Miroslav Krleza: A Croatian Writer Against War

When he died in 1981 at the age of eighty-six, the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza was already recognized as Yugoslavia's greatest twentieth-century author and a national figure of towering stature. He excelled at poetry, fiction, drama, memoirs, essays, cultural criticism, literary theory, and political polemics, and wrote prolifically and innovatively in all these forms and genres. His collected works run to more than twenty-seven volumes. The literature about him in Serbo-Croatian is vast. (For a study of Krleza in English, see Ralph Bogert, "Miroslav Krleza (1893-1981)" in European Writers: The Twentieth Century, ed. George Stade, Vol. 11 (N.Y.: Scribner's, 1990), 1807-34.)

Krleza was a Marxist, but he was also a modernist and a determined opponent of Stalinism, socialist realism, and all kinds of dogma limiting artistic freedom. He defended the Serbian surrealists and the right of authors to make their own personal interpretations of reality. After a stormy relationship with orthodox Yugoslavian communists for many years, for the last three decades of his life Krleza enjoyed a close relationship with his old friend Marshall Tito (who was almost his exact contemporary). He was at the center of the cultural life of his country, started many literary magazines and editorial projects, and founded the Yugoslav Lexigraphic Institute, where he would edit ten multi-volume encyclopedias. Until the end of his life, he maintained his own critical and ironic attitude to society and its dominant ideology. Above all, he considered himself a playwright (he wrote and staged children's plays when he was eleven) and is the author of dozens of dramas written between 1914 and 1970.

Despite all these accomplishments and his acknowledged stature in Croatia, Krleza occupies no place at all on the Western stage and remains almost unknown in the world of Anglo-American theatre studies. The reason is perhaps that Krleza was very much a Hapsburgian by birth and education, and his art is a product of his experiences as a member of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was obsessed with the dissolution of the empire in all its political, social, and psychological ramifications and returned to the subject again and again throughout his career. It might be thought that Krleza's works are too Central European (a delimiting concept that the writer himself rejected) to be accessible to readers and theatregoers unversed in the history and culture of that period and place. But Krleza's contemporaries, Kafka, Musil, Svevo, and Kraus, have become well known, despite, or perhaps because of, their Central European baggage. Language and issues of translation may play a part here, and in the case of Krleza's dramas, theatre always poses special problems of adaptation and assimilation.

There is one area of Krleza's art, however, that can speak to us directly: his writing about war and the military. This is particularly true of Finale, based on Krleza's own experiences of World War I but cast in an expressionist form that synthesizes the horrors and idiocies of all wars. Krleza (who spoke and wrote both Hungarian and German) studied on a scholarship at the military academy in Budapest and then volunteered to serve in the Serbian army in 1912. His military career was cut short when he was accused of being an Austrian spy and deported from Serbia. Then he was arrested by the Austrians and stripped of his officer's rank. During World War I he was sent as a private to the front, where—although he never saw battle—he fell ill and came home to Zagreb in 1917.

Krleza's experiences in World War I made him a pacifist and anti-military activist. In his poetry, plays, and novels of the 1920s, he castigates the war and those responsible for starting it, while reserving his compassion for its many victims. In his collections of stories, The Croatian God Mars (1922) and A...