YUGOSLAV
REPORT
609
behind him a plaque with his name on a tree-shaded Belgrade street.
His
Krleza was the synthesis of poetry and revolution, of Slavic fervor
and Western aesthetics, a romantic realist equally uncompromising in his
literary standards and his political idealism. What seems remarkable, at
this remove, is that our evaluation reflected not only our search for God
and father but also a sound measure of objective standards. In those
days, to be caught with a Krleza novel almost inevitably meant jail and
a beating at the very least, a risk not conducive to dispassionate criticism.
And yet, on rereading him in middle age and at a time when anything
goes and nothing matters, I still agree in essence with our youthful
judgment.
Born in 1893, a Croat raised to be a soldier in the Austro-Hungari–
an army (he graduated from the Honved Military Academy in Buda–
pest), Krleza first lived through the long moment of graveyard quiet
in which smoldering decay and corruption built up to disaster - the
collapse of the empire, the death of faith and the abortion of the
brave new world.
Galicia,
his first play, written after the end of the war, already
sounds the major themes and variations. Set in an Austrian base camp
at the Russian front (where Krleza himself spent the war years), it
centers on a Croatian officer who, acting against his conscience, carries
out orders to execute a peasant woman accused of having insulted the
wife of an Austrian general and then expiates his guilt and moral
responsibility in an orgy of remorse, murder and suicide that settles all
scores even if it leaves open a number of questions. Despite expressionist
trappings and an excess of both rhetoric and gore the drama is no or–
dinary period piece; the issue of individual guilt aside, Krleza's vision
of the military mind in action and of the boundless potential for cruelty
inherent in power at any level seems, in fact, both uncomfortably topical
and gruesomely prophetic. Moreover, for all its fustian and polemics it
already has the vigor and sparkle characteristic of Krleza's style.
Characteristic, too, was the fate of the play - banned one hour be–
fore its scheduled opening. This in 1920, i.e., no longer in Austrian–
occupied Agram but in independent Yugoslav Zagreb. The political
changes turned out to have been superficial, a matter of certain ad–
ministrative readjustments; the end of the Habsburgs and the dismem–
berment of their empire proved mere symptoms of a plague already
far beyond any such palliative measures, and Krleza, though certainly
in favor of independence, did not mistake it for an end in itself.
Golgota,
his first play to reach the stage, opened in 1922. In terms and technique
not unlike the early O'Casey, it deals with a strike betrayed by one of
