On the Yugoslav political and cultural space Milovan Djilas i Miroslav Krleža were rare people, and even a rare social phenomenon. They significantly influenced the creation of ideological, party, literary and who knows what else Yugoslav reality. Looking a little deeper, in their biographies you can see and follow our politics, and even the history of the modern era. (In the political biography of Miroslav Krleža, you can see part of the history of the XNUMXth century, i.e. you can see only the rise of the ideology of communism. With Milovan Đilas, you can see the entire history of the XNUMXth century, i.e. you can see both the rise and fall of communism.)
Somewhere, Đilas wrote that while he was in power, he collaborated with numerous artists, scientists, writers, university professors, but Miroslav Krleža was by far the most interesting to him. This is understandable, because Krleža's pre-war and post-war influence on new generations of various orientations was incomparable and priceless. Krleža was a major cultural phenomenon of enormous education. The communists paid him great attention. Even in Krleža, Đilas saw the most significant cultural phenomenon in the modern history of South Slavs, who "with his poetic and polemical gift and his titanic activity immediately exposed not only the literary epigones of communism, but also writers of different, opposite ideologies".
Krleža was a member of the KPJ since its foundation in 1919. But already in 1929, Krleža - due to the collapse of the party - withdrew and "opposed" the party. In 1929, he was expelled from the KPJ. In his report at the XNUMXth National Conference, Tito took Miroslav Krleža "to the teeth" stating that "The struggle against the Party began in the form of a revision of Marxism-Leninism." The case with Krležini By seal this is confirmed... The Party took vigorous measures against him".
While he was a member of the KPJ, Krleža was sui generis. He never engaged in illegal, banal party work. Even less, or rather not at all, the bulky Krleža was not involved in the turmoil in the Party or the struggle for any party office. Knowing the situation in the USSR, Kleža met the pre-war Bolshevization of the KPJ with repulsion and even contempt. In this regard, Krleža did not support the internal Stalinization of the KPJ and its ideological sharpening for the future socialist revolution and subsequent war.
This new, imposed Bolshevik-Stalinist combat ideological awareness among members of the KPJ later proved to be necessary and even saving (victorious) in the Second St. war. And it was precisely this new awareness that made Krleža shudder, because he believed that the revolution - even the communist one - was not an ideal and happy act. On the contrary. But he clearly perceived the importance of the revolution for the development of society in those cases when politics cannot successfully solve basic life problems and make life better.
In short, Krleža was more inclined to evolutionism as an emancipatory way of solving social problems, than to revolution or a revolutionary way to solve existential social issues.
In this regard, Krleža's horror of violence and killing is well known. It was very difficult for him to bear the terrible and brutal events. In his many novels, plays... he writes about it. And yet, Krleža was not a salon communist-purist, but a great and true left-wing intellectual. For Krleža, wars and revolutions were cataclysms that were very difficult to avoid. He is - similar Ivo Andrić - "a very sensitive, complex being, who takes care of clothes, food, sleep, and above all, his inner peace" (Đilas). So a man of high spiritual and every other hygiene.
Therefore, it would be almost impossible to imagine Krleža the partisan, Krleža the bomber, Krleža the machine gunner charging at the "hated enemy", sleeping in the hay with bedbugs and howling "you are chasing me brothers".
Throughout the war, Tito, Kardelj and numerous other people in the NOB Supreme Council were obsessed with the need and importance of Krleža's arrival in the Partisans. To the extent that before the Second World War, Krleža belonged to the innermost circle of the left, he was one of its founders, its prominent if not the most prominent cultural figure. He was highly respected in the Komsomol. Also, it was highly valued for example code Dimitrova. There were whispers even at his house Stalin, which gave great weight to his political biography.
So, all in all. The party (KPJ) and the revolution needed Krleža more than the party and the revolution needed him.
However, Krleža did not respond to the permanent call of the communists to leave Zagreb and move to the territory freed from the fascists. (Krleža was sent eight invitations to join the partisans. Safe travel routes were also worked out.) However, Krleža spent the entire Second World War in Zagreb. Almost every day he was threatened with death by some crazy and uncontrolled Ustasha who was "looking for his minute of fame". Therefore, Krleža spent part of the war in a neuropsychiatric sanatorium in Zagreb's Zelengaj under guard Dr. Vranešić.
It is interesting that at the beginning of the war, Krleža was arrested twice by the Ustasha. By occupation Milo Budak, writer and Pavelić's deputy with the consent of the head of the NDH Pavelić, Krleža was released. The quick release of Krleža from the Ustasha prison had a favorable circumstance in the ideological dispute that Krleža had with the KPJ before the Second World War ("conflict on the literary left"). But it is believed that he was saved by the great name that Krleža had in the Croatian cultural, state and general public.
Krleža bravely held on during the war and the Ustasha regime in Croatia (NDH). He did not publish anything or speak publicly. With this, Krleža decisively demonstrated his opposition to the Ustasha government, Đilas states somewhere. He bravely refused Pavelić's proposal to take over the leadership of a prominent cultural institution in the NDH. (Krleža rejected Pavelić's proposal to take over the position of president of the Academy of Arts and Crafts of the NDH or director of the University Library in Zagreb.) They would say that that time was the golden age of Krleža's political biography.
Considering the greatness of Miroslav Krleža, the cultural and political consequences that his absence in the partisans caused during the war, the best expert on this issue and Krleža's intimate Dr. Slavko Goldstein interprets that the main reason for Krleža's failure to join the partisans is multi-layered from his "pessimistic fear in 1941 that the partisan uprising was just a hopeless adventure, calls "from the forest" through emissaries that did not instill confidence in him (August Cilic) to fear for his wife Belu. He couldn't even think of taking her with him into the forest, and leaving her in Zagreb would mean exposing her to the usual Ustasha reprisals against the family of "renegades": imprisonment in the Jasenovac camp and death. He could never forgive himself for that."
In his war memoirs, Đilas assessed Krleža's failure to join the partisans as "plain cowardice". Later, Đilas was strongly influenced by Krleža's argument (justification) about the possible fate (murder) of his wife Bela, to whom Krleža was very attached.
(End in next issue)
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