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age, will have to take over; among the old guard only Svetozar Vuk–
manovic and Dr. Vladimir Bakaric seem equipped to deal with problems
of this magnitude. (Bakaric, secretary of the Croatian CP, is a trained
economist of pre-World War II vintage; Vukmanovic, a fifty-four-year–
old Montenegrin, is a supremely able organizer who managed that rare
feat, a transfer of talent from conspiracy and Partisan warfare to eco–
nomic development. Both men were constantly at odds with Rankovich's
Serbian Secret Service.)
Then there is Miroslav Krleza.
Krleza has been a Great Classic for so long that to come face to face
with him, very much alive and as busy as ever, is something of a shock,
rather like walking into the offices of Gallimard and running into
Victor Hugo.
Krleza has no use for either Djilas or technocracy and is most out–
spoken about his likes and dislikes, has been outspoken for the past
half-century in a steady stream of plays, novels, essays and poems that
together constitute the most impressive body of work in twentieth-century
Yugoslav literature. That he is all but unknown in the West (though
he has been nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize) reflects in part
the ignorance and provincialism of incestuous intellectual cliques; yet
his own ambiguities and conflicts, which extend the range of his work,
also contribute to his relative obscurity. He is a relentless, meticulous
realist who created his own myth and then proceeded not only to de–
scribe it but to live in it with all the furious passion of a visionary, while
simultaneously protecting - perhaps overprotecting - body and vision by
a stance of ironic detachment that is part of his heritage - the illegi–
timate heritage of a Croat born and raised in the ambivalent twilight
culture of the dying Habsburg empire.
A living classic, then; but in the years between the two World
Wars he had been oracle and revelation as well. Even his enemies
conceded him stature; the rest regarded him as Yugoslavia's foremost
literary figure. Yet his books were banned, his plays could not be per–
formed in public and only an occasional essay would slip past the
censor in more or less castrated form. The underground circulation of his
writings might have been sufficient to maintain his artistic reputation;
persecution, however, turned him into a legend, a black cloud on Par–
nassus hurling bolts of savage wit into the vale of idiocy below.
So that going to see him now raised ghosts.
The boy who first converted me to Krleza was sixteen and a poet;
he died at twenty-one in an assault on a Gestapo prison, leaving
