A Fearful Lament

...He withdrew into himself...

...These short stories, reflecting a definite break with the Communist way of life as it has been imposed upon the Montenegrins, and showing how much useless blood was spilled in the name of the Communist creed, are a fearful lament from the depths of the heart...

...The novelist Ivo Andric made some important innovations in departing from this tradition, for he looked at Bosnia and its contrasting worlds—Moslem, Orthodox Greek and Catholic—with the eyes of a modern man familiar with West European culture...

...In "The Leper," which concludes the book, the meaning is clear: Djilas' own disenchantment with the Party, his excommunication from the top leadership of it, the ostracism which followed and his final isolation smelling of death...

...The book is also given an added tragic dimension in representing, albeit allegorically, the present and equally bitter rift between himself and the ruling party in Yugoslavia, for he is clearly as disillusioned today as his compatriots were in former times...

...Written in prison, the stories carry with them the horror of war-time existence when Djilas worked as a partisan among partisans, killing his own Montenegrins who refused to embrace Marxism...

...The War" (which first appeared in English in The New Leader of April 16, 1962), "The Leper," "Sudikova" and "The Song of Vuk Lopusina" are the saddest stories ever written by a Yugoslav writer...

...He focuses his attention both on the Montenegrin individual and on the national tragedy, including his own...

...The historical novel Montenegro is a sequel to Land without Justice...

...THE LEPER AND OTHER STORIES By Milovan Djilas Translated by Lovett F. Edwards Harcourt, Brace $ World 247 pp...

...This is why the Montenegrins would sooner perish than live shackled...

...The people depicted in Montenegro are strong and brave...

...It is a picture of the Montenegrin at war with himself...

...Before the war, however, Djilas was recognized in Yugoslavia as a poet and short story writer, though of a second rank...

...but they preferred death to treason...

...It was this heroic image that the great Montenegrin thinker and poet, Peter Petrovic-Njegosh, projected more than a century ago: the image of Montenegrins as a people made for rebellion and struggle, who lived by wearing their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at and exposed themselves to death as a way of dramatizing their sense of life and eternal fate...

...Land without Justice thus traces its author's rediscovery of himself as well as his role among his own people...

...We are indebted to the president of Hartcourt, Brace, William Jovanovich, an American Montenegrin who met Djilas and not only offered him a friendly hand but enabled him to make explicit what is implicit in the Yugoslav consciousness in its present spiritual stalemate...

...Consider his new collection, called The Leper...

...Djilas' Montenegrins are no longer the artificial and pompous heroes of the past, but living and breathing human beings who know how to face destiny, however dire...

...Still, some of his stories, brought out by the daily Politika, had attracted discriminating readers for their unflinching realism and their poetic feeling...

...Montenegro was, even during Djilas' childhood, one of the most backward countries of the Balkans...

...Djilas has invested his whole personality and fate in the writing of these stories—the fate of a man who buried his ideology to save his humaneness...

...The political undertone of the novel is the Montenegrin's refusal to be identified with the Serbians, though they both belong to the same racial stock...

...Historically divided from the Serbians for many centuries and practically never subjugated by the Turks, the Montenegrins are as much Serb as the Serbs from Serbia, but because of their different destiny, they feel themselves to be separate and independent...

...Translations have not done him justice...

...4.95...

...A feeling of betrayal remained in the air and haunted the Montenegrins in the newly established state of Yugoslavia...

...Djilas' ultimate emergence as a novelist reflects the difficult circumstances of his life...

...Djilas has acquired fame, at home and elsewhere, from his ideological and Marxist writings— mainly through the publication of The New Class, which summed up much of what he had already been saying in leading Communist newspapers...

...Montenegro seemed at last to have found a true recorder of its tragic existence...

...It is this period of bitter disappointment for the Montenegrins in pre-war Yugoslavia that is so powerfully expressed by Djilas in this novel...

...In "The War," Djilas tries to show the folly of this fraticidal ideological struggle...

...Of the pieces that make up this volume...

...When I read the original manuscript of this book for the first time, I felt the proverbial shock of recognition...

...it is, in fact, a postscript to his own personal disillusionment...

...they have a vivid awareness of their personal and national existence in history...

...Their greatest grievance against the Serbians from Serbia stems from the fact that the latter have always tended to absorb them, ignoring their unique history...

...This land, which had long been misunderstood, and whose tales had therefore remained untold, Djilas had brought brilliantly to light...

...For Djilas, like other Montenegrins, sees death as the only decent end of man when he is unable to protect himself from ignominy...

...Their present status in Yugoslavia as a separate republic from Serbia provides them a little more satisfaction, but their pre-war position alienated them violently...

...They felt themselves to be parents pauvres, and unjustly regarded the Serbians as traitors...

...In 1954 he came into conflict with the Yugoslav Communist Party, which he more than anyone else had helped to found and bring to power only to discover that he could not express himself frankly within its confines...

...Their confessions in jail on the eve of execution are authentic transcriptions of their inner feelings...

...What makes Djilas' novel so powerful is its characterization and its dramatic revelation of the nature of man...

...The political nature of the struggle was such that its issue remained unclear and did not satisfy either the Montenegrins or the Serbians...

...Despite the achievement of this novel, however, I think that Djilas remains more effective as a shortstory writer...

...The whole heroic vision of Montenegrin youth comes to life in all its beauty through the remembrance of old ballads...

...The picture he gives us is of the Montenegrin as unpredictable, irritable, emotional, never satisfied with anything —existing in a constant state of rebellion against the established order, whatever it is...

...The little, abandoned Sudikova church that appears in the mind's eye reveals something that one would never have expected from Djilas—a religious sentiment that he did not exhibit during the whole of his career...

...Had they been published in Serbo-Croat and read by the author's countrymen, their impact would have been tremendous...

...Reviewed by BOGDAN RADITSA Department of History, Fairleigh Dickinson University In the frightening silence of contemporary Yugoslav letters, Milovan Djilas' latest works stand out as examples of a new literary vitality...

...Djilas focuses in this new book on the origin of modern Montenegrin tragedy, the battle of Mojkovac, in 1915, when an entire people fought against their dynasty, against the government and against the AustroHungarian army to help their Serbian brethren cross the mountains and seek the safety of the Adriatic Sea...

...In the past the basic defect of Serbo-Croat literature has been its reliance on stereotypes...

...Djilas thus continues in this modern vein...

...They have been written in prison, smuggled out of the country and published abroad, in English, Italian and in French...

...This in itself is an irony because his three major literary efforts, Land without Justice, Montenegro and The Leper and Other Stories, have never appeared in his own native land...

...As a writer he is free from all mannerism...

...Djilas succeeds, moreover, in introducing into the Montenegrin background a new psychological reality that is not to be found in any other Yugoslav writer...

...Traditionally, its characteristic features—the ruggedness of the country and the roughness of the people, who were so human among themselves and so astonishingly inhuman to outsiders—were depicted in terms of epic heroism...

...His prose, moreover, was alive, vigorous, brimming with passion and passionate thought...

...Conquered by a foreign army, they were given a chance to survive by collaborating with the occupying force...

...A greater lyricism prevails in "The Song of Vuk Lopusina"—a note of hope in the face of imprisonment...

...Though Montenegro has always provided exciting material for sociological and anthropological exploration, Djilas is the first to succeed as a story teller in abandoning this folklorist attitude...