Possibilities of a Comparative Yugoslav Literature

Abstract

In Yugoslavia two books in all have been written with the title 'Yugoslav Literature:'* Milos Savkovic published his lugoslovenska knji~evllost J-lJI in 1938, and Antun Barac wrote his lugoslovenska knji~evnost in 1954. The latter has been translated into several languages. In addition, Preg/ed lugoslovenske knji~evnosti by D. Stefanovic and V. Stanisavljevic has had more than ten editions and was very popular in Yugoslavia as a high school textbook. In all these surveys Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and (in the last-named book) Macedonian literatures were lined up one against another with no effort to put them into any kind of relationship. In encyclopedias (Enciklopedija lugoslavije, I st and 2nd eds., Enciklopedija Leksikografskog 7.avoda, Prosvetina Enciklopedija) there are only histories of the national literatures-Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian. There have been several attempts at theoretical discussions of Yugoslav literary history (in 1956, 1962, 1967) but all of them failed and were labeled 'unitarist' for not sufficiently recognizing the specifics of each national literature. And the efforts to assemble a team of literary historians who would write a history of Yugoslav literature have also failed-attempts that were made by Professor Ivo Franges of Zagreb and Professor J. Rotar of Ljubljana. Something easy and simple in a country with one nationality has, in a country with many, to be prepared for a long time and can only gradually be achieved. Writing about Yugoslav music or painting raises no questions at all. For example, in the late sixties there were several very well organized exhibitions under the general title Jugoslovenska umetnost XX veka in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade and the respective catalogues treated Yugoslav painting as a whole. The history of Yugoslavia has also been written with a certain amount of success-both by an individual author (B. Petranovic) and by a collective (I. Bozic, S. Cirkovic, M. Ekmecic and V. Dedijer). Obviously, the history of literature is something ditIerent. As a special field for understanding literature, literary history developed at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. This was a period of national revival in all the countries of Europe. Literary history was conceived of as an effective device for enhancing the cultural self-awareness of a nation. To return to the literary past meant, and even today means-especially in small nationsgaining a notion about the glories of the nation's past. Besides, in the sense of a philosophy of art established by Plato and valid in European esthetics till the twentieth century, literature was defined as a kind of mimesis; and for this reason for the literary historian the first and most important goal has been to describe the context (the social and political background) of the literary work and to summarize its plot (what the artist was saying about the circumstances in which he was living). In the kind of literary history based on the alleged mimetic nature of literature, the main goal was to re-create the past, to make the readers aware of their predecessors, proud of inheriting such a glorious past and such a nation. Since we in Yugoslavia have more than one nationality, it is clear that we can not have one literary history in the classic sense. We have to find a new key that might produce a new idea about what has been going on in all the literatures of Yugoslavia over the centuries. The old model of literary history does not work in a country with several nationalities and with an as yet unfinished process of national differentiation. Besides clearly marked national traditions (Serbian, Croatian, Slovene and perhaps even Macedonian) there are regions where the process of national rebirth is still ongoing (Muslims, Montenegrins). In such circumstances a traditional