966). According to Lord, Đilas’s

book is extraordinary: it is the rst critical treatise on a major Yugoslav author published in the United States for the general audience. The most importantthing, notes Lord, is the fact that Đilas is both a Montenegrin and a Serb, as was

Njegoš. Đilas’s study on Njegoš is exceptional, although it underplays the roleof the folk epic in the development of Njegoš’s poetry and minimizes the rolesof the Cetinje monastery and the Tropović school in the Bay of Kotor. Still,Đilas has captured the very essence and the telling details “of the period andregion and has made them dramatically alive.”24 Lord further emphasizes thatĐilas’s analyses are pertinent and “reveal not Njegoš’s artistic and philosoph-20 Ibid., 181.21 Edward Dennis Goy, The Sabre and the Song: Njegoš, “The Mountain Wreath” (Belgrade:Serbian P.E.N. Publications, 1995), 7–8.22 Ibid., 8.23 Ibid., 126.24 Albert Bates Lord, “Father of Serbian Literature,” Saturday Review, 30 April 1966, 30.


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ical creed, but Đilas’s own,”25 and he concludes that the “book is an event forthose in the English-speaking world who believe that Yugoslav literature andliterary gures should be better known.”26

Finally, instead of further presenting the glimpses of different perspectiveson both Njegoš and Đilas and their poetics, which would be an endless task,let us in conclusion return this time to Milovan Đilas and Edward Dennis Goyand bring them back together, only in order to agree with Goy’s conclusion andhis quotation from Đilas in, as he says, “his excellent book on Njegoš”: “The

Mountain Wreath shall be and must be constantly rediscovered and re-expe-rienced in ever new ways, as long as the Serbian nation and tongue exist.”27 As briey shown here, the perspectives on Njegoš and his works, Đilas’s per -

spectives on Njegoš and his works, and perspectives on Đilas’s Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop have been many. The complexity of Njegoš, the different roleshe had to play, the time and place in which he lived, as well as the complexityof Đilas’s most comprehensive study on Njegoš (rst published in the U.S.)will hopefully inspire more and more new perspectives. What must be kept inmind are the complexities and controversies of the times that we live in and the

positions from which we can and should study Njegoš in the future, while newcritical approaches continue to be developed. The last word on the possible

perspectives on both Njegoš and Đilas has obviously yet to be said.

[email protected]

25 Ibid., 30.26 Ibid., 31.27 Đilas, Njegoš: Poet, Prince, Bishop, 372. Quoted in Goy, The Sabre and the Song, 9.


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Literary Disputes of the 1950s and the Demise ofSocialist Realism

Radmila J. GorupColumbia University

This article focuses on the literary debates between the “modernists” and the“realists” which inaugurated the transition from the socialist realism of the late

1940s to the new wave of modernism in Serbian and Yugoslav literature in the

mid-1950s and beyond. According to the critic Sveta Lukić, the literary debatesof the early 1950s were “the battle cry in the ght for normal cultural relations

between Yugoslavia and the world, and for stylistic and critical freedom, aswell as the broader question of political democratization in socialism.”1

In his 1994 book Prošlost i poluprošlost (Past and Half-Past), Predrag

Protić states that three distinct orientations characterize Serbian spiritual lifeand dene the relationship of the Serbian cultural elite to the civilized world.The rst is a feeling of self-contentment, i.e., the idea that every departurefrom tradition unavoidably works against the vital interest not only of the

national culture, but of the nation as a whole. It is therefore imperative to staywithin the parameters left to the nation by ancestors. The second is the diamet-

rically opposed idea that Serbian culture must turn to foreign sources. Namely,during the long Ottoman occupation, Serbian culture was excluded from themain currents of Western civilization. To make up for that loss, Serbia has tofollow the same or similar path of other nations in order to reach the same level

of accomplishment. The third, a compromise orientation, acknowledges thatwhile Serbian culture may lag behind some other cultures, it has somethingauthentic and unique to offer to the rest of the world as an equal partner in

cultural dialogues with others.2

1 Sveta Lukić, Contemporary Yugoslav Literature: A Sociopolitical Approach (Savremena jugoslovenska literatura), ed. Gertrude Joch Robinson, trans. Pola Triandis (Urbana, IL: Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 1972), 17.

2 Predrag Protić, Prošlost i poluprošlost , Nove knjige domaćih pisaca: Esejistika (Belgrade:BIGZ, 1994), 194.

Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies 26 (1–2): 25–

43, 2012.


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This three-way orientation is usually collapsed into a two-way division,namely, an opposition between “traditionalists,” or “nationalists,” that is,those content with their own identity, who do not readily welcome changes

from abroad, and the “internationalists,” or “mondialists,” who are more opento the new, primarily Western currents. While there are other terms used toname this opposition, none represents a perfect t because historical condi-tions change and, with them, the composition of the opposing camps.3

This binary pattern can be followed throughout Serbian cultural history.

The national movements of the 19th century took two major forms in EasternEurope: nations that did not have established states yet fought against their op-

pressors and nations that had already achieved their statehood—Serbs among

them—attempted to strengthen their cultural identity. Both forms of national-ism were hostile to cosmopolitanism and tended to look inward. The nationalmyths they created in order to forge their cultural identity continue to inu-ence cultural trends to this day.

The opposition of “traditionalists” and “modernists” was the crossroads

at which Serbs halted periodically while their leading intellectuals debated

passionately which direction their culture should take. With time this opposi-

tion acquired different forms. In the 19th century it reected the gap betweenthe primarily patriarchal Serbs and their more cosmopolitan co-nationals who

grew up outside of Serbia and who were exposed to foreign cultures. Prečani,i.e., Serbs living in Austria-Hungary, many of whom were educated abroad,found themselves in a rather difcult position as their ideas and practices wereseen as alien by the Serbs south of the Sava and Danube, who treated themwith mistrust and resentment.

The opposition between “nationalists” and “internationalists” was rmlyestablished in the post-Ottoman period of Serbian culture and was reected inthe positions and personalities of the two key gures of the Serbian national

rebirth: Dositej Obradović (1742–1811), who was an Austrian Serb, and VukStefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), who was born in the Ottoman Serbia southof the Sava and Danube.4 Even though there was an overlap in the interests ofthe two men, Obradović is generally seen in hindsight as the champion of a

3 This is not limited to Serbia and the Balkans. Scholars throughout modern history recog-nized the distinction between global and local in the context of political and cultural affairs.They acknowledged the oppositional forces between these two notions also known as cosmo-

politanism or internationalism versus nationalism or modernism versus traditionalism. Theformer member of the pair seeks to engage with other cultures, while the latter opposes thatand tends to turn inward. Cosmopolitanism, or internationalism, assumes a relation to plural-ity and diversity in contrast to nationalist uniformity.

4 The rst internationalist in modern Serbian history, Dimitrije Obradović, known as Dositej,was a proponent of the philosophy of rationalism. His work was of crucial importance for the

26 Radmila J. Gorup


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pro-Western cultural orientation—a man who encouraged his nation to bor-

row freely from the cultural pool of more developed nations. Conversely, andeven paradoxically given his major role in the introduction of Serbian culture

to Europe, Karadžić is seen more as a traditionalist who was condent of thecultural accomplishments of his people and who offered them to others. The

leading Serbian critic at the beginning of the 20th century, Jovan Skerlić, also believed that Serbian material civilization and general culture lagged behind

the most developed countries of Europe and that Serbs should turn to the Westand adopt its new forms of culture.

The dilemma of which cultural orientation the country should adopt was

based on ideology and politics; those who favored the status quo in culture

had the upper hand in politics and opposed those who were more open tochange—usually that of the new modern trends coming from Western Europeand America and striving for legitimacy within the native culture.

The two different orientations toward culture were contested in several

key periods, culminating in celebrated literary debates, such as the polemic between Karadžić and his opponents in the rst half of the 19th century,5 the

emergence of modern Serbian culture as well as the formation of the Serbian national con-

sciousness.

The philosophy of rationalism implied the total reevaluation of culture by advocating

a break with tradition, in particular, by distancing education and culture from the stiinginuence of the church, seen as an impediment to progress. The reforms of Emperor Joseph(1780–90) to modernize his empire were met with mixed feelings among the Austrian Serbsin Vojvodina. While the afuent middle class enthusiastically embraced the reforms, the Ser -

bian Orthodox Church came out against them. To give the reforms any chance of success,a powerful gure was necessary, someone who would promote the reforms but at the sametime expose himself to the ire of the church. Educated in a monastery and a former monk,

Dositej was singularly equipped for this mission. He respected diversity and desired to bringhis countrymen to the Western European tradition and away from the culture and literaturerooted primarily in folklore and the church. He criticized the abuses of monasteries and clergy

and showed, by his own example, how decient the monastic education was. Dositej’s work paved the way for the great Serbian language reformer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. For more onDositej, see Radmila J. Gorup, “Dositej Obradović and Serbian Cultural Rebirth,” SerbianStudies 6, no. 1 (1991): 35–56.

5 The rst literary polemic in modern Serbian history involved Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. Tostandardize the Serbian literary language, Vuk chose a revolutionary path. He rejected everywritten tradition. Instead, he chose as the basis of the standard language the dialect of theHerzegovina region spoken by ordinary peasants, who were uneducated but had a rich oraltradition. He rejected any form of etymological orthography and insisted on consistent pho-netic spelling. The principal opponents of Vuk’s language reforms were the Serbian OrthodoxChurch and the educated Serbs living in Vojvodina, who had a written literature and preferredthe etymological orthography. However, their linguistic situation was complicated and rath-er chaotic, and they themselves needed linguistic reforms but preferred an entirely different

Literary Disputes of the 1950s and the Demise of Socialist Realism 27


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Conict on the Yugoslav Left of the 1930s,6 the disputes of the 1950s, whichare the topic of this article, the controversy following the publication of thenovel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (1976) by modernist Danilo Kiš (1935-89)

and the resulting scandal,7

and the literary debate of the 1990s between tra-ditionalists and postmodernists, played out in Književne novine (The Literary

direction from the one Vuk chose. They wanted to preserve their cherished Slavonic past andinsisted that the standard language be based on the language of educated people.

The rst shot in what later became known as the “War for the Serbian Language” wasred when Karadžić wrote a very negative review of a novel by Milovan Vidaković (1780– 1841), the most popular prose writer among the Serbs in Vojvodina at the time. Vidakovićresponded in kind, and a polemic ensued from which he never recovered. The “war” continued

throughout the 1830s and the 1840s. Karadžić’s new opponent was Jovan Hadžić (1799–1861),the secretary of the literary association Matica srpska and one of the best educated men in Vo- jvodina. An advocate of etymological spelling, Hadžić called Vuk an imposter and denied himany achievement. The dispute between Karadžić and Hadžić ended when a young collaboratorof Karadžić’s, Đuro Daničić, a trained philologist, wrote an elaborate essay entitled “War forthe Serbian Language and Orthography” in which he successfully defended Vuk’s linguisticideas. This signaled the victory of Karadžić’s language reforms. To read more on this, seeThomas Butler, “The Origins of the War for a Serbian Language and Orthography,” in HoraceLunt and Wiktor Weintraub, eds., Harvard Slavic Studies, vol. 5 (Camrbidge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1970), 1–80.

6 The Conict on the Yugoslav Left refers to a prolonged polemic Croatian Yugoslav writ-er Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981) held with his opponents in the 1920s and 1930s. Krleža, bythen considered an outstanding writer, was attacked both from the right and the left. Themonarchists harassed him because of his leftist orientation and his battle against bourgeois

mentality, and fellow Communists criticized him for not being zealous enough. In 1933 theclashes on the left intensied when Krleža wrote a forward to a book of drawings by Croatian

painter Krsto Hegedušić ( Podravski motivi – Scenes from the Drava Region). In the forwardthat amounted to his artistic credo, Krleža railed against the social function of literature andthe method of social realism. This provoked a strong reaction from the leftist camp, and in a

number of articles they tried to discredit Krleža. He responded in kind, publishing a vitrioliccriticism of orthodox realist writers, including Milovan Đilas and Radovan Zogović, whichset the stage for further clashes that lasted until the outbreak of WWII. Krleža was practicallyexpelled from the Communist Party as Josip Broz Tito felt it necessary to stop the debate. Formore on this, see Ralph Bogert, The Writer as Naysayer: Miroslav Krleža and the Aesthetic of

Interwar Europe (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1990).

7 Even though the plot of Kiš’s novel does not take place in Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav Com-munists were very alarmed when the novel was published because its author criticized every

ideology and by implicatio

sotirovic: article on albanian ethnogenesis, 2015

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