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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2021
During the early 1950s the Federative Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia underwent a series of radical politico-economic reforms that created the system of socialist self-management. Although scholars have long acknowledged that these reforms liberalized the field of cultural production, the precise ways in which self-management shaped Yugoslav culture during this period remains under-examined. Drawing from Daniel Immerwahr's concept of “thinking small,” this paper contends that self-management be thought of as an effort to rescale the horizons of socialist modernity. As Yugoslav reformers diverged from the Soviet model of Stalinist high modernism, they descaled state power to local sites of administration. This turn towards “small socialism” was recorded in certain conceptual and methodological trends in the cultural production of this period. This paper explores this recalibration of the scales of socialist culture in three examples from the 1950s: the urban theory of Bogdan Bogdanović, the revival of dialect poetry in Croatia, and the proliferation of domestic travelogues that emphasized the diversity of local cultures. As these examples demonstrate, the ambivalence that many Yugoslav intellectuals felt with regards to the high modernist scales of Stalinism prompted them to redirect the focus of socialist culture towards the marginal, the minor, or the minute.
1. Dobriša Cesarić, “Bubica,” Književne novine, March 20, 1951, 3.
2. On the high modernism of the Soviet project see Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the use of the sublime in High Stalinist culture, see Clark, Katerina, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass., 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3. Bogdan Bogdanović, Mali urbanizam (Sarajevo, 1958).
4. Drago Gervais, Istarski kanat (Zagreb, 1951).
5. Ivo Braut, Kruženja u malom svijetu (Zagreb, 1957); Oto Bihalji-Merin and Liza Bihalji-Merin, Mala zemlja između svetova: kontemplativna putovanja (Belgrade, 1954).
6. For an overview of the Yugoslav reform process see Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment (Berkeley, 1977).
7. On the history of Yugoslav non-alignment see Alvin Rubinstein, Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned World (Princeton, 1970), and Robert Niebuhr, The Search for a Cold War Legitimacy: Foreign Policy and Tito’s Yugoslavia (Leiden, 2018).
8. Critiques of Soviet-inspired policies in culture flourished following the Second Congress of the Union of Writers in December 1949. For an overview of these debates in the wider context of the Yugoslav literary left, see Stanko Lasić, Sukob na književnoj ljevici (Zagreb, 1970) 245–92.
9. Bojana Videkanić offers an excellent study of these reforms in Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945–1985 (Montreal, 2020).
10. For those works that point to the origins of socialist modernism in Yugoslavia’s reorientation to the west, see Miroslav Perišić, Od Staljina ka Sartru: Formiranje jugoslovenske inteligencije na evropskim univerzitetima 1945–1958 (Belgrade, 2012); Ljubomir Petrović, “Kulturni sukob blokova tokom hladnog rata u jugoslovenskoj prestonici 1945–55 godine,” in Ljubodrag Dimić ed., Velike sile i male države u hladnom ratu: Slučaj Jugoslavije (Belgrade, 2005), 341; and Radina Vučetić, Coca Cola Socialism: Americanization of Yugoslav Culture in the Sixties (Budapest, 2018), 137–43.
11. Two works that draw more direct parallels between the ideology of reform in the political-economic and cultural fields are Videkanić’s Nonaligned Modernism and Borislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91 (Ann Arbor, 2016), 11.
12. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, 1998), 90.
13. For an account of the high modernist discourse in the Soviet Union see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain.
14. Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, 1984) 229–31.
15. Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, 1988), 3–44. See also Niebuhr, The Search for a Cold War Legitimacy, 20–52.
16. Some of the most significant critiques of the Soviet Union from Yugoslav intellectuals include: Moša Pijade, “Veliki majstori licemerja” in Izabrani govori i članci, 1948–1949 (Belgrade, 1960), 329–82; Milovan Đilas, Conversations with Stalin (London, 2014); Edvard Kardelj, Socijalizam i demokratija (Zagreb, 1980).
17. Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 32–80; A. Ross Johnson, The Transformation of Communist Ideology: The Yugoslav Case, 1945–1953 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 143–56; Goran Musić, “Yugoslavia: Workers’ Self-Management as State Paradigm” in Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, eds., Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present (Chicago, 2011), 173–80.
18. Hilde Katrine Haug, Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, Communist Leadership and the National Question (London, 2012), 137.
19. Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: the Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990 (Princeton, 1995) 153–54; Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, The Economic Struggle for Power in Tito’s Yugoslavia: From World War II to Non-Alignment (London, 2017), 95.
20. Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, Mass., 2018).
21. Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 7–8.
22. In the early 1950s Yugoslavs did not refer to “socialism with a human face” but rather socialism of a “human measure.” See, for instance, Marko Ristić’s 1952 essay, “Svedočanstva pod zvezdama,” in Marko Ristić, Politička književnost: Za ovu Jugoslaviju 1944–1958 (Sarajevo, 1977), 119.
23. Scott, Seeing like a State, 103–46.
24. Brigette Le Normand, Designing Tito’s Capital: Urban Planning, Modernism, and Socialism in Belgrade (Pittsburgh, 2014); Ljiljana Blagojević, Novi Beograd: Osporeni modernizam (Belgrade, 2007).
25. Vladislav Ribnikar, “Oblakoderi u Moskvi,” Književne novine, February 2, 1952: 5.
26. Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome, 279–88.
27. Vladimir Kulić, “Bogdan Bogdanović and the Search for a Meaningful City,” in Ákos Moravánszky and Judith Hopfengärtner eds., Re-Humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950–1970 (Basel, 2017), 200.
28. Kulić, “Bogdan Bogdanović,” 202–3.
29. Bogdanović, Mali urbanizam, 7.
30. Ibid., 14.
31. Ibid., 75–6.
32. Ibid., 84.
33. Kulić, “Bogdan Bogdanović,” 200.
34. Bogdanović, Mali urbanizam, 89.
35. Ibid., 88.
36. Ibid., 89.
37. Patricia Morton, Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 96–129.
38. Elinor Murray Despalatović, Ljudevit Gaj and the Illyrian Movement (Boulder, 1975).
39. See, for instance, Milovan Ðilas’ early short stories in Rane pripovetke, 1930–1940 (Belgrade, 2000), much of the dialogue of Jovan Popović’s Reda mora da bude (Belgrade, 1932), or the short stories and novellas of Hasan Kikić, collected in Pripovijetke (Zagreb, 1969). We could also consider Miroslav Krleža’s occasional use of the kajkavian dialect in his interwar novels, such as Povratak Filipa Latinowicza (Zagreb, 2002) or Na rubu pameti (Zagreb, 2004). On the relationship of the social literature movement to poetry in the čakavian dialect, see Milorad Stojević, Čakavsko pjesništvo XX. Stoljeća: Antologija, studija (Rijeka, 1987), 291–308.
40. The turn against naturalism among social realists in Yugoslavia was prompted by the reception of the literary theory of Georg Lukacs, in particular his essay “Erzahlen oder Beschreiben?” Internationale literature 11 (1936): 100–18, and 12 (1936): 108–23. From the mid-1930s onwards, Lukacs’s theories began to appear in the critical writings of Yugoslav communists. Several essays by Radovan Zogović, for instance, feature citations of Lukacs’s work, such as “Osude bez prizive” in Naša stvarnost, June 15–16, 1938, 19–38.
41. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford, 1998), 146–48.
42. Eli Finci, “Nekoliko misli o razvojnim tendencijama naše književnosti” in Književne novine, March 2, 1948, 1.
43. Ibid., 1. See also Velibor Gligorić’s critical review of Vjekoslav Kaleb’s work and Grga Gamulin’s savage critique of Peter Šegedin’s Djeca božja. Velibor Gligorić, “Dve knjige Vjekoslava Kaleba,” in Književne novine, May 25, 1948, 3; Grga Gamulin, “Uz prvi roman Petra Šegedina,” Republika, 3, no. 12 (1947): 932.
44. Significantly, many of the works of dialect poetry that were published in these early post-war years were composed in the interwar or wartime period. See, for instance, Marin Franičević’s Govorenje Mikule Trudnega (Zagreb, 1945); Ive Ćaće, “Stipe Jarbolina” Republika, 4 4, no. 6 (1948): 520–22; and the republication of the 1934 collection Antologija nove čakavske lirike (Zagreb, 1947).
45. Marin Franičević, “Problem regionalizma u hrvatskoj književnosti,” in Pisci i problemi (Zagreb, 1948), 370–72.
46. Ibid., 382.
47. Ibid.
48. On the disregard for dialect in socialist realism see Bernice Rosenthal, “Sotsrealizam i nitssheanstvo,” in Hans Gunter and Evgenii Dobrenko, eds., Sotsrealisticheskii kanon (St. Petersburg, 2000), 67; and Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, 2000), 150.
49. Franičević, “Problem regionalizma,” 383.
50. Dalibor Brozović, “O uvjetima za nastanak i razvoj dijalektalne poezije,” Hrvatsko kolo 5, no. 7–8 (1952): 467.
51. Ironically enough, one of the founding members of the Čakavski sabor was none other than Marin Franičević, who had already by the end of the 1950s begun to revise his earlier dismissal of dialect poetry. See, for instance, his later article “Dijalektalna poezija danas,” in Književnost Jučer i Danas (Zagreb, 1959), 199–212.
52. Gervais, Istarski kanat; Ante Cettineo, Magarčićeve ekloge (Split, 1954); Nikola Bonifačić Rožin, “Šesti kontinent,” Rad Jugoslavenske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti, Odjel za suvremenu knjizevnost, in Milan Marjanovič and Marijan Matkovič, eds., 13 vols. (Zagreb, 1957), 4:235–78; Zlatan Jakšić, Zavitri i spjaze (Brač, 1958); Nikola Pavić, ed., Antologija novije kajkavske lirike (Zagreb, 1958).
53. Although the reappraisal of dialect was not limited to Croatian literature, it does seem to have been restricted to the dominant language of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian. There appears, for instance, to have been no turn to dialect in Slovene or Macedonian, the smaller languages of the federation. In part this can be attributed to the sheer diversity and lack of standardization of dialects within these languages. More pertinent, however, was the minority status of these languages within the Yugoslav federation. Although the post-war socialist government’s nationalities policy recognized the official status of Slovene and Macedonian across the country, the small size of the population of these two republics within the larger Serbo-Croatian speaking country likely continued to fuel anxieties among cultural officials regarding their linguistic integrity. Although I’ve been unable to identify a particular government policy to this effect, it seems reasonable to conclude that these anxieties placed pressure on writers within these republics to hew closely to the standard literary language and discouraged experimentation with dialects.
54. Stanislav Vinaver, “O melodiji našeg govornog jezika,” Mladost 6, no. 5 (May, 1950): 402.
55. Vinaver, “O melodiji našeg govornog jezika,” 410.
56. These included, for instance: Isidora Sekulić, Pisma iz Norveške (Belgrade, 1914); Rastko Petrović, Afrika (Belgrade, 1930); Edvard Kocbek, “Luči na severu,” in Krogi navznoter (Ljubljana, 1977), 5–37; Miloš Crnjanski, Ljubav u Toskani i drugi nežni zapisi (Belgrade, 1997), and Knjiga o Nemačkoj (Belgrade, 1931); Miroslav Krleža, Izlet u Rusiju (Zagreb, 1926). On the significance of travel writing in interwar Yugoslavia, see also: Zoran Milutinović, Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture (Amsterdam, 2011); and Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis eds., Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest, 2008).
57. See, for instance, Aleš Bebler, Putovanje po Sunčanim Zemljama (Belgrade, 1954); Radoljub Čolaković, Utisci iz Indije (Novi Sad, 1954); Živko Milić, Koraci po vatri (Belgrade, 1956); Fadil Hadžić, Budha me lijepo primio (Zagreb, 1955); Mahmud Konjhodžić, Video sam Egipat (Zagreb, 1956); Josip Kirigin, Palma Misira (Zagreb, 1956); and Tišine pod Himalajama (Sarajevo, 1956).
58. Ervin Šinko, “Poezija proze,” Književne novine, July 25, 1950, 2–3; “Jednakost slobode,” Književne novine, August 1, 1950, 2–3; “Ljudi i pisci,” Književne novine, August 8, 1950, 2–3; Zlatko Tomičić, Nestrpljivi život (Zagreb, 1956); Petar Šegedin, Na putu (Zagreb, 1953); Braut, Kruženja u malom svijetu; Bihalji-Merin, Mala zemlja. We might even include the historical travelogues of the sixteenth century Slovene diplomat, Benedikt Kuripečić, and the seventeenth century Ottoman explorer, Evliya Çelebi, both of which were republished in new updated editions by the Sarajevo publishing house, Svjetlost, during this same period. Benedikt Kuripešić, Putopis kroz Bosnu, Srbiju, Bugarsku i Rumeliju 1530 (Sarajevo, 1950); Evliya Çelebi, Putopis: odlomci o jugoslovenskim zemljama (Sarajevo, 1957).
59. David Chirico, “The travel narrative as a (literary) genre,” in Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis eds., Under Eastern Eyes (Budapest, 2009), 38–39.
60. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 2009). For a more complicated account of the imagined boundaries constructed by east European travel writing see Wendy Bracewell, “The Limits of Europe in East European Travel Writing,” in Under Eastern Eyes, 61–120.
61. Bihalji-Merin, Mala zemlja, 40.
62. Ibid., 256.
63. Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome, 288–90.
64. Bihalji-Merin, Mala zemlja, 118.
65. Ibid.
66. Elsewhere in the work the Bihalji-Merins made this observation explicitly, noting that the goal of socialism was not “to force peasants to learn the rhythm of the machines, but also to humanize the machines and the industrial process. The tempo has to be dictated by the people that run the process.” Ibid., 272.
67. The concern with local and regional cultures in Mala zemlja seemed to have an important effect on Oto Bihalji’s subsequent career. Although best known for his works on German modernism and the more canonical movements of European art history, from the mid-1950s onwards Bihalji-Merin dedicated much of his career to promoting the work of Yugoslavia’s naïve or “primitivist” art movement. This work, which grew out of the interwar Zemlja movement and the Hlebine school, sought to marry contemporary European modernist techniques with the style of Croatian and northern Serbian folk cultures.
68. Ibid., 338–39.
69. Ibid., 59.
70. Ibid., 174.
71. Ibid., 234–35.
72. Ibid., 232.
73. For examples of one worldism, see Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy (Washington, 1948); Claude Levi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris, 1952); Glenda Sluga, “UNESCO and the (one) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 21, no. 3 (September 2010): 393–418; Todd Shepard, “Algeria, France, Mexico and UNESCO: a Transnational History of Anti-Racism and Decolonization, 1932–1962,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 2 (2011): 273–97; Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Dream of Peace (New York, 2018). For similar examples of this discourse of a common humanity see Erika Lorraine Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America (Princeton, 2019); Stefanos Geroulanos, “Polyschematic Prehistory at the Dusk of Colonialism: Internationalism, Racism, and Science in Henri Breuil and Jan Smuts” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 69–70 (Spring-Fall 2018): 136–57.
74. Aamir Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 2016), 74–77.
75. See, for instance, Marko Ristić, “Kultura i koegzistencija” in Politička književnost, 149–262.
76. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 85–102.
77. See, for instance, Latham, Michael E., The Right Kind of Revolution: Modernization, Development and U.S. Foreign Policy from the Cold War to the Present (Ithaca, 2011)Google Scholar; Tischler, Julia, “Negotiating Modernization: The Kariba Dam Project in the Central African Federation, ca. 1954–1960” in Bloom, Peter J., Miescher, Stephan F, and Manuh, Takyiwaa, eds., Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (Bloomington, 2014), 159–183Google Scholar; Toner, Simon, “‘The Life and Death of our Republic’: Modernization, Agricultural Development and the Peasantry in the Mekong Delta in the long 1970s” in James, Leslie and Leake, Elisabeth, eds., Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (London, 2015), 43–62Google Scholar.
78. Immerwahr, Thinking Small, 4.