The people living in the Yugoslav Successor States today show an intensely strong interest in Yugoslav-era artistic production about the Yugoslav Partisan resistance during World War II. At almost 400 pages and with fifteen chapters, this volume provides a fine scholarly companion to this popular interest by offering a multi-sided critical insight into the vast Yugoslav and some post-Yugoslav Partisan-themed art—literature, visual arts, and above all films, particularly those with a record number of viewers.

In her effective Introduction, Miranda Jakiša writes that, far from being just a convenient founding “myth” of socialist Yugoslavia, World War II “was the crude reality and experience of the people living on Yugoslav territory between 1941 and 1945” (15). Atrocities and policies by occupying fascist forces and domestic collaborators, such as those ordering the summary execution of fifty to a hundred civilians for each German soldier killed, turned large numbers of Yugoslavs into Partisans. “By the end of war,” Gal Kirn notes, “there were more than 800,000 Partisans organized in four Yugoslav armies, which made it the largest resistance movement” in all of Europe (205).

Although the title puts literature in first place, the volume deals mostly with cinematic production. The officially promoted view of the post- and anti-Yugoslav era has reduced the whole Partisan film genre with its over 200 films to a straightforward tool of simplification and glorification of the World War II Partisan struggle in the service of the post-war socialist state ideology. However, as Ivan Velisavljević puts it, the “‘mainstream’ partisan films are wrongly viewed only as coherent works made to support dominant narratives of the Communist Party” (266). This approach neglects these films' complexities as well as their aesthetic form and that form's own immanent ways of functioning. Therefore, aside from including chapters that focus on genealogies, genre characteristics, or gender issues in Yugoslav Partisan films, this volume gives much space to discussing a number of films—or individual films' aspects—that refute this dominant view. Within even supposedly the most ideologically monochromatic works, by paying close attention to the film language of specific scenes—for instance, Velisavljević’s enlightening chapter on disability and typhus sufferers in Partisan films foregrounds the inclusion—the irreducible suffering, death, and oblivion are not mitigated or diminished by any final victory.

Of fifteen chapters, four deal with literature. This imbalance may be due to the fact that film had broader audiences and thus a more widespread popular influence on the politics of memory in socialist Yugoslavia. Yet, it is a pity that there is no discussion of some of the Partisan literature that belongs to the best and most beloved writings of the Yugoslav period, such as Mihailo Lalić’s novel The Wailing Mountain or the novels of Branko ćopić. Readers less familiar with the field would also have appreciated more space dedicated to major Partisan films such as Veljko Bulajić’s Kozara and The Battle of Neretva or Stipe Delić’s The Battle of Sutjeska. Repeatedly mentioned as a point of reference or contention and with some of their specific aspects analyzed, these best-known films that define the genre itself received not a single overall discussion in the book. On the other hand, foregrounding some of the commonly less-emphasized aspects of Partisan art unearths and reclaims the past once intimately known by many but now largely lost or intentionally eradicated. Miklavž Komelj's splendid chapter illuminates “a meeting of the current and the cosmic” (31) in Partisan poetry, where “cosmic” provides a viewpoint so distant in space and time that it can serve as a proper standpoint from which to launch “a radical confrontation of art with a given time and place” (33). Found in the realm of the universe, the dead, or eternity, alone can “finish my verse” (39) in a revolution that is a continuous process. This cosmic realm also pulsates in a moment of “incredible intensity [which] can never be truly understood and recognized outside [that moment]” (43) in which “ordinary people were great in the service of the great cause” (45).

A partisan called Iztok wrote, “But if he could know // With what warmth our hearts then beat, // That comradeship meant to us more than ourselves, // Maybe he would think differently about us // And would understand our great sorrows” (44). “Knowing” here means knowing and not losing sight of the objective facts of what the fascists did in Yugoslav lands and what the resistance fought against, as well as knowing the subjective motivations of the Partisans themselves. The best chance of survival for many, the resistance attracted others out of idealism and solidarity of the kind that fueled the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The basic historical facts do not have to be glorified or homogenized one way or another. Bracketing them away completely, however, allows a critical work of some of the chapters that, though valuable in other aspects, appears dangerously close to dissolving history altogether into mere discursive, ideological, genre, or narrative forms.

Editors Miranda Jakiša and Nikica Gilić should be praised for the fine work of editing and compiling this excellent and substantial volume. While each chapter has much to recommend it, I would single out as outstanding those by Miklavž Komelj, Barbara Wurm, Gal Kirn, and Nebojša Jovanović. Kirn's superb chapter breaks new critical ground by looking into the Partisans' own, mostly lost, film production created during World War II. Both he and Jovanović elucidate and advance the field by spelling out the underlying critical and political issues at stake in this scholarship. The excellent film analysis in Jovanović’s “We Need to Talk About Valter: Partisan Film and the Anti-Leftist Odium” ends with a crucial and timely call to “replace the bipolar vision [on Yugoslav cinema] with the multifocal optics” (308). Providing such “multifocal optics” on varied Partisan art, this strong volume manages to show not only the past lives of Yugoslav Partisan art, but also what this art “means for us today, and for the future” (202).