Post-War Literature: An Appraisal

MARIJAN MATKOVIĆ

WE LIVE in an age feverish in its demand for the new, for the unknown, and for the consequently interesting, with which to pamper the slightly weary civilization of the world. Each year, sensational new developments make their appearance in every field of human activity. In the race to discover the new and the unknown, a race in which the explosions of firecrackers are frequently authoritatively proclaimed to be veritable fires, much decorative scenery to be edifices of permanent value, and many transitory and dubious successes to be achievements of destiny, the broad field of the arts is naturally not exempt. It is precisely because refined commercial advertising and frequently Barnum-like propaganda regularly accompany artistic manifestations in our time that critical judgments must be more cautious than at any time in the past.

Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule. The international popularity of Hemingway, his robust physical personality as seen in the pages of numberless magazines, the publicity about his safaris, his passions, his income and literary achievements — none of these have been able to cast a shadow upon the deeply human poetic value of his best pages or his tragic view of the world in The Old Man and the Sea. Another exception to this rule, beyond the barriers of language, is contemporary Yugoslav literature. Two of the most popular contemporary writers, Ivo Andrić and Miroslav Krleža, are proof that in certain cases popular appeal coincides with artistic value. Last year’s Nobel Prize made the name of Ivo Andrić internationally famous overnight, but it did not create any special sensation in Yugoslavia, where the value of his works has long been critically established. For two decades any Yugoslav child working a crossword puzzle in a weekly magazine would have answered the clue “one of the greatest Yugoslav writers” with either the name of last year’s Nobel Prize winner or with that of Miroslav Krleža.

Contemporary Yugoslav literature actually begins with these two writers. Both echo in their writings the long, peculiar history of the Yugoslav literary language, yet both are sufficiently modern to feel and describe the anxieties of the modern world. In the most recent development of Yugoslav literature they are not, because of the complexity of their works, simply a bridge from yesterday to today; their work represents a turning point in a national literature which has had many exceptional literary talents in the past. Although their historical significance is practically identical, as are their most important biographical data (Andrić was born in 1892, Krleža a year later; both published their first works just before World War I; both have been active in Yugoslav literature for fifty years), and although both have frequently employed as a theme in their works the fall of the Austrian and Ottoman empires, rarely in the literature of one country have there been two contemporaries more unlike in creative temperament and expression. Andrić is a contemplative epic writer with lyric accents, Krleža a restless poet-dramatist with a perpetual socially oriented rebellion which violently characterizes practically every sentence in his fifty voluminous books of poetry, novels, stories, essays, and plays.

Andrić started his writing with lyrically sentimental notes in verse and prose (Ex Ponto), manifesting even in the works of his youth the basic characteristics of his creative personality. A realist of the Flaubert type, devoted to purity and precision of expression, he will always, with a certain cold objectivity and with the measured style of a medieval monastic chronicler, record events in the form of tales or larger prose compositions, and in his powerful realism remain true to the peculiar atmosphere of Bosnia. He is a poet of Bosnia, a Yugoslav province whose capital, Sarajevo, became internationally known in 1914 when there occurred there, exactly at the time of Andrić’s first literary publications, the assassination which precipitated World War I. A true Bosnian, he has celebrated in verse both Bosnia’s present and its past, a history which has witnessed the constant tragic contradictions not only of four religions — Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism — but of four fanatic ethnic groups placed inseparably by fate in the small, mountainous, impenetrable Bosnian fastness.

Andrić describes in his stories the various characteristics of this land which had for centuries been at the extreme periphery of civilized Europe and of the expansion of the Asiatic Turkish Empire. He penetrates the psychology of his Bosnians, following their dark and tragic fate, which was determined by the backwardness and primitiveness of the country and the tangle of their passions and years of hatred, in the shorter prose works which he wrote in the thirties. In his realism, he restored Bosnia to a place in Yugoslav literature which was almost folkloric. Against a patriarchal background which other writers had abandoned as a setting for their fiction, Andrić draws his heroes, his primitive, selfish mountaineers, refined voluptuaries, and hard headed religious fanatics, who, carried on by a torrent of passions, become involved in tragic conflicts. In Andrić the Yugoslav world found its poet, as did the Ukraine in Sholokhov and the American South in Faulkner.

Ivo Andrić made the change from writing stories to larger literary works relatively late in life. In 1945 he published the three novels which were to bring him world fame: The Bridge on the Drina,Bosnian Story, and Miss. His meditative, realistic method of the chronicler achieves complete expression only in these three works. Condensing in each detail the distant chasms of the past and the gray perspectives of the future in his most successful books, The Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Story, Andrić remains true to his native environment. In his tragic Bosnia time flows like an unrestrained river. The people flow along with it, experiencing their catharses, crises, their petty pleasures and long sorrows beneath a melancholy and monotonous existence. They travel like shadows to their calvaries, and like shadows disappear from the cursed stage upon which they have never been more than mute extras, a stage represented by a stone bridge, a mosque, a graveyard, or only by the lethargic atmosphere of some forgotten little town (Bosnian Story), far more resistant to time than all their tragically illusory importance.

Although Andric is a literary solitary, like Franz Kafka, objective to the point of cold disinterestedness, totally immersed in his own material, and although he employs a literary method popular during the nineteenth century, he has managed to create a vision of the world which in tragedy anticipates many of the most modern, avant-garde attempts at literary objectivization of the relationship of man to time, of man to things, of man horribly alone and a stranger to himself.

ANDRIĆ achieved international recognition only during the fifth decade of his life. This fact might be attributed to the specifically Bosnian themes of his work. And it is because of the accursed fate of a small Slavic nation’s literary expression that his contemporary, Miroslav Krleža, has only recently, through the sporadic, unsystematic translations of his works, attained a world reputation in literature. Has he not, for fifty years, always reacted in vigorous language, in an original and avant-garde manner, to all the events and conflicts of his time? Has he not drawn his basic fictional themes from the great Danube Basin, from whose centers emerged Kafka and Krause, Rilke and Musil and Ady, Krleža’s contemporaries?

Here is a writer who has published about fifty huge volumes, who in January of this year began publishing in the Yugoslav periodical Forum, in serial form, the monumental historical novel The Banners, which describes events along the Danube in the not distant past, when the AustroHungarian monarchy was dying. However, at a time when world literary fame can be, and frequently is, achieved by a single successful novel or play, it can be dangerous to single out a writer who has lived and worked in Yugoslav literature for decades and whose literary output consists of an entire library of plays, novels, stories, poems, essays, travels, and studies. The uninformed may get the impression that here is simply an industrious man with a mania for writing who has composed thousands of pages which, judged from the standpoint of worth, serve only to add to the already overcrowded shelves of the world’s libraries. Even the undisputed facts that for many years the prolific work of this writer has been at the very center of the literary and cultural life of his nation and that his many pages are new, aesthetically revolutionary proclamations which have established the direction for the development of an entire literature in themselves say nothing except that here is an undoubtedly interesting literary phenomenon which has been common to every literary civilization in the world at one time or another.

It is only when we show that Krleža’s versatile and prolific output remains vital even today, when tastes are so rapidly changing, that we arrive at the first critical truth concerning this writer, the bard of a literary epoch, who is now a classic in a literature little known throughout the world and who continues to be the most impressive voice in its poetic present.

Krleža’s first writings appeared in 1914, a few months before the outbreak of World War I, when he was twenty years old. In his first plays (The Legend, The Masquerade, Kraljevo) and poems (Symbhony and War Lyrics), and, somewhat later, in his series of war novels (The Croatian God Mars), he manifested his approach to life and gave evidence of the eruptive powers of his talent which would never come to terms with convention, any literary position, or any passive literary development. Temperamental, vivacious, keenly interested in the various domains of intellectual events, and one of the first of the new Yugoslav writers to live entirely by his pen, he never regarded literature as an exclusively aesthetic profession. His subjective approach to the written word is perhaps the most obvious factor in his creativity, a factor which provides unity in the diversity of his literary publications. He is never satisfied simply to express reality in his works, to be a literary chronicler of facts and data, to describe events; he always aspires to express his times and reality in their total complexity and to make his writing a poetic expression of the anxieties and searchings of the era, its tragic question mark, and frequently its salutary answer.

It is precisely because he has made this the goal of his writing that it is difficult to submit Krleža’s work to ordinary literary classification. True, in his early works it is easy enough to discern the influence of the expressionism then dominant in central Europe, but the texture of expressionism never shackled his fantasy. Within the formal framework of expressionism he succeeded in proclaiming the anxieties of the times, the tragic fate of his homeland, then in fetters, and created in dramatic dialogues themes which some thirty years later were again heralded in world literature as new and timely. It would not be difficult to show that there are many themes in Krleža’s works written between 1914 and 1920, especially in his plays and poems of that period, which were to become known in modern existentialism. But all his early dramas, unusual for the times in which they were written, with their pseudobiblical and historical themes — Adam and Eve, Christopher Columbus, Michelangelo — burdened with the real anguish of a mortally wounded and tortured humanity, are actually only the preludes to the completed poetic expression of his later works. Based on the experience of his earlier dramas, at the end of the 1930s Krleža wrote his series of plays about the Glembayevs — Messrs. Glembaveu, In Agony, and Leda. The lyric orchestrations of his youthful works served him in the same way when, in 1936, he composed his Ballad of Petrik Kerempuh, a book of poetry not only about the legendary Croat Til Eulenspiegel, but also about the spite, tears, pain, and screams of his people, enslaved for centuries.

Although Krleža has written a whole library of books, his attainments, as compared with his original intentions, have been incomplete. From the series of novels of World War I there are the pacifist, deeply moving Croatian God Mars books. From the broad Balzac-like panorama there is the huge novel A Thousand, and One Deaths, and even the drama-prose Glembayev series is incomplete as compared with the originally conceived intention. But it is this fragmentariness that gives a special charm to his works, and what remains unsaid opens perspectives into the realms of the imagination, where these difficult poetic creations took place. Of the novels The Return of Philip Latinovicz, The Banquet at Blitva, and At the Threshold of the Mind, the most complete and impressive is the first, which was written thirty years ago. Even today, in a modern Yugoslav literature rich in novels, it is one of the best and most expressive.

A socialist by conviction, Krleža was persecuted for years before the Yugoslav revolution because of his views. But even when his writings are polemic and engage in politics, they are never bereft of poetic beauty, nor do they become vulgarly utilitarian. Although he has written as much nonfiction as fiction, he has always been above all an artist, and as such the conscience of the prerevolutionary epoch of his country. He is read in Serbia and Slovenia as well as in Croatia, and has electrified all Yugoslav revolutionary youth with his pen. He is in fact a Croat, but he is truly the first great Yugoslav writer of the new, common Yugoslav literature.

AS WRITERS, both Andrić and Krleža had attained their maturity long before the dramatic events of World War II, during which Yugoslavia was partitioned under the brutal conditions of the German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian occupation. From the first days of the national catastrophe, a hand-to-hand partisan war began, not only against the troops of the occupiers but against the traitors of the country, who, guilty of capitulation, hastened to enter the service of the occupying enemy. The four years of the war for liberation (1941—1945) formed the period which began an entire new history of Yugoslavia.

The generation of Yugoslav writers who appeared just before the war shared totally the fate of their nation: either they remained mute in silent protest under the occupiers, were decimated in the casemates and prison camps scattered throughout Europe, or were engaged, as were the majority, in the war for liberation. Two of the most talented poets of this generation, the Croat Ivan Goran Kovačić, author of the moving poem The Pit, and the Slovene Karel Destovnik-Kajuh, were killed by the enemy’s bullets and knives during this period. They were not the only ones.

This black period of death and struggle was a period of heroism in the Yugoslav People’s Revolution; it was also a period in which unbelievable poetic energy was released. The vehement tide of events carried with it the voice of poetry proclaiming the new events and opened a new chapter in the literature of Yugoslavia.

Today four national literatures—Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian — make up a common Yugoslav literature. During the past decade this literature has begun to penetrate beyond the national borders, and as a result the world has suddenly become interested in the until recently unknown ancient Yugoslav literature, one of the most interesting works of which is certainly a comedy of the sixteenth-century Dubrovnik dramatist Marin Držić.

It is difficult to find a common denominator for the tendencies in contemporary post-war Yugoslav literature. Although it contains all the trends of modern literary aspiration (according to UNESCO statistics, Yugoslavia today occupies one of the foremost places in the translating of world literature), and although it is intricately related to its own revolutionary social present, it also reveals an originality of expression and of ideas. Examples of this originality are found in the many Serbian prose writers and critics who have gone beyond surrealism, among them the brilliant essayist Marko Ristić. Even the greatest contemporary Serbian poet, Oskar Davičo, the author of many novels, was once a representative of this movement. Although these writers make free use of surrealism’s methods and experience, they have created their own style of writing, which has produced their most expressive pages. In Croatian literature there have lately appeared several writers whose work resembles either the European short story (Kaleb, Marinković, Novak) or subjectivistic European prose (Petar Šegedin), but in essence their books contain original themes and are as closely bound to the roots of Yugoslav literary tradition as are the robust books and raw prose of Mirko Božić or Mihail Lalić.

The newest Slovene literature is characterized by a refined European expression, both in poetry and prose. Croatian literature contains names which have, to a certain extent, been influenced by modern American writers. In addition, two writers deserve special mention: the Serb, Dobricu Ćosić, whose best-known novels are The Sun Is Distant, Roots, Furrows; and the Montenegrin, Miodrag Bulatović, whose stories are contained in The Devils Are Coming, and whose novels are The Wolf and the Bell and The Red Cock Flies to Heaven. Both prose writers are completely modern in expression, from the standpoint of themes and ideas. A specific national symbolism and the deep, unexplored sources of the age-old anonymous Balkan literature speak in their pages in a modern idiom suggestive of the drama and destiny not only of exceptional individuals and isolated events, but of the fate of a country crucified for centuries between East and West, a country which only lately has erected bridges toward the shores of the wide world from which it was artificially separated for centuries by a cruel history.

One may come to know a country, its sky, its mountains and seas, its cities and villages, by means of documentary films, color photography, brief statistics, and, of course, by leafing through history and geography texts. But to know the Yugoslavia of today, to know its people and lands, its legendary thirst for freedom, its laughter and tears, its joys and curses, its discouragements and jubilations — hence, to know it thoroughly, not in a superficial, touristic way — there is no better way than by reading the pages of its rich, diverse contemporary literature.

Translated by Stanley Frye.