Ambivalent Modernism: Nonalignment and Socialist Yugoslav Literature

Before and especially after World War II, Yugoslav writers developed a socialist modernist aesthetics that broke with Soviet socialist realism and Western modernism alike in an attempt to articulate an independent cultural identity. What became a dominant modernist sensibility in literary production often registered ambivalence toward the idea of progressive historical temporality, subverting both socialist and capitalist teleology. It highlighted uneven development and the disjunctive experience of liminality, the state of exception inherent in political and economic realities of the Balkan region, an “inter-imperial” semiperiphery which historically played the subaltern role of an extractive zone and market for metropolitan goods.[1] While the Balkans share with non-European colonies the position of structural underdevelopment, exacerbated by the exploitation of agrarian labor and natural resources by foreign capital, as a whole they were not subjected to systemic control, slavery, and racism in the service of globally expanding capitalist modernity, and thus they figure as a semiperiphery rather than a periphery.[2]

My essay contextualizes the development of socialist modernism alongside Yugoslavia’s participation in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), of which it was a founding member in 1961. Like decolonizing countries in the Global South, socialist Yugoslavia was preoccupied with developing a multiethnic, postcolonial culture in the decades following World War II. It saw itself as a country forged out of resistance to centuries-long Ottoman, Habsburg, and Austro-Hungarian imperial rule; out of the communist-led struggle for liberation from Nazi occupation and exploitation by Western capital; and, after the 1948 break with Stalin, out of evading Soviet control. Seeking a third-way alternative to Cold War bloc politics, it turned to the Global South, establishing cooperation agreements with newly independent states and anticolonial liberation movements. The resulting international alliance, NAM, united its members across continents and political systems in opposition to superpower politics and around principles of nuclear disarmament, active peaceful coexistence, and respect for national sovereignty. Key to this strategy was the establishment of unprecedented political, economic, educational, and cultural partnerships among Non-Aligned countries, in which Yugoslavia actively participated. The cultural partnerships, specifically, enabled a host of literary exchanges and translations, with prominent writers traveling between the Global East and South, fostering both intellectual engagement and affective solidarity with the decolonizing world.

After Yugoslavia’s break with the USSR, its cultural establishment turned away from a short-lived and much contested hegemony of socialist realism, which became associated with Stalinist control of expression, didacticism, and prescriptiveness, seen as inimical to human needs, creativity, and imagination. The break with socialist realism, however, was preceded by a much longer conflict among Yugoslav left-wing writers aligned with realist and modernist camps, as well as with various modernist avant-gardes, during the interwar years. Support for realism solidified especially in the 1930s, influenced by the Soviet turn to socialist realism and the related split among French surrealists; writers lauded its ability to represent the historical development of both bourgeois and socialist eras through a totalizing, objective, rational lens, while criticizing the modernist focus on the fragmentation of perspective and fabulation, subjective immediacy, and irrational, nonrepresentational language as pessimistic, gratuitously experimental, or unconcerned with reality. Rather than being a mere conflict over representational aesthetics, however, the debate, both among and within various literary camps, articulated different visions of revolution and the role that art should play in the increasingly dictatorial Yugoslav kingdom, where the Communist Party was banned, leftists were persecuted, and literature became one of the few platforms for political mobilization.

In a series of polemics, the established modernist writer Miroslav Krleža defended interwar surrealist writers, in particular, from accusations of “revisionism” by arguing that literature gives expression to the subjective experience, to human desire in all its unpredictability, rather than articulating, in a presumably orderly and rational fashion, “structural essences” and “social entities.”[3] Nonetheless, Krleža’s modernist sensibility departs from its Western variations as much as from Soviet socialist realism, approximating, in James M. Robertson’s words, “a peripheral modernism specific to the conditions of South East Europe.” Analyzing Krleža’s interwar novels, Robertson traces the contours of this peripheral modernism in the “subversion of the teleology of European integration,” “a rejection of realism, with its focus on a progressive historical temporality,” and “an anti-capitalist critique” that highlights the unevenness of capitalism in “the European periphery.”[4] While Krleža’s suspicion of “progressive historical temporality” also entails the rejection of teleological socialist realist models, he nonetheless affirms the socially engaged role of literature. In 1945, on the heels of the communist revolution and victory over fascism, for instance, Krleža praises indomitable and brave “promethean books” that,” like the “flash of a torch,” charge through the darkness of their “enslaved circumstances” to ensure the survival of human beauty, morals, and truth.[5]

Following Yugoslavia’s break with the Socialist Bloc, Krleža’s 1952 speech at the Third Congress of Yugoslav Writers, often seen as a manifesto for an autochthonous Yugoslav socialist culture and aesthetics, diagnosed local tendencies to “mimic” (206) foreign models, primarily Soviet and western European, as inadequate to addressing the country’s unique historical trajectory and contemporary problems.[6] Whether literature is “realist or formalist,” whether it confronts the horrors of the modern world in a politically engaged manner or “abstains in lyrical indifference,” Krleža argues, are creative decisions that cannot be enforced through “intolerant purism” or “canonical iconography” (207, 208). Krleža likens the creative submission to socialist realism to religious fanaticism, while also dismissing the “cultural superstructure” of the “financial-capitalist democracy” as a model, due to its right-wing tendency to create new “conflagrations” from “Korea to the colonies” (210) and its dismissal of leftist revolutionary politics as dangerous and doomed to failure.

While respecting artistic autonomy, Yugoslav cultural development, for Krleža, must take place in a thoughtful, coordinated manner, much like in other decolonizing nations vulnerable to influence by metropolitan cultures, in conditions of an autochthonous revolutionary society established on the “principle of the self-determination of small nations” (232). Krleža, according to Ivana Bago, here follows the official definition of Yugoslavism as a social rather than national category, emptying out this signifier of “any positivist, nationalist pathos.”[7] He argues that Yugoslavia’s new cultural program should not romanticize the nation in search of an identitarian essence, much like Frantz Fanon rejects definitions of culture that frame it as “abstract populism” that seeks to discover the “people’s true nature.”[8] Rather, Krleža proposes, Yugoslavia’s cultural program should synthesize multifarious insights into the country’s geopolitical and historical positioning, as well as build unity by interpreting and explaining the “tragedy” of internal divisions and “mutual negations” (Krleža, “Govor” [Speech], 242).

The increasingly dominant modernist sensibility of Yugoslav literature following the break with the USSR was shaped by this abandonment of imperial models: a blended form, it accommodated both modernist experimentation and critical realism and often articulated its peripheral positioning as leftist, anticolonial, and anti-Eurocentric. The latter cultural constellation especially informs novels, essays, and travelogues by Yugoslav writers who traveled to NAM countries as cultural or diplomatic representatives. One example of this nonaligned aesthetics is Čedomir Minderović’s Traces of India [Tragovi Indije], essays about his experiences as cultural counselor with the Yugoslav embassy in India.[9] Mixing prose and poetry, these essays employ modernist techniques such as subjective, impressionistic narration, non-linearity, and richly associative, non-representational language to highlight the unevenness of modern development through stark representations of social and economic inequality in the postcolony, expressing, in the words of the Warwick Research Collective, “a fundamental dissonance in the structure of reality” through “the abrupt juxtapositions of different modes of life engendered by imperial conquest, or the violent reorganization of social relations.”[10]

Yugoslavia and India are here united through an ambivalent attitude to modernization, as Minderović’s essays are preoccupied with those who derive little benefit from large infrastructure projects that follow revolutions and battles for independence. Descriptions of India juxtapose modern technological development with the lifeworlds of poor fishermen, Dalit cleaners, liftboys, and women performing domestic labor. Modern factory smokestacks alternate with powerful, overflowing rivers that displace multitudes and, paradoxically, leave “hundreds of thousands of people / in the midst of water / without drinking water.” The incongruity of environmental “refugee camps” made up of “small dirty tents” stretching across Delhi’s “wide boulevards traversed by gleaming limousines / with tulle curtains” is emphasized by the description of them as apparently “having dropped / from the sky” (Minderović, Tragovi Indije [Traces of India], 25). The narrative perspective is frequently suspicious of developmentalist optimism, mocking both the adulation of “St. Henry Ford” across Indian and Sri Lankan factories and the slogan “Glory, glory, glory to work,” typical of Yugoslavia’s postwar rebuilding (80, 86). Once Calcutta rickshaw drivers, for example, are made obsolete by modern transportation, they will join the armies of the unemployed, the narrator muses, since “they will never be able to catch up with a taxi / they will always lag behind—more and more each day” (122). Haunted by those left behind from the narrative of progress, whose names repeatedly punctuate the essays, Minderović, the cultural counselor, contrasts his numerous interviews for Indian newspapers with the former’s invisibility and silencing in public discourse.

Such imagery also highlights the disjunction between collective ideals and individual opportunism, between past aspirations and present disillusion. Minderović develops a broader critique of Yugoslavia’s and India’s betrayals of the potential for egalitarian social transformation in the wake of antifascist and anticolonial struggles, respectively, while, nonetheless, also reminding us of their promise. He especially condemns the widening class gap between intellectuals, on the one hand, and workers and peasants, on the other, which he explores in conversations with numerous Indian professors, editors, and journalists. They confront problems similar to those faced by Yugoslavs: cults of personality; foreign influences that lead to corruption and competition among elites for work or study abroad; dogmatic Marxists who act like conservative Christians; and socialist politicians who despise “the people” they represent (40–42). By way of contrast, as he visits the former British Residency in Lucknow, site of a siege during the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the narrator feels moved by the ruins that speak to the “horrors of the siege” and yearns to “linger in the calm, diaphanous air that hangs over the 1857 horrors,” rather than return to the city with its “administrative, scientific, and cultural institutions” (118-19). A recurrent motif across the essays concerns the narrator’s 1944 memory from Torre a Mare in Italy, of the sounds of “German tanks in withdrawal” (88). These impressionistic vignettes possibly draw on Minderović’s own past as a Yugoslav partisan; paradoxically, rather than evoking the horrors of war, Tore a Mare is associated with a (now lost) lover, the pleasures of laughing and holding her hand, and the optimism of impending victory over fascism.

Stylistic repetitiveness (recurring names of disenfranchised Indians that the narrator meets, Torre a Mare vignettes) and temporal and spatial confusion (locations change rapidly, narrative jumps forward and backward) reinforce the thematic preoccupation with frustrated “progress.” The narrator reflects, “my ‘hobby’ is the time that stopped” (23). Wandering the streets of India’s large cities, he is absorbed by their sensory overflow but simultaneously feels isolated and aimless, which is articulated through both social distance—he is a middle-class, white European—and broader existential dilemmas. Namely, the narrator often wonders which “traces” India has left on him as well as which traces he will leave on India, its “strange guest,” a collection of different “I’s” who return to India anew with a “human hope that not even the fallout of hydrogen bomb mushrooms over oceans that live for people and that people live for, can stifle” (144, 131–32). The narrator’s ambivalence is in sustained conversation with the indeterminacy of India’s own future: while images of constant movement and activity dominate the descriptions of India’s cities as well as the countryside, a future horizon that might be totally represented is inaccessible, continually receding. Rather than being teleologically anticipated, the future is more often posed as a question: “What awaits these millions of people in the streets, at the docks, at the train stations of India?” (87).

And yet, Traces at times also vibrates with optimism about the broad social benefits of modern development (as in the narrator’s praise of the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam, completed in 1967); about India’s schoolchildren and students, who embody the “power and beauty and joy of life”; and about serendipitous, generative exchanges with Indian writers and cultural workers about shared concerns (145). In that respect, Minderović’s nonaligned sensibility emerges also in the critique of ritualistic, and therefore unauthentic, Yugoslav–Indian cultural exchanges—boring exhibition openings attended by supercilious “Dignitaries” is a recurrent motif—and preference for bottom-up, unscripted encounters which cannot be captured by idealizing official rhetoric. In essays on modern Indian writers, Minderović especially commends Jainendra Kumar for his abiding egalitarianism and broad humanism that opposes everything that is “anti-emotional, mechanical, conventional” (35). Here we can hear echoes of previously discussed Yugoslav cultural discourses that, in opposing socialist realism, affirm a creative autonomy that privileges humans, in all their complexity, over what Krleža describes as “structural essences.” Simultaneously, Minderović approvingly quotes the fellow modernist Agyeya’s comments on engaged writing. Agyeya says that the task of a writer, as an “intellectual worker,” is to capture progressive human values and ideals, but without being subjected to control by any one party, nation, or “administrative patronage”: “literature can only reflect collective national consciousness through the individual consciousness of a particular author” (53-55).

Such thoughts affirm Minderović’s own commitment to engaged writing—as the spirit of immanent, perpetual critique which performs the freedom of independent thought and aesthetics, including freedom from the triumphalist discourses of development and progress. In Traces, this critique assumes the shape of leftist nostalgia for what could have been, and could yet be, as it not only thinks together Yugoslavia’s and India’s disparate histories of resistance to occupation, exploitation, and inequality but also reminds us of the right to individual creative freedom as a fundamental promise of an independent, nonaligned orientation. In this and other texts on India, Minderović attempts to recapture the original antifascist—and anticolonial—revolutionary ethos, while registering interruptions to narratives of liberation rather than romantically prefiguring a socialist utopia. Focus on the past rather than the future, fragmented multivocalism, and moral ambiguity in these texts similarly informed even the supposedly most socialist realist of Yugoslav genres, early postwar “partisan novels” that soberly explored wartime traumas and dilemmas. Minderović’s own trajectory as an author exemplifies this aesthetic blend: from interwar social realist prose (deemed controversial by then Yugoslav authorities), to revolutionary anti-fascist poetry, to wartime memoirs that employ both realist and modernist narrative techniques and, finally, to conspicuous formal experimentation in his texts on India.

At times, Yugoslav authors in NAM spaces posit socialist modernism as superior to local genres deemed insufficiently revolutionary, such as those influenced by contemporaneous Soviet or Chinese socialist realism, by British or French bourgeois models adopted during the colonial era, or by “unmodern” religious themes. We can see instances of such cultural paternalism in both Minderović and fellow modernist, Oskar Davičo, author of an experimental travelogue about West Africa, Crno na belo [Black on White] (1962).[11] And yet, the nonaligned cultural constellation in which such texts emerged also means that Minderović and Davičo frequently undercut their own authority through dialogic, self-reflexive modes of relationality, sympathetic representation of intercultural encounters within the parameters of horizontality and reciprocity, and recognition of one’s (differentially) shared peripheral status.

Writers from Yugoslavia and other NAM countries who met during diplomatic travel or cultural exchanges—such as Grozdana Olujić and Amrita Pritam; Aco Šopov and Léopold Sédar Senghor—were also inspired by each other’s innovative aesthetics and postcolonial themes. While Senghor, moreover, attended the Yugoslav poetry festival in Struga where he received the Golden Wreath award in 1975, Pritam visited Yugoslavia on three occasions in the 1960s and 1970s, and published translations in India of many Yugoslav authors, including modernists and other experimental writers such as Davičo, Vesna Parun, Sead Fetahagić, Vladan Desnica, and Vasko Popa.[12] Yugoslavs in fact preferred to represent themselves in NAM countries through modernist and contemporary artistic and literary genres, even as their insistence on creative freedom meant that their cultural production at home accommodated heterogeneous styles and themes. Similarly, while they hosted many writers from NAM and other countries in the Global South whose work incorporates modernist aesthetics, including Jorge Amado, Carlos Fuentes, Wole Soyinka, and Agyeya, they also welcomed writers working predominantly in the realist register who were respected for their ambivalence toward the USSR or their uncompromising anticolonialism, such as Mulk Raj Anand or Djamel Amrani.

In conclusion, socialist Yugoslavia’s peripheral modernism registers the uneven development particular to spaces marked by the legacies of coloniality, “approach[ing] the world-system as partially, potentially describable in its concrete reality.”[13] Additionally, this mode of creative expression responds to the idiosyncratic modernity engendered by Yugoslavia’s socialist revolution and the new Non-Aligned constellation that afforded opportunities for comparative reflections on different peripheral experiences. Many discussions of peripheral modernisms, especially in the North American academic context, conceptualize it as primarily an engagement with capitalist modernity, whether through mimicry or subversion of metropolitan literary models, since modernity, in Fredric Jameson’s words, is “singular.”[14] Similarly, it is also analyzed as an engagement with European modernism, to which there is no historical or epistemological “outside,” even when it scrutinizes the contradictions of European imperialism, develops idiosyncratic aesthetic modes, or emerges in profoundly different social contexts.[15] But what happens when our critical lens changes, and we turn our attention to versions of modernism that engage with a nonaligned, socialist modernity, explicitly seeking to depart from dominant socialist as well as modernist models, from the “Second World” as well as the “First World”? I propose the Yugoslav case—and broadly, Non-Aligned literary internationalism—as an opportunity to theorize literary connections across peripheral spaces, which can help us expand the aforementioned readings of peripheral modernisms as necessarily responding to metropolitan models.

Notes

[1] See Laura Doyle, “Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 159–96.