610
ERNST PAWEL
its leaders, and for the first time openly proclaims Krleza's socialist
sympathies-and his was a sympathy rather than an unconditional
rurrender; he for one continued to distinguish between cures and
panaceas. That commitment, all the more basic for being undogmatic,
informs most of his subsequent work and accounts to a great extent for
the unremitting harassment that followed. His books were automatically
banned as fast as they came off the presses; but
if
persecution distorted
his public image (he was either martyr or agitator), it failed to diminish
his output or its stature. The
Glembajev
trilogy, a family chronicle
tracing
in
intricate detail the reverberations of social upheaval
in indi–
vidual lives, and novels such as
The Croatian God Mars, Banquet at
Blitva, The Return of Fillip Ladinovic
(the only one of his books
translated into English) and
Mind's Edge
are works in the mainstream
of European (or more specifically Central European) literature; their
thrust comes not from Krleza's politics but from the radical humanitari–
anism that shaped his political outlook.
Positions independently arrived at are lonely perches more often
than not. Krleza's wide-ranging concerns and radical bias set him apart
from the very writers of his generation with whom by nature and nur–
ture he had most
in
common (the Germans and Austrians, from the
turn of the century to 1933), and at the same time also increasingly
tended to cut him off from important parts of his public at home.
To the Communist intellectuals of the thirties who dominated the Yugo–
slav cultural scene, Krleza's iconoclasm represented a disconcerting chal–
lenge; what, for instance, were they to make of a professed socialist
who ridiculed the very notion of socialist art, not to mention socialist
realism?
What they were to make of him had, of course, long since been
decided elsewhere. The young brave picked to wield the hatchet hap–
pened to be Milovan Djilas, at that time the Party's culture commissar
and most vituperative polemicist. Djilas attacked with his customary
reckless courage; but for once the victim struck back and in a spec–
tacular battle routed his would-be executioner.
For the sensitive writer, with his moral scruples and liberal pre–
judices, turned out to be a nasty in-fighter. In both his fiction and his
essays he had already proved a formidable polemicist; moreover, he
possessed in abundance what Djilas lacked altogether - erudition, and
a sense of humor. Cunningly paraphrasing Lenin, he lured the unwary
commissar into attacking his own patron saint and then proceeded with
indecent gusto to tear him to shreds.
The breach between the two men never healed and came to have
