Remembrance of Politics Past
BUTLER, THOMAS J.
Remembrance of Politics Past Memoir of a Revolutionary By Milovan Djilas Translated by Drenka Willen Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 402 pp. $12.00. Reviewed by Thomas J. Butler Department of...
...Reviewed by Thomas J. Butler Department of Slavic Languages, University of Wisconsin This second volume of Milovan Djilas' autobiography covers the years from 1929—when Land Without Justice left off—to 1941, when the Axis powers occupied Yugoslavia...
...Life was something that had to be lived and fought, and the harder one fights the better it is...
...In such a situation the inner strength of a man is put to the test...
...They believed there would have to be a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and then a proletarian uprising, before they could come to power...
...At the time, Yugoslavia was under the dictatorship of King Alexander...
...Djilas maintains that official Party historians are wrong in giving Tito credit for the reorganization...
...1 wanted to sound as revolutionary as possible, and as free of prejudice," he explains...
...I knew I was a Communist, and she knew she wasn't, and we fell in love not because we saw things alike ideologically but because we couldn't keep away from each other...
...The Party's Central Committee had fled the country, leaving behind the rather fatuous instruction that local Communists should rise up in armed rebellion...
...Working together in groups, the imprisoned revolutionaries had the opportunity to study Marxist literature and to assimilate and transform vague ideological tenets into prescriptions for action...
...While his coconspirators "spilled" what they knew, Djilas bravely withstood the tortures administered by the notorious Djordje Kosmajac of the Belgrade police...
...We Communists had to organize ourselves militarily so as to be able to attack our enemies at the time of their defeat...
...Djilas himself points out that it was only after the humiliating and surprising collapse of the Yugoslav Army in the very first days of the War that Tito decided the bourgeois-democratic revolution could be dispensed with and began to talk of a separate Communist Army: "Tito postulated a Communist takeover after the defeat of Germany so as to prevent any other party from doing so...
...Though he was not a serious student, he achieved early success as a writer, publishing stories and poems in literary magazines like Misao ("Thought") and the newspaper Politika...
...What is more, Djilas has the artist's capacity for projection: He relives the past with an intensity uncontaminated by temporal distance from the events and feelings he describes...
...Djilas—a visionary of a later mold—subjected himself to one heroic test after another, only to see the society he helped create {The New Class) resemble the one he helped destroy, and to be isolated from the Party to which he had devoted so much of his life...
...he observes, "There was something contradictory of course between my professed view and my intimate joy, which I couldn't even admit to myself, that she was virginal and pure...
...When we became politically active we believed the exact opposite to be true: We came to hate Dostoevsky's mysticism, and we became dry rationalists, explaining everything in terms of the 'objective conditions of the material productive forces at a given degree of development...
...Indeed, he sees the ability to withstand police torture as the supreme test of a revolutionary: "A man is alone with himself and his enemy...
...But being cut oft from both the Comintern and their own Central Commitee, the incarcerated Yugoslav Communists gradually evolved their own approach to local problems for which there were no stock Marxist answers...
...The first part of Djilas' book, "The Idealist," covers his days at the University of Belgrade and his three-year imprisonment by Yugoslavia's prewar government...
...He ultimately foiled Kosmajac by faking a suicide that led to his hospitalization and a public outcry against the barbarous tactics of the police...
...Strangely enough, we were all partial to Dostoevsky and believed that the revelation of internal impulses and motives should be the basis of all art...
...the poet Oskar Davico, who underwent brutal treatment, "was somewhere in-between...
...The real office hours began at night...
...In fact, the separatism of the Yugoslav Party after 1948 may be partly traced to the development of a homegrown variety of Communism during the years that many of its outstanding members were in prison...
...The intensity of his love notwithstanding, when Djilas went to prison he wrote Mitra a letter absolving her from fidelity to him...
...Djilas is painfully frank about his love for her, their affair and their marriage...
...At the university he met Mitra Mitrovic...
...From the beginning, his ties to reality and humanity were generally stronger than his allegiance to Marxist theory...
...Djilas was setting out for Belgrade, to become a revolutionary...
...One day, at the end of Kosutic's class, Mitra stretched herself, tucking her sweater into her skirt...
...Besides being attractive, Mitra was one of the best students in her class, a mental and moral match for Djilas in every way...
...The "Mitra" theme haunts the first half of the book...
...In contrast to his Montenegrin compatriot and fellow Communist, Radovan Zogovic...
...It was not Communism but, rather, a deep dissatisfaction with existing conditions and an irrepressible desire to change life...
...He says of his ideological beliefs as a young man, "We called it Communism...
...From the second part of Djilas' Memoir, "The Professional," which relates his experiences as an illegal Party activist (ilegalic) in the years 1936-41, one gains the impression that the Yugoslav Communists were still quite weak at the time of the German invasion...
...Until that time, my second year at the university, I had not been attracted to any one girl...
...Looking back now...
...Ironically, by sending the majority of its Communist prisoners to the same jail (Sremska Mitrovica), the Yugoslav government inevitably strengthened and consolidated the Party...
...In view of their equally innocent origins and bright hopes, the fates of both men seem tragic in the end...
...Djilas never became committed to the principles of socialist realism, and his most successful pieces seem to have been those with folkloristic content...
...The enemy insists this would be no 'betrayal' in the conventional sense, but rather a kind of loyalty to traditional values and relationships...
...For Mitra...
...One eagerly awaits the next volume of Djilas' autobiography for his account of that remarkable period...
...Djilas is justifiably proud of his resistance to interrogation-"There weren't many men in prison who held up as well as 1"—for he gave away no new information and betrayed no one...
...Salaj and Kersovani "carried the burden of not having stood up well before the police...
...Djilas recalls: "As our discontent grew, our common interests gradually changed from literary to political pursuits...
...The tips of her breasts showed under her soft cotton blouse, and it was indeed odd that such a slender girl should be so endowed...
...Yet elsewhere his words reveal it was not magnanimity that impelled him to give Mitra her freedom, but a determination "to be separated from her in order to fight...
...Djilas' long, moving description of the Belgrade prison (Glavnjaca) alone is worth the price of the book: "In this cave of curses, blows, screams, and vituperation, early morning was the quietest part of the day...
...Unlike most political memoirs, it is written with scrupulous honesty and a deep insight into human motivation...
...The result is a priceless historical document that will surely stand the test of time...
...The resulting political vacuum in Belgrade drew together Left-wing writers and cafe-intellectuals...
...For Pupin exerted his peasant strength and uncluttered mind to "make it" in America, eventually becoming a pompous namedropper (as his book shows) and a confidant of Presidents and cardinals...
...In any event, Djilas gives the Paris-based Central Committee little credit for developing the new Yugoslav Party just before the War...
...Evenings were terrible...
...Applying this yardstick to his fellow Communists, Djilas observes: Petar Radovic felt guilty about his "weakness before the police...
...who was later to become his first wife and to whom this volume is dedicated...
...Pupin was leaving for America, to acquire fame and fortune as an inventor...
...Personal courage, the courage to defend one's own opinions and ideas to the bitter end, is the greatest courage of all, and the most human, at least here, in this country, where there is so much physical courage and so much personal cowardice...
...It w;>s there that Mosa Pijade translated Das Kapital and graduates of the Moscow schools passed on what they could remember of Communist teaching on all aspects of society...
...Djilas' arrest and imprisonment for participating in a vain plot to tree Petko Miletic marked a crucial juncture in his development as a Communist...
...In effect, from 1933-36 Sremska Mitrovica was gradually turned into a school for Communists, under the direction of Ognjen Prica, a graduate of the University of Vienna and a former professor of mathematics and philosophy...
...He praises her "iron will" and "quickness and independence of mind...
...Djilas' life was not totally dominated by politics, however...
...Memoir of a Revolutionary begins with an account of Djilas' departure from his native Bijelo Polje in Montenegro, a touching scene reminiscent of Michael Pupin's much earlier description in From Immigrant to Inventor of his farewell to Idvor, a village in the Serbian Banat...
...When Tito returned to the country permanently in 1938, he was automatically accepted as the Party's head—not because of his activities in his homeland, but because he was the only member of the old Central Committee who was still in good standing with the Comintern...
...The enemy makes all kinds of promises...
...His description of his earliest memories of her is more that of a fiction writer than a political memoirist: "She was a slender, pale young girl, with a small mouth and large black eyes which appeared to be pulling her whole body along with them...
...Despite the Communists' espousal of "free love" prior to 1937, Djilas found himself taking a traditional pride in Mitra's virginity...
Vol. 56 • May 1973 • No. 10
