The Early Crnjanski - North American Society for Serbian Studies

3
SERBIAN STUDIES
PUBLISHED BY TilE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIEI'Y FOR SERBIAN STUDIES
CONTENTS
VOLUME 5, NUMBER 4
FALL 1990
Edit Petrovic and Andrei Simic
MONTENEGRIN COLONISTS IN VOJVODINA: OBJECTIVE
AND SUBJECTIVE MEASURES OF ETHNICITY 1
5
Nicholas Moravcevich
THE PORTRAIT OF NIKOLA PASIC IN DOBRICA COSIC'S
NOVEL TIME OF DEATH
21
Zora Devrnja Zimmerman
ON THE HERMENEUTICS OF ORAL POETRY: AN
ANALYSIS OF THE KOSOVO MYTH OS
31
Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic
THE RECEPTION OF MOMCILO NASTASIJEVIC IN SERBIA
AND YUGOSLAVIA SINCE 1938
41
Dragan Kujundzic
THE EARLY CRNJANSKI: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS
OF WRITING
55
BOOK REVIEWS
Slavko Todorovich
The Chilandarians: Serbian Monks on the Greek Mountain .
Boulder, Colorado
East European Monographs, 1989
(Paul Pavlovich)
69
Dragan Kujundzic
55
THE EARLY CRNJANSKI: THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF
WRITING
Kamo az pojdu, gorkost smerti vizu.
Milos Crnjanski, Seobe
In the second book of Crnjanski's Seobe (Migrations}, a certain
protophysicus Trikrofos, after having been asked by Vitkovic about
the state of mind of Pavel Isakovic, the main hero of the novel,
replied by writing with a stick in large, calligraphic letters in sand:
"M e 1 a n c h o l i a." This scene, in a paradigmatic way, may
serve as a departure point for discussing the topic suggested by the
title: Crnjanski's unbearable lightness of writing. Another topic that
could be discussed here, what Christine Buci Gluecksman calls "Le
cogito melancholique de la modernite," the melancholic cogito of
modernity, suggests itself as the logical outcome of reading Crnjanski's melancholic visions in the light of his modernistic engagement.
We would like, then, to proceed by offering a theoretical outline of
the problem of melancholy and modernity, (since Crnjanski himself
wrote some important theoretical discussions about the subject to
which we shall return), and then to see how some of these aspects
affect or arc justified by our reading of Crnjanski's texts.
Crnjanski and melancholy: the topic needs little justification.
Twenty years ago Nikola Milosevic, in his Roman Milosa Crnjanskog,2 and then, later, in his Zidanica na pesku, 3 suggested that
Crnjanski's writing induces in a reader a "melancholic resignation
with the complexities and ugliness of existence." 4 This "melancholic resignation" appears to be, according to Milosevic, the major
emotional impulse underlying the writing of Milos Crnjanski, producing a semantic statement of a metaphysical and universal dimension: tho works of Crnjanski represent, says Milosevic, "the true
realm of the tragic metaphysical qualities,'' 5 which have something
of the "melancholic light of a candle burning for the rest of someone's soul." 6 According to the lucid interpretation of this author,
the literary oeuvre of Milos Crnjanski, from his early
poetic achievements, over Dnevnik o Carnojevicu, the
first book of Seobe, Suzni krokodil, Iris Berlina, Tajna
Albrebta Direro and Ljubav u Toskani, until his second
Dragan Kujundzic
56
book of Seobe, Hiperborejci and Nikola Teslo, displays
under the seemingly historical, psychological and compositional flow (appearance) of tho lilerary structure,
an essentially identical, metaphysical vision of man and
the world.7
This vision, according to Milosevic, can hardly be expressed by the
prosaic, everyday language of criticism. This disturbing vision or
quality of Crnjanski's writing can only be authentically expressed,
according to this critic, by those incurably melancholic lines from
Crnjanski's poem Strazilovo: "And dust, everything is dust, when I
raise my hand and sweep over the transparent hills, and a river."
("A prah, sve je prah, kad dignem uvis ruku i prevucem, nad providnim brdima i rekom.") 8
While it seems to be fairly easy, after the work of Nikola Milosevic,
to enumerate the places in Crnjanski's writing operating within a
certain "melancholic" mode, a more scrutinous analysis would prove
that it is not quite obvious how "melancholy" functions in the writing of Milos Crnjanski, or how one is to locale ils position in any
definitive or precise way. This undecided position of the "melancholy effect" is already obvious from the critical statements by Nikola Milosevic which seem to share this uncertainly with the text
they analyze. For example, in order to say what the melancholic
quality of Crnjanski's writing is, Nikola Milosevic, like in the example quoted from the conclusion of Zidanica no pesku, explicitly
gives up critical discourse, and has recourse to Crnjanski's poem
itself. (i.e. the melancholic quality of Crnjanski's writing can be explained only by quoting Crnjanski himself). The paradoxes of this
kind seem to have to do something with the structure of melancholy,
since it appears to be both inside, and outside of a text, in the reader,
the writer, and in the text simultaneously. This instability and perpetual displacement seem to be the driving force in any melancholic
economy, be it philosophical, existential, textual or psychological.
Kierkegaard, for example, writes that melancholy is "an empty space
always opening in front of me, as a consequence of being situated
behind me and pushing me forward. That life is made upside down,
is terrifying and unbearable." 9 This melancholic mechanism is equally
present in the work of mourning and melancholy during which, as
Freud has it, melancholy is simultaneously caused by the loss of a
Dragan Kujundzic
57
libidinal object, while at the same lime being the condition of this
lack: the loss has always already happened, and in that sense, is
both inside and outside of a melancholic body.
And indeed, in the scene where the protophysicus Trikrofos writes
on sand the word "Melancholia," we encounter all the problems
and complexities of a "melancholic discourse" at work, including a
difficulty to name or denote a space of melancholy. Trikrofos writing
the word "melancholia" is, in a self-referential manner, summarizing the thematic or emotional dimension prevailing throughout
Crnjanski's novel. And yet, at the same time, this scene points out
that literary melancholy is essentially a "quality," an assumption or
an effect of writing which is in this scene thematizing and displaying
both its own assumptions and effects. In that sense, melancholy is
what the text is writing about, its "theme," and at the same time it
is larger than the text, it is the rhetorical assumption of the very
scene or movement of writing "melancholia" in sand. As much as
melancholy is contained by the text of Milos Crnjanski, the text of
the novel is itself contained, paradoxically, by its own content i.e.
melancholy. In other words, if melancholy is a frame, a "universal
message" (Miloscvic) of all Crnjanski's writing, it is at the same time
what is being framed: its own model, paragon, and its own frame,
parergon, simultaneously, a mise en abyme, 10 to the point where the
representational trait "splits while remaining the same, and traverses and yet also bounds tho corpus,'' 11 the text, the body of writing
which contains il. With melancholy, as with any self-referential
movement of writing, "it is thus impossible to decide whether an
event, account, account of event, or event accounting took place.
Impossible to sellle upon the simple borderlines of the corpus, of
this ellipse unremillingly repealing itself within its own expansion."12 In that sense writing is melancholy, melancholy is writing,
a borderline which is constantly unfolding unto itself, splitting its
own frame of reference in the repetitive movement of transgression
and reconstitution, a product, to use Crnjanski's title as a handy
example, of constant rhetorical migrations, and immigrations over
its own generic, semantic or figurative borders. And it is in this sense
that melancholy, by its restless disruption of any presence, by its
ability to always anew put into question the mechanisms of representation, the status of the referent, by its erasure of the "ontological
consistency, of the primary referent," 13 appears to be a proper space
Dragan Kujundzic
58
of modernity, the major symptom of the "melancholic cogilo of modernity," of its "disjoint subjectivity," of its perception of the world
pulsating/oscillating between "appearance and apparition, jouissance and death, dream and reality," and of its profound feeling that
the impossibility of representation "is nothing else than the nothingness of the subject ilself." 14 If melancholy appears as the symptom of a metaphysical loss, of the "death of god" and his disappearance
or the "death of tragedy," (Kierkegard writes in Eillu:r ... Or that "by
losing the tragic we gain despair and melancholy''),1 5 then it is a
genuine condition for any modernist discourse 10 to take place. 17
The feeling or awareness of a melancholic loss, of this light of the
black sun of depression that shines over contemporary man, appears, interestingly enough, to be one of the major "qualities" or
emotional drives that Crnjanski himself perceives as tho necessary
elements of any modernist discourse. In his unduly neglected essays
of far-reaching theoretical and critical impact and importance for
Serbian and Yugoslav modernism, "The New Form of the Novel,"
and "For a Blank-Verse," written in 1920 and 1922 respectively,
Crnjanski writes that:
the new [modern] man, [appearing out of Flaubert's
novel November], has no homeland, and all landscapes
make him melancholic by their bleak horizons. Having
experienced travelling and seas, he knows that no law,
border or distance can prevent that bleak fog/haze from
penetrating and spreading through everything human.
Work of all kinds, reality, life, all that loses sense and
power when confronted with that mystical, eternal and
unavoidable, which resides in nature. In the end there
is only death, rising as the enormous shadow of some
ship. 18
That kind of literary sensibility represents, for Crnjanski, a model
"which will, in the twenlieth century, produce a new form of the
novel, and a new type of prose wriling." 19 His essay "For a BlankVerse" presents itself as a theoretically and philosophically e-ven
apter description of modernism and modernity. Written as a programmatic essay drawing out the boundaries of his modernist engagement, it also puts the movement of any modernistic stratEgy
Dragan Kujundzic
59
into a larger historical and theoretical perspective. As in his essay
on Flaubert, Crnjanski shows here a strong inclination lo viewing
modernist discourse as a product/generator of a certain melancholic
sensibility. It also offers a pertinent insight in the relationship between literary history and literary modernity. "This great split between art and life, historically very usual, is self-understandable.
After all, a certain degout in Europe is not surprising. . . . Life will
follow art and fulfill all that is, for the time being, only an idea. That
is how il has always been. And only that way will art be Nietzsche's
'Bejahung des Daseins."' 20 Pleading for what he calls "textual ecstasy," Crnjanski defines modernism as a conflict historically unavoidable between what a critic writing about modernism calls "the
power of a present moment as an origin [Nietzsche's Bejahung des
Daseins]," and the "necessary experience of any present as a passing
experience that makes the past irrevocable and unforgettable, because it is inseparable from any present or future." 21 And indeed,
Crnjanski conceives of a "new man" as one "in whom past and
distance disappear ... [and] memoirs to be the best part of literature."22 Thus, we could say that Crnjanski repeats the paradoxical
strategy of modernist writing, and that in his texts "modernity and
history relate to each other, in a curiously contradictory way."zJ On
the one hand, Crnjanski quotes Nietzsche's demand to forget any
previous experience, to live the utmost presence of the present, Heideggerian "Da-Sein," "saying -yes lo presence," what Paul de Man
calls "Nietzsche's ruthless forgetting, the blindness with which he
throws himself into an action lightened of all previous experience,
capturing the authentic spirit of modernily." 24 (Let us remember that
Crnjanski wrote exactly about this lightness of experience in his
poem Suma/.m: "Now we are careless, light and gentle/And we think:
how silent are and snowy/the peaks of Urals"; "Sad smo bezbrizni,
laki i nezni./Pornislimo: kako su lihi, snezni/vrhovi Urala").zs Elsewhere Crnjanski writes in the same manner that "We are trying to
get rid of the old shames, relations, laws and illusions!" 26 thus anticipating and confirming the words of a contemporary critic for
whom "modernity exists in the form of a desire lo wipe out whatever
came earlier, in the hope of reaching the point of origin that marks
a new departure." 27 The discourse of modernity, in one of its aspects
or poles, works as a radical forgetting of history and tradition, "old
laws and illusions," it is buill upon the reaction to the historical, it
Dragan Kujundzic
60
carries in itself the trauma of the past which il constantly tries to
fight, outdo, forget. zo "The past is a terrible, dim abyss; what falls
in that darkness, exists no more, and has never existed," 29 writes
Crnjanski about historical lime in Seobe.
On the other hand, this performative textual element of forgetting
is undone by the very historical referenliality of Crnjanski's novel.
In order to start forgetting, the text has to re-establish tho past, the
temporality or history it is trying to erase. Thus, his concept of modernity itself appears to be established between two conflicting poles:
one, which tries to forget the past, to erase il, and one which constantly resuscitates the past, like in Seobe, in order to start forgetting
it anew. Like Kierkegaard's melancholic, who is facing the abyss
pushed by the same void appearing as its consequence, tho writing
subject in Crnjanski's texts exists in the "ecstasy," or textasy, of
constantly establishing the past and forgetting it, in a literary space
where the past is no more, the future is not yet, and now lives a
"lost plenitude, a fragmentary catastrophe, ... a being of [simultaneous] excess and lack."30 Some fifty years before do Man's essay,
we find in Crnjanski's criticism a full theoretical awareness of the
conflict between the historical and the modern. Reflecting upon his
own writing as consisting of two opposing strategies and drives, one
that is an action of forgetting, and the other that is historical and
remembering, that relies on the historical "duration involved in
writing," 31 Crnjanski gives us a sound critical material on which we
can start explaining some paradoxical features of his writing.
This rhetorical movement of representational erasure appears in
most of the texts of Milos Crnjanski, and just a brief recollection of
some of his themes witness to his constant obsession with crypts,
tombs, melancholy and death. Vuk Isakovic, the central character of
the first Seobe (1929), for example, is someone whom melancholy
has reduced to complete nonexistence and silence: in the beginning
of the novel, Crnjanski says of him that melancholy turned lsakovic
into silence. 32 Some two hundred pages later, towards the end of
the novel, Crnjanski picks up again the same moUf, and says of
Isakovic that melancholy has turned him into complete silence. 33
Like the hills in Strazilovo, Vuk Isakovic disappears completely by
the end of the novel: "So, he thought, it is enough to move from one
place to another, and to abandon everything, as if il had never existed.... Tired and empty, he was light, as if he had had no body.
Dragan Kujundzic
61
The sun shone through him, and he felt warm , and not heavy at all,
as if he had no body."J4 The wound inflicted to Vuk made him
"hover between life and death for months." 35 These are just some
of the places in which characters in Crnjanski's novels appear as
shades, ghosts, vampires or living dead. In that way, the representational borderline is in constant motion, repeating the performative
rhetorical drive of the melancholic distribution within the text.
Crnjanski's heroes seem to be what Julia Kristeva in her recent book
on melancholy and literature called the "messengers of Thanatos,
{for] melancholy is a witness to the fragility of the signifier, and of
the destructibility of a human being."J6 Dafina Isakovic, Vuk's wife,
for example, is described by Crnjanski long before her death, as
already being dead: "She was lying down, dark as a corpse, sweating, in her bed." 37 "She was lying in her bed, -says later Crnjanski - not knowing whether she was still alive or dead." 38 Arandjel
Isakovic, Vuk's brother, is depicted in a similar way. At one point
he feels that in case Dafina dies, he "could stay alive in this world
only if he were not forced to move, if he could be left completely
alone and silent, if he turned to stone."J9 On the other hand, Vuk's
servant Arkadije, the first soldier to be killed during the war, somewhere on the Rhine, and whose body was never found, appears,
towards the end of the novel, as a ghost in his village: "Transparent,
so that the moon shone through him, he was very distant from everything . . . The dead Arkadije walked straight to his village . .. White
and transparent. .. he came to his house." 40 Needless to say, Dafina
after her death starts appearing as a vampire as well. "Ananija [Arandjel's servant], was convinced that she would be getting out of
her grave and walk through the village . .. Somebody saw her, . . .
white and big . .. in the shape of a white cow. The appearance of the
vampire . . . completed the disaster that had already happened to the
village .. . {so that] Ananija went to pierce her heart with a wooden
stake." 41
Even the central symbol of Seobe, "veliki plavi krug, u njemu
zvezda," the great blue circle, the star in its center, which has a
privileged position in the text, since il is placed at the beginning,
and its end, and is otherwise a recurrent metaphor for Vuk's idealized Russia, is undone in the same manner as the transparent hills
from Strazilovo. After Dafina's death, Arandjel looks into her eyes
and sees "two frozen, blue circles, with the color of the winter sky,
Dragan Kujundzic
62
cold and clear ... In her passing away, ... he saw a high sky appearing. And like his brother, in his dream, he saw above her, beyond himself with sorrow and fear, two blue circles, and a star in
them." 42 The great blue circle which is invested, within the symbolic economy of the text, with an enormous semantic and metaphorical potential, turns out to be a transparent veil through which
the death of Dafina shows its face.
Even in his essays, wrillen at the Lime, Crnjanski displays the same
obsessions with crypts, graves and burial siles . In his essay written
at the same lime when Seobe, Krf, plava grobnica (Migrations, Corfu,
A Blue Tomb), Crnjanski writes that "All this shore of Corfu, terrible
and frightening, is our tomb." 43
This obsession with the physical disappearance, dominates with
equal persistence the poetry of Crnjanski as well. His most famous
poem of the time, Stra:lilovo, is a poem about the lomb of Branko
Radicevic. The beginning lines in a telling way display the thanatotical obsessions of Milos Crnjanski: "Lulam jo~. vilak, sa srebrnim
lukom, IRascvetane tresnje, iz zaseda mamim,/ ali, iza gora, zavicaj
vee slutim, I gde cu smeh, pod jablanovima samim, Ida sahranim." 44
The whole poem is an intertextual response to the verses of Branko
Radicevic about his own dying: "Lisje zuti vece po drvecu, lisje zuto
dole vece pada, zelonoga ja nikada/ videt' necu./ Glava klonu, lice
potavnilo,/ bolovanje oko mi popilo. Ruka lomna, telo izmozdeno,
a kleca mi slabacko koleno! Dodje doba da idem u groba." 45 Compare, for example: "Znam, polako idem u jednu patnju dugu, i znam,
pognucu glavu kad Iisee bude zuto." 46
Another major poem by Milos Crnjanski, his Lament nod Beogradom (not written at the same time, but within the same thematic,
emotional and rhetoric framework), presents itself as a long mourning over the poet's future death. It unites the whole range of cadaveric appearances: "Jedan se leiche, leiche dcre, drugi mi sapce
cadavere. Treci, les, les, les." 47 The poet is praising Belgrade as his
proper tomb, the only tomb he wants to be buried in: "A kad mi se
glas, i oci, i dah upokoje, Ti ces me znam, uzeti na krilo svoje." 48
Quite appropriately, this poem was recited by the actor Petar Banicevic, over Crnjanski's open grave, as the last farewell, thus repeating the cryptographic logic of Crnjanski's poem in the most
appropriate way.
Dragan Kujundzi6
63
The writing of Milos Crnjanski presents itself as what Kristeva
calls a "Messenger of Thanatos, melancholy, accomplice and witness to the fragility of the signified, the precarity of life." 49 In one
of the scenes central to Seobe, Vuk Isakovic addresses his soldier
who is about to be punished and whipped, upon the order of a
general of a higher rank than Isakovic, and "probably in a few moments blind and crippled: Forgive me, Sekula, my ignorance of what
to do! See for yourself: I have no way out! Do not cry! Shall I, with
the army, find way to the distant shiny Star? And my long life will
pass as a shortest life. And wherever I go ... I see the bitterness of
death." 50 In that sense the text of Seobe serves as a frame, or cadre,
through which everything Isakovic casts his eye upon, turns into a
corpse or cadaver. Wherever he goes he sees the bitterness of death.
To every cadre, its cadaver. As Kristeva recently pointed out, melancholic phantasm, melancholic literature, treats the things it represents as "falling into invisible and unnamable. Cadere. All is decay,
everything is corpse." 51 In that sense the texts by Milos Crnjanski
perpetuate the logic of a radical modernist pleasure in dying, a repetition of loss and destruction, what Maurice Blanchot calls a satisfaction in death: "One must be capable of satisfaction in death,
capable of finding in the supreme dissatisfaction supreme satisfaction, and of maintaining, at the instant of dying, the clearsightedness
which comes from such a balance." 52 In this type of literary strategy
"the corpse manipulates the scene of birth of a certain type of literary representation, and we must allow for that very corpse to determine the limits and nature ... of the text." 53
In his essay on Milos Crnjanski, Nikola Milosevic claims at one
point that the writings of Milos Crnjanski produces only appearances ("history and psychology exist in Crnjanski's writing only in
appearance"). These textual appearances- historical, textual or referential-are produced only to be erased, or, as in the lines quoted
from Straiilovo, to become dust and transparence. We could say
that the hand sweeping over the hills and rivers, in Strazilovo, turning them into transparence and dust, holds the pen of Milos Crnjanski: every trace it leaves erases the text or the body it produces. The
referential appearances in his texts are, in fact, only apparitions of
this conflicting, self consuming textual energy, guided by the logic
of decay and decomposition. In a word, Crnjanski's writing is constantly erasing any firm frame of its reference. Or, what his texts
Dragan Kujundzic
64
frame, it is the erasure of any represented appearance, the gaze which
sees everywhere destruction and death. The writing of Milos Crnjanski is like writing Melancholia in sand, every trace of it lo be washed
away by the first rain or blown away with the first wind. In Crnjanski's own words, the world represented in his text falls into a dim
abyss, and whatever falls in that darkness, disappears, exists no
more, and has never existed.
University of Southern California
Los Angeles
•Christine Buci Gluecksman, "Le cogito melancolique do Ia modernit6," in Litteroture et melancolie, Magazine litteraire, 244, juillet-aout 1987, 38-40.
2 Nikola Milo~evic, Roman Mi/o§a Crnjanskog. Problem univerzolnog iskaza, (Beograd: Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1970).
3Nikola Milosevic, "Metafizitki vid stvarala~tva Milo~a Crnjnnskog," Povodom jednag tumatenja knjizevnog opusa Milosa Crnjanskog," "Osnovno filozofske linije drugog deJa 'Seoba,"' "Slutaj komedijant," and "Piscu u pokoju," in Zidanica no pesku.
Knjizevnost i metofiziko, (Beograd: Slovo ljubve, 1978), 7-59, 189-193, 219-221, 221225.
Nikola Milosevic, a professor in the department of Comparative Literature and
Literary Theory in Belgrade, member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences,
and the president of Crnjanski Foundation, remains, to this day, probably the best
avid interpreter of the work of Milo~ Crnjanski. In a letter sent to Nikola Milosevic
from London on December 27, 1964, while he was still in emigration, Milos Crnjanski
wrote that an essay about the second Seobe by Nikola Milosovi(;, represents "the most
serious work ever written about my [Crnjanski's] work." Both tho essay "Osnovne
filozofske linije drugog deJa 'Seoba"' and the letter, "Fotokopija pisma Milosa Crnjanskog" are published in Zidonica na pesku, 193- 219, 225. Tho writings of Nikola
Milosevic about Milos Crnjanski. which deserve an interpretation on their own are
the major influence that inspired this text, and with which this text dialogiz~s in
many places.
That is why we would like to dedicate this essay to Professor Nikola Milosevi(; and
his work on Milos Crnjanski.
•Milosevic, Zidanica no pesku, 58, underlined by D.K.
•Milosevic, Roman Milo~o Crnjanskog, 259.
•Mi!osevic, Zidanica no pesku, 224.
7 Milosevic, Zidonica no pesku, 58.
•Milos Crnjanski, "StraZilovo," Lirika, proza, eseji, (Novi Sad-Beograd: Matica srpskaSrpska knjizevna zadruga, 1965), 87.
•Soren Kierkegaard, Ou bien ... au bien, quoted from Gluecksman, 39.
' ""There is no term in English for what French critics call a mise en abyme- a
casting into abyss- but the effect itself is famili ar enough; an illusion of infinite
Dragan Kujundzic
65
regress can be created by a writer or painter by incorporating within his own work
a work that duplicates in miniature the larger structure, setting up an apparently
unending metonymic series. This mise en abyme simulates a wildly uncontrollable
repetition." Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandman," in Textual Strategies, Josue V.
Harari ed., (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 311.
This uncontrollable repetition of which Hertz writes, seems to have affected the
writing of Nikola Milo~evic itself. As much as his own melancholic mood predisposes
him for insights in the structure of the melancholic statements in Crnjanski's novel,
at the same time they are a source of a blindness for the rhetorical effects of repetition
produced by melancholy, within confines of which this critic develops his insights.
It is for that reason that melancholy, which by itself is a process, relation, a movement
of absense and displacement, appears to this critic as a static, "metaphysical" quality.
Melancholy is not "metaphysical" since the very mode of its appearance presumes
a work of displacement, absense, and constant differentiation. In the language of
modern philosophy, it is itself a work of deconstruction of any metaphysical presence.
"jacques Dorrida, "The Law of Genre," Avila! Ronel tr., in On Narrative, W.J.T.
Mitchell ed., (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981), 66.
12 Derrida, 6 7.
13 Gluccksman, 39.
14 Gluccksman, 39.
"Quoted in Gluecksman, 39.
••See, for example, Adorno writing about Kierkegaard, that "Melancholy is the
historical spirit ln its natural depth." Theodor W. Adorno, "Kierkegaard. Konstruction des Aostetischcn," in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/M.,
1979), 91.
"Even though some classical literary monuments may incorporate a melancholic
perspective, running counter to their religious, metaphysical or political economy
(for oxamplo, jean Starobinski, in his "La melancolie au jardin des racines Grecques,"
Starobinski, Utterature et m6/ancolie, 24, considers the warrior, Bellerophont from
Iliad, chapter VI , lines 200-203, to represent the first melancholic hero), it is with
the birth of doubt, parody, and generally with the feeling that the inherited social,
literary or ideological institutions are insufficient, false and repressing, that a modernist discourse comes to lifo. In this respect, it seems that Aristophanes is the first
writer partaking of this modernist condition. (It is not by chance that his Frogs are
one of tho major literary associations and references reproduced or invoked in the
beginning of tho ultimate modernist novel, Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or that Joyce's
Ulysses, as much as Crnjanski's Urika !take, re-write, parody and undo the classical
institutions of tradition and literature in a manner befitting the Greek playwright).
"Crnjanski, "Novi oblik romana," in Urika, proza, eseji, 415.
1•Crnjanski, Urika, proza, esoji, 415. It should be noted here, and only in passing,
how Crnjanski's bold and prophetic critical statement aptly formulates the spirit or
modes of writing that came after his text in our century, witnessing a very sophis ticated critical and theoretical sensibility. Crnjanski's essays are notoriously neglected
by critics, oven though ho was one of the most learned writers and intellectuals that
ever wrote in tho Serbian and Yugoslav cultural space. Fluent in English, French,
Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Hungarian, German and Russian, having a command of
Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Greek, he was an avid reader of many literary traditions. His reading of Nordic literatures, permeating the narration of his
Kod Hiperborejaca, his book about Michelangelo (1984), his interest in and translation of classical Chinese poetry, among many other literary achievements, s tand as
monumental documents of his extraordinary literary and cultural education. We have
Dragan Kujundzic
66
not even started, with very few exceptions, to pay tributo to tho complexities and
importance of Crnjanski's oeuvre, both in the Serbian, Yugoslav, and in a wider,
European cultural context, or to study tho plurality of intertoxts whi ch his writing
prefigures, quotes, or puts into play.
2 °Crnjanski, "Za slobodni slih," Lirika, proza, esoji, 403 .
"Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity," in Blindn ess and Insight,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 148- 9.
22 Crnjanski, Lirika, proiza, eseji, 414-5.
23 de Man, 151,
24 de Man, 1983, 147.
'"Crnjanski, Sumatra, in Lirika, proza, eseji, 78.
••Crnjanski, "Obja~njenja 'Sumatra,"' in Lirika, proza, eseji, 396.
27 de Man, 148.
••Vladimir Mayakovsky, for example, wanted to "throw overboard from the ship
of History" Pu~kin, and all Russian XIX Century tradition.
••Milo~ Crnjanski, Seobe, in Serbia, Seobe, Lament nad Boogradom , (Novi SadBeograd: Matica Srpska-Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1965), 107.
30 Antoine Raybaud, "L'expansian melancolique," in Litterature at m olancolie, 46.
31 de Man, 159.
32 Crnjanski, Seobe, 24.
33 Crnjanski, Seobe, 218.
34 Crnjanski, Seobe, 219, underlined by O.K.
"Crnjanski, Seobe, 95.
'"Julia Kristeva, Soleil nair. Depression et melancalie, (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 30.
37 Crnjanski , Seobe, 161.
38 Crnjanski, Seobe, 165.
3 °Crnjanski, Seobe, 171-2, underlined by O.K.
4 °Crnjanski, Seobe, 204-5.
41 Crnjanski, Seobe, 197-9.
42 Crnjanski, Seobe, 188.
43 Milo~ Crnjanski, "Krf, plava grobnica," in Sabrana deJa (Boograd : Narodna prosveta, 1930). vol, 2, 122.
44 Crnjanski, Strazilovo, in Lirika, proza, eseji, 83 .
45 Branka Radicevi~. Kad mlidijah umreti, in Rukovet, (Novi Sad-Beograd: Matica
srpska-Srpska knjizevna zadruga, 1963), 223. Milan Dedinac was probably the first
to elaborate the con nection between Branko Radi~evi~ and Milo~ Crnjanski. in terestingly enough, his essay also finds the melancholic tone to bo predominan t in
Crnjanski's modernist rewriting of Branko Radicevi~: "A man from Vojvodina, a Viennese student, like Branko Radicevic, Crnjanski was at the time a young man whose
youth was mercilessly broken by the war which left in him disappointment and
melancholy." Milan Dedinac, "Ono ~to je zivo i ono ~to je mrtvo. Varijacije na temu
Branko Radicevic," in Branko Radicevi~. Rukovet, 23. He also suggests that Crnjanski's modernism owes a lot to Branko Radicevi~ and his ossontially modern sensibility. Dedinac, 34.
••Crnjanski, Strazilovo, in Lirika, proza, eseji, 84.
47 Milo~ Crnjanski, Lament nod Beogradom, in Serbia, Seobo, Lament nad Beogradom, 228 .
••Crnjanski, Lament nad Beogradom, 227.
••Kristeva, 30.
'°Crnjanski, Seobe, 39-40. This passage is hardly translatable, since it combines
now non-existing mixture of Church Slavonic and Serbian, (tho action of the novel
takes place in XVII century). and it is worth quoting the original in full: "Prosti mja
Dragan Kujundzic
67
Sekula, u moemu nedoumeniu Ho l:initi! Razsuzdaj: najdoh se u nuzdi! Ne prolivaj
slezi?! Obresli 1i budu az i polk put k dagoj blagozratnoj Denici? I moj dolgi zivot
projde aki kratcje zitie. I kamo az pojdu ... gorkost smerti vizu ... " (Underlined by D.K.) .
The quotation is very important for it repeats the motif of the star which we have
discussed earlier, and relates it again to death and dying.
"Kristeva, 24.
"Maurice Blanchet "The Work and Death's Space", The Space of Literature, Ann
Smock tr., (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 91, underlined by D.K.
" Eugenio Donato, "The Crypt of Flaubert," in Floubert and Postmodernism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). 40. It is not by chance that I quote here
Donato on Flaubert. Let us remember that Milos Crnjanski, in his essay about the
new novel, praised Flaubcrt for this very type of literary practice analyzed by Donato.
It is this literary sensibility, in which the corpse determines the movement or logic
of writing, that for Crnjanski dominates the modern literature, and his own literary
practice as well.