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August Cesarec: The national question and our missions
- Central European University Press
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AUGUST CESAREC: THE NATIONAL QUESTION AND OUR MISSIONS Title: Nacionalno pitanje i naši zadaci (The national question and our missions ) Originally published: Borba, organ Nezavisna radničke partije Jugoslavije; a series of four articles published in August and September 1923. The excerpt is the third article, published on 30 August 1923 under the sub-title Osnovni naš nacionalni stav: federalizam Language: Croatian The excerpt used is from August Cesarec, Izbor članaka, ed, by Nusret Seferovi ć (Beograd: Kultura, 1962), pp. 30–35. About the author August Cesarec [1893, Zagreb – 1941, Zagreb]: writer and publicist. As a gymnasium student he joined the Nacionalistička Omladina (Yugoslav Nationalistic Youth), a radical revolutionary group of young Serbs and Croats advocating the idea of unitary Yugoslavism. In 1912, he was sentenced to three-year imprisonment for taking part in the assassination attempt of the Croatian ban Slavko Cuvaj (see Franjo Rački, Yugoslavism). In 1915, he went to occupied Serbia. In 1918, he joined the Socialist Party, and in 1920, was linked to the Communist fraction after the dismantling of the party. During the 1920s and 1930s, he became, along with his friend Miroslav Krleža, the most prominent Croatian left-wing intellectual. Simultaneously , Cesarec spearheaded the ‘socially engaged’ literary project, which ultimately led him to part ways with Krleža, who advocated the autonomy of art. He spent three years in the USSR (1934–1937), and published an enthusiastic account of Soviet life. Shortly before the German attack on Yugoslavia, he was imprisoned together with other Croatian communists, and was finally put to death by the Ustasha regime in July 1941. In socialist Yugoslavia, Cesarec’s intellectual contribution was perceived to be in line with that of Krleža, which had strongly contested Croatian ‘petit-bourgeois’ nationalism, and advocated the national emancipation of Croatia within a socialist South Slavic federation. However, after the 1990s, based on some of his works from the late 1930s which strongly emphasized the notion of Croatian national identity, Cesarec was reinterpreted by some critics as an advocate of an independent socialist Croatia. Main works: Đački pokret [The students’ movement] (1912); Sudite me: ispovijed siromaha [Put me on trial: the confessions of a poor man] (1925); Careva kral- AUGUST CESAREC: THE NATIONAL QUESTION AND OUR MISSIONS 427 jevina: roman o nama kakovi smo bili [The emperor’s kingdom: the novel of what we were] (1925); Stjepan Radić i republika [Stjepan Radić and the republic] (1925); Zlatni mladić i njegove žrtve: roman o svijetu na stranputici [The golden youth and its victims: a novel about the world on the side-track] (1927); Tonkina jedina ljubav [Tonka’s only love] (1931); Psihoanaliza i individualna psihologija [Psychoanalysis and individual psychology] (1931); Bjegunci [Fugitives] (1933); Današnja Rusija [Today’s Russia] (1937); Novele [Short stories] (1939); Sin Domovine [The son of the homeland] (1940). Context In the aftermath of the First World War, the newly founded Yugoslav socialist movement advocated the idea of a unitary Yugoslav nation. This was partly motivated by the early post-War Comintern policy, aiming at an international proletarian revolution in a politically unstable Europe. However, it was also embedded strongly in the ideology of pre-war Croatian and Serbian socialist parties, as well as that of the left-wing faction of the ‘Yugoslav Nationalist Youth,’ a South Slavic youth movement from Austro-Hungary that advocated the national-revolutionary idea of radical Yugoslav integralism. All these factions considered the unitary Yugoslav nation as a precondition for south Slavic social emancipation. Along the lines of the Comintern agenda, the party labeled emerging non-Serb national identities as the invention of a reactionary bourgeoisie, thus focusing exclusively upon the notion of revolutionary class struggle. This position was even more radicalized after the break up of the socialist movement and the emergence in 1920 of an independent Komunistička Partija Jugoslavije (Communist Party of Yugoslavia , hereafter CPY), led mostly by the adherents of the ex-‘Yugoslav Nationalist Youth.’ The members of this group claimed that the process of Yugoslav national unification had been achieved, and hence they demanded the immediate start of socialist revolutionary activities. Due to its support of unitarism , and due to the efficient administrative measures of the government in curtailing communist agitation, the party, which had emerged as the strongest anti-regime political force in the chaotic conditions of the initial post-war years, would diminish into a minor political force by the early 1920s. The party was forced to abandon unitarism under the impact of new directives...