YUGOSLAV
REPORT
611
far-reaching consequences for both. Its immediate effect was to accentu- .
ate Krleza's isolation to the point where he found himself cut off from
the Communists, and it seems at least plausible to assume that this is
what kept him from joining the Partisan movement and taking to the
woods when the time came. There may, of course, have been other
reasons as well ; but the fact remains that Yugoslavia's foremost left–
wing writer and intellectual sat out the war in Zagreb while Tito's
Partisans appointed Vladimir Nazor, a patriotic octogenarian rhymster,
as their poet laureate.
Zagreb, where Krleza was born in 1893 and has been living with
interruptions ever since, is to this day a sleepy provincial town irretrieva–
bly lost in the brackish backwaters of nineteenth-century Austria. Imita–
tion grandeur has given way to shabby functionalism, egalitarian but
somehow still striving to appear genteel. The stolid burghers turned into
pseudoproletarians cling to their briefcases and pretensions, and the
dismal hulks of overcrowded tenements preserve at least outwardly the
style of a bygone era, an ornate rococo crossed with excremental Habs–
burg.
Krleza's office looks out on a pleasant, quiet square fittingly named
after the nineteenth-century bishop and educator Strossmajer, sur–
rounded by buildings in Vienna Imperial and by the solidly bourgeois
facades of what had once been upper-middle-class apartment houses.
From behind one of these false fronts, in a cavernous structure with
mildewed walls and marble stairs worn round by at least four genera–
tions, Krleza now runs an ambitious project, the publication of Yugo–
slavia's first multi-volume encyclopedia. No sinecure, but a full-time job
into which he has thrown himself with his customary zest (though
without neglecting his fiction: he is still working on a nine hundred page
trilogy of which the first part has already appeared in print).
There are dangers in revisiting the idols of one's youth, and writers
should in any case be read rather than cornered in the flesh; but Krleza
is the exception. He is not disappointing. Massive, blunt, yet at the same
time incongruously kind, a cherubic Jupiter with an enormous head
fringed by recalcitrant tufts of white hair, he has the vigor and enthusi–
asm of a man half his age. His large, cluttered office is an intellectual's
workshop devoid of fancy touches; no management consultant or interior
sterilizer has had a hand in it, and even the impressive hand-carved
desk is clearly functional, all but buried under a mess of books, papers,
cups and saucers, a coffee maker. Everything about ·the man conveys a
lack of pretense, a spontaneous warmth which rarely appears in his
work; but it is his charm that comes as a shock. Charm seems im-
