Writing as Resistance

...The old warrior is so touched that the politician wins his vote (and the clan's) in spite of the initial resistance...

...Marko Miljanov, after winning great honors in fighting the Turks, turned his back on the corrupt court of King Nikola and retired to his fortress home at Medun, where he wrote Examples of Manliness and Heroism, among other books...

...A Montenegrin Jest," for example, is the tale of a young politician who, in order to win the votes of a clan, offers an impromptu recitation of the kind of graveside eulogy he will give its old leader if the honor should be his...

...Thus sexual freedom becomes identified with physical freedom, and by extension with the right to live...

...Reviewed by Thomas J. Butler Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin In Land Without Justice, written in the period between his expulsion from the Communist party (January 1954) and his first imprisonment (December 1956), Milovan Djilas said "there had been neither leaders nor heroes" in his family, and that to grow up without them was both "vexing and shameful...

...And so long as men are a blend of good and evil, then all one's life is a wrestle with Dukljan, since one bears him in oneself...

...indeed, normal sex is so natural that in "Birds of a Feather" the mother sets up a bed for her daughter and lover, and the grandmother brings them food on trays...

...It did not change me, nor did it change others, but it forced me to live on the other side of the coin...

...It is not in my nature...

...Not all the stories in The Stone and the Violets are serious or morbid, however-some are truly light-hearted gems...

...Montenegro had produced such a prophet in the late 19th century...

...Like the poet-ruler Njegos, whose motto was, "to do evil fighting evil, in this there can be no evil," Djilas seems obsessed with the conflict between good and evil...

...The Serb does not himself understand why he committed these awful acts...

...It] saved him from getting involved in petty squabbles and eventual disgrace...

...The autobiographical element is strong in this collection, as it is throughout Djilas' writing...

...The Brothers and the Girl" seems to recall his relationship with his older and younger brothers, both of whom died as Communist fighters during the War...

...And in "About Marko Miljanov," one of the 13 stories that make up The Stone and the Violets, Djilas explains himself while explaining "my ultimate inspiration": "Writing was his form of resistance...

...In any event, it is interesting that even though he had long since recanted Communism in "Tsar Dukljan" Djilas could not resist the temptation to portray the Manichean principle in a Marxist-type dialectic: "Good is transformed into evil as soon as it becomes a barrier to human survival...

...Seen from his prison cell-nine of the pieces were written in Sremska Mitrovica-sexuality (life) is the antithesis of ideology (death...

...In an ever rising spiral of horror, the group kills innocent Hungarians...

...Under the Yoke," its title perhaps taken ironically from Ivan Vazov's Bulgarian novel, is a fiction-alization of a tale Djilas once heard about the rape of a young Serbian woman by three Bulgarian soldiers toward the end of World War I. The victim symbolizes occupied Serbia, a "girl at communion or a lamb before slaughter...

...He describes sex not in terms of male conquest but of female invitation...

...The war, so to speak, turned me upside down too...

...It was as if I had never known myself until then...

...I cannot, will not, do anything like that...

...That gift made it possible for him to behave in an impossible manner, according to his will, paying no heed to the essential needs of existence...

...I first heard of Miljanov from Djilas, during one of our conversations in Belgrade four years ago...

...The girl, a rather free-living apostle of sexuality, is condemned to death by the revolutionary government because she had consorted with enemy officers (she also had relations with Partisan officers...

...The girl refuses to save her life by working for the intelligence arm of the new regime: "I have never given myself to anyone against my will...

...Djilas' ability to interweave Montenegrin folkways with art adds an extra dimension to all his stories and affords us an extraordinary blend of life and philosophy...

...The war turned everything upside down," he says...

...when the two come into conflict, as they do in "The Girl with the Gold Tooth," it is ideology that triumphs...

...His concern about the evil force in humanity is most strongly felt in "An Eye for an Eye," the story of a Serb from the Vojvodina who sees his neighbors assaulted and killed by Hungarians at the beginning of World War II...

...He forms a resistance group bent not on liberation but on revenge...

...Conceivably, this story is really about a prisoner Djilas met at Sremska Mitrovica, one who provided a good "case study" for his views on man's evil nature...

...Though sex dominates many of these stories, and malignant nationalism is expressed as rape, Djilas can hardly be accused of male chauvinism...

...It was as though Djilas, in those early days of estrangement from the Party, was already measuring himself for the role his native Montenegrin tradition prized as the highest possible spiritual attainment-that of the heroic outcast and critic of tyranny...

...I am not a whore...