The Roots of Djilas

...Djilas's approach to Montenegro is as passionate as its people and land...

...The Djilas drama does not spring only from the blood he saw spilled from childhood and from the lack of culture and law in his early environment, but also from the intellectual limitations of his teachers...

...More than The New Class, Land Without Justice shows Djilas's despair and the yearning for justice, freedom and truth that brought him to Communism, a new and more desperate monolithism...

...Whoever offended the mores, the honor, the blood of the clan by intermarrying with the Turk or embracing Islam must be killed, since such infidelity destroyed the only justified value on which the common law was established...

...To Dostoyevsky and to Archpriest Bojovic," Djilas feels "an unpaid Communist debt...

...In him there was the call to write and an enthusiasm for whatever could be done to change the world from which he came...

...They were unprepared for the 20th century, could not adjust themselves to the books they read and did not really understand, could not find a compromise between their dreams and reality...

...It thus expresses the essential experience of the Slav semi-intelligentsia that never grew and matured...

...In this book, Djilas emerges in his full integrity...

...Helpful and accurate footnotes explain every arcane reference, and the informative introduction by William Jovanovich, President of Harcourt, Brace and the Colorado-born son of a Montenegrin miner, places the story in historical perspective for the average reader...

...the clans and tribes of legendary Montenegro...

...This American edition has been well and powerfully translated and honestly edited...

...Montenegro's resistance to Austria at the battle of Mojkovac in World War I assumes great importance to Djilas...

...After Montenegro had launched the first Balkan War against the Turks, however, it found itself betrayed in World War I by its dynasty, its ruling families, and the unfriendly policy of the Serb monarchy...

...The stature of Djilas as a man springs from his genuine sincerity...

...Before long, corruption took over a land that had been honest and pure, ihough primitive, before then...

...We see his beginnings in a country of limited culture, reduced to epic poetry and Nyegosh's hatred for everything not Orthodox, Byzantine or Slav...

...The Belgrade regime bestowed pensions and jobs in the state administration (principally in the gendarmerie) on its collaborators...

...Land Without Justice is a great contribution to the understanding of peoples who are anxiously trying to reach their maturity in a world transformed by industry and ideologies...

...Djilas tells us that neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin brought him to Communism...

...Moved by a yearning for justice and equality, influenced by Dostoyevsky as well as other titans of 19th-century Russian literature, Djilas and some of his teachers dreamed that Communism could help them...

...It places Djilas at the side of Nyegosh as one of the truly great Serbian writers...

...It is a penetrating social, anthropological and psychological portrait of the Montenegrin national character, drawn by one of the most ardent sons and the best literary talent Montenegro has produced in years...

...This is not a dry, abstract political treatise or a series of random, unpolished journalistic notes, but the dramatic overture of a maj or work— the multi-volumed personal history whose continuation was interrupted by Djilas's imprisonment in 1956...

...The history of Montenegro, as Djilas tells it, is a series of upheavals in which the Montenegrins rose first against the Ottoman Empire, then against their own rulers, finally against those who tried to subjugate them in the new Yugoslavia after World War I. Djilas starts where Nyegosh left off, in the Montenegro after the Berlin Congress of 1878...

...Ethnically Serbs, the Montenegrins differ from the valley Serbs in that, after the Turkish invasion, they escaped to the mountains and remained independent, refusing to conform to any outside power...

...The translator, the editors and the publisher must be congratulated for the splendid job they have done...

...He left the backward peasant proletariat of Montenegro to become part of the broader South Slav intelligentsia when he entered the University of Belgrade in 1929...

...Educated on the folk epics, on The Mountain Wreath which is the source of inspiration for all Montenegrins literate and illiterate, Djilas left his village in his early years to go to a small town for his grammar- and high-school education...

...His shots, Djilas says, "rang out in Parliament, mortally wounding an already frail and unripe freedom...

...In the course of this guerrilla struggle, which embraced more than 500 years, the Montenegrins became convinced that law and justice were identical with purity of blood and with the defense of individual and clan honor...

...It marks the end of the old Montenegro—the end of its pride, its glory, its heroism—and the rise of shame among the chieftains...

...After all, Mother Russia had tried it first...

...Shamefully, Djilas reports that the trigger was pulled by a Montenegrin clansman, Punisha Rachich, one of those who worked with the Belgrade reactionaries and terrorized dissident Montenegrins...

...Even though it deals with the present situation only by implication, it has been forbidden in Yugoslavia—presumably because its popularity would enhance the political prestige of its jailed author...

...It is the vivid story of his childhood, his family and the people around him...

...Rather, it was his religious instructor in the high school at Berane, Arch-priest Bojovic, who taught that the proof of God's existence lay not in the church's dogmas but in the mercy that is in man...

...Djilas was able to do so because, as a Montenegrin, he was a man in whom the desire for justice was greater than his own life...

...Already, the idea had matured of chasing the Turks from the Balkans, dissociating the South Slavs from Austria and uniting all the Slavs— with the aid, of course, of Mother Russia, the great protector of all Orthodox Christians...

...In these sections of the book, he confirms the deep fanaticism the Montenegrins showed a century ago in exterminating (as Nyegosh put it) the "leper" from their blood...

...it was true also of Nyegosh, who was split between Western pluralism and Byzantine monolithism and who failed to establish the cultural harmony that makes for the success of happier societies...

...Worn out with itself," Djilas writes, "Montenegro flourished, groaned, gasped and perished...

...The latter, in its own devious Balkan way, eliminated not only the Montenegrin dynasty but the independence of the kingdom and established Belgrade's Karageorgevich dynasty on the throne of Yugoslavia...

...Not since Prince-Bishop Petar Petrovic Nyegosh wrote the Montenegrin national epic, The Mountain Wreath, in the middle of the last century has a Serbian writer expressed in so astonishing and original a manner the way of life of one of the Balkans' proudest and bravest peoples...

...The reader—and, doubtless, the author—will be grateful for their care...

...The last act of this period before Djilas goes on to the University was symbolic: the assassination in the Belgrade Parliament in June 1928 of the Croatian Peasant leader Stjepan Radich, whom Djilas here calls "the vigilant conscience of the entire country...

...This is not only true of Djilas's youth...

...Along with this history of rebellions, Djilas describes the clans' struggle against those Montenegrins who had been converted to Islam...

...Divided into clans and tribes, they fought among themselves and against the "foreigners," bringing all their fanaticism and taste for revenge to the merciless struggle for freedom and for the Cross against the Crescent and the Turk...

...As a result, the book has genuine style...

...It is a book which Djilas obviously was writing for posterity and shows the marks of careful reflection, writing and rewriting, and the structural craft of a man who has been a poet and literary critic as well as political pamphleteer...

...Tito, the organization man of the Communist apparatus, lacked the character or intellectual integrity to embark on a thorough reevaluation of Communist premises...

...Reviewed by Bogdan Raditsa Professor of Balkan History, Fairleigh Dickinson University This book springs from the very flesh and blood of Milovan Djilas...

...While the Moslem Montenegrin is ethnically the same as the Christian, he ceases to be Serb in accepting an alien faith—this was the view which, at the birth of Yugoslavia, impelled Montenegrins and Serbs to massacre their Moslem brethren in one of the most cruel extermination campaigns that ever took place...

...Born in Kolashin, near Albania, he goes to great length to establish the origin of his family on both sides as Serbian and Montenegrin, making it clear that there has never been any blood-mixing with the Turk...

...The Djilasi remained pure and killed those who were not so...

...When they seized power, they brought with them the bitter feeling that Communism, ideal of absolute justice and equality, was further from their reach than any other effort of mankind toward those goals...

...Throughout, this edition shows (and this must be said after other recent experiences) the great understanding and professional pride of the publisher...

...Having read the original, I can appreciate the effort made in the translation to grasp Djilas's thoughts and style, which are not always easy to render in English...

...From then on, Montenegro was split between those who favored unification with Serbia and those who remained loyal to the old kingdom which King Nikola had betrayed...

...Hidden among the huge and inaccessible Black Mountains, the Montenegrins lived free and independent for centuries...

...In power, he saw that the Leninist idea did not work and found the strength to speak and rebel...

...This type of slaughter was repeated on other occasions, including World War II...

...Survival was possible only through the preservation of Christian blood in the family and the clan...