In 1951, as the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia entered the second year of its radical campaign of de-Stalinization reforms, Književne novine, the newspaper of the Union of Writers, published the following poem by the Croatian writer Dobriša Cesarić:
This evening, while I read Homer, a little bug landed on my book.
and thus found itself,
harmless and small,
at once among the Gods.
Little creature, what are you doing here?
I thought, while she walked the hexameters—
you are not a God, nor a Titan, nor a Hero.
You are only a gentle smile of Mother Nature,
that appears and is already disappearing.
But I quickly recalled that she is a speck
of real life.
And that she is more alive
than all of Olympus,
and the bug at once became great,
and the gods small.
And walking thus among the Gods,
she slowly entered my poem.
Little creature, let it preserve you
as amber preserves those others
who accidentally found themselves in it
while it was yet still resin.Footnote 1
With its humble, contemplative tone and minute, quotidian subject matter, Cesarić's poem would seem to jar with the turbulent historical moment in which it was composed. Three years had passed since the Tito-Stalin split, when Yugoslav leaders rejected Moscow's commands and were exiled from the communist world. In that time the country had entered a period of political, economic and existential uncertainty: how was this small country on Europe's south east periphery going to survive in the bipolar world of the early Cold War? What did it mean to be a communist state at odds with Soviet policy? Was it actually possible to diverge from the model of communism that the Soviets had pioneered? Set against these urgent, world historical questions, this poem certainly seems out of place.
As this paper will demonstrate, however, far from being out of step with its time, Cesarić's poem expressed a wider trend that animated facets of cultural production in the decade that followed the Tito-Stalin split. This trend was characterized by an effort to rescale socialist culture in order to better highlight and celebrate smaller spheres of life. Cesarić's little bug is an unwitting insurgent, not merely distracting the narrator from his serious pursuit of the classics but disrupting an entire cultural order. Its vitality brings into relief the lifelessness of Homer's epic, while its playful wandering across the page seems to gently mock the strictly measured pace of the ancient hexameters. The poem concludes with a wish that this momentary “speck of real life” could be preserved in some way, admitted into the literary canon where it will stand as an equal alongside the classics of world literature. What Cesarić proposed in this unassuming poem was nothing less than a transvaluation of socialist poetics. The shift in the narrator's attention from the Gods and Heroes to a tiny bug was a recalibration of the socialist frame of meaning, casting aside the monumental and the epic that had dominated the aesthetics of Soviet socialist realism, and centering, instead, the small and unassuming as themes worthy of socialist poetry.Footnote 2
Such themes were not unique to Cesarić's poetry but directed several prominent intellectuals working across a range of cultural fields in 1950s Yugoslavia. The Serbian urbanist, Bogdan Bogdanović, for instance, celebrated what he termed “small urbanism,” the minor, incidental or even accidental architectural interventions that gave urban spaces their unique character.Footnote 3 The Istrian poet, Drago Gervais, inspired a revival of poetry written in minor dialects with his 1951 collection Istarski kanat (Istrian canto).Footnote 4 Meanwhile works of domestic travel literature, such as Ivo Braut's Kruženja u malom svijetu (Orbitings in a Small World, 1957) and Oto and Liza Bihalji-Merin's Mala zemlja između svetova (A Small Land between Worlds, 1954), explored the diverse local cultures of Yugoslavia.Footnote 5 Like Cesarić's poem, each of these seemingly unrelated forms of cultural production illustrate a common impulse to redirect the focus of culture towards the marginal, the minor, or the minute.
“Small socialism,” as I will term this aesthetic concern with the smaller scales of life, was first and foremost a rejection of the high modernist paradigm of socialist realism that Yugoslavs had inherited from the Soviet Union. Suspicious of Soviet theorists’ celebration of the grandiose and monumental, in the years following 1948 some Yugoslav intellectuals turned their attention to the minor phenomena of everyday life, the smaller and more intimate spheres of cultural experience and the diversity of local traditions and dialects. This was not so much a single, coordinated cultural movement, but, rather, a common attitude or tendency, one that directed the work of numerous intellectuals across a range of disconnected fields—from literature and poetry to architecture and urban planning.
Small socialism grew out of the self-management reforms that Yugoslavia's leaders embarked on following their break with the Soviet Union. These reforms moved away from the centralized state and command economy of Stalinism and instead sought to devolve political and economic decision making to more local institutions: municipalities, regional bodies, and individual workplaces.Footnote 6 As Yugoslav socialists seized on the early Leninist idea of the “withering away of the state,” they increasingly emphasized the need for decentralization and critiqued what they saw as the bureaucratic dictatorship of the Soviet Union. In foreign policy this ideological shift led Yugoslavs to agitate for the disaggregation of the Cold War superpowers’ influence in order to better secure the autonomy of “small nations.”Footnote 7 Yugoslavia's unique system of self-management socialism was a policy that sought to avoid large-scale, centralized power structures in favor of smaller, more localized institutions of governance. Understood in this way, the conceptual filiation of self-management and the cultural works of small socialism examined in this article becomes clearer.
Yugoslav cultural politics went through a radical period of liberalization during these years of reform. From 1950 onwards, anti-Stalinist critics such as Petar Šegedin, Eli Finci, and Radomir Konstantinović set out to dismantle the doctrinal aesthetics of Soviet socialist realism.Footnote 8 Critical of a policy that forced writers and artists to create according to ideologically correct rubrics, these intellectuals instead called for greater freedom of creativity in order to fully realize the liberation socialism promised. Interwar leftists, such as the Serbian surrealist Marko Ristić and the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, who had previously been marginalized by the post-war regime owing to their modernist sensibilities, quickly ascended to the heights of cultural politics during these years. Under their influence Yugoslav cultural institutions adopted an open, permissive policy toward art and literature, encouraging experimentation and developing connections with both the east and west of the Cold War.Footnote 9 It was within this milieu of radical cultural reform that small socialism emerged as one strand of innovation.
Although scholars have long acknowledged the broader impact the liberalization of the reform years had on the flourishing of Yugoslav cultural life, existing literature has yet to examine the more precise ways in which self-management theory influenced and shaped the open, eclectic, experimental cultural climate of this period. While some scholars trace the roots of Yugoslavia's liberal cultural policy to the influence of interwar modernists like Ristić and Krleža, others attribute it to the country's openness to the west and its intellectual ties to avant-garde currents in France and the US.Footnote 10 In each case, however, the link between this new cultural policy and self-management theory is presented as merely functional: self-management opened a space that anti-Stalinist cultural theorists then set out to exploit for their own aesthetic ends.Footnote 11 What is missing in these accounts, however, is a more rigorous effort to identify the common conceptual coordinates that underpinned both the political-economic reforms and the new forms of cultural production and aesthetic sensibilities of this period.
The following article contends that far from simply creating a more liberal environment for cultural experimentation, the paradigm of self-management also promoted particular sets of concerns and methods that came to animate the work of Yugoslav intellectuals during the reform period. Specifically, I demonstrate that the newfound appreciation for social autonomy and suspicion of administrative power that attended self-management ideology fostered a greater appreciation for the local, the peripheral and the minor in Yugoslav culture. This reorientation prioritized the small-scale of cultural existence, drawing attention to local cultures, regional traditions, and those phenomena of life that had been marginalized under the high modernist visions of Stalinism. This article explores small socialism through three distinct examples: the early theories of the Serbian urbanist, Bogdan Bogdanović, the revival and official reappraisal of dialect poetry in Croatia, and the burgeoning publication of domestic travelogues.
These varied cultural projects were each characterized by one or more set of common attitudes. The first was an ambiguity towards high modernist development, what James C. Scott defines as “a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity.”Footnote 12 This ambiguity was often expressed as a critique of Stalinism, the large-scale of which was criticized as so grandiose as to dwarf the human individual and his/her community.Footnote 13 Second, the greater attention to local cultures and traditions led some intellectuals to reconceive a common Yugoslav culture as a unity of regional particularities, often bypassing or blurring the lines between national cultures. Such a focus on regional particularities served the party's turn to a more integrative Yugoslavism during these years of decentralization and reform.Footnote 14 Finally, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, while these projects reduced socialism's spatial scale to the smaller and the more local, they often expanded its temporal horizon to integrate these local cultures into a longue durée timeline of human civilization. Moving away from the shorter temporal regime of historical materialism, intellectuals began to reference the Medieval, the ancient, and even the prehistoric cultures that had once flourished within contemporary Yugoslavia's borders. This deepened temporality, I suggest, grew from an effort to foreground the contributions of “small” or peripheral nations to a new post-war vision of world culture that Yugoslav intellectuals began to advocate on the international stage. Small nations, it seemed, had long histories.
Towards a Socialism of Human Measure
In the summer of 1948 Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet-dominated Cominform. What became known as the Tito-Stalin split had its roots in a wider set of issues, specifically concerning what Moscow perceived as Belgrade's dangerously independent line on foreign policy in the Balkans.Footnote 15 The split provoked a crisis among Yugoslavia's communist leadership, most of whom had been raised to defer to the Soviet Union's authority as the motherland of socialism. In the recriminations that followed the split, Yugoslavs attacked what they saw as the domineering and even “imperialist” attitude that the Soviet Union adopted towards the new socialist states of eastern Europe. As the dispute intensified, Yugoslavs broadened their criticism to the Soviet model of communism itself. The Soviet Union's arrogant claims to being the “leading nation” of the socialist world, they argued, replicated the top-down, authoritarian structure of the Soviet political system, in which a dictatorial “bureaucratic caste” ruled over a subjugated people.Footnote 16 Both at home and in their dealings with other socialist nations, that is, the Soviets constructed a system of relations that centralized power and subordinated their subjects to the rule of Stalin and his cohort. Breaking with the Soviets’ vision of a socialist international order, Yugoslav leaders concluded, necessitated a rejection of their model of socialism in toto.
By 1949 the rift with the Soviet Union had become a permanent schism. The break prompted Yugoslav theorists to rethink the political-economic model they had imported from Moscow and to pioneer their own distinct path to socialism. Returning to the works of Marx and Lenin, party intellectuals like Edvard Kardelj, Boris Kidrič and Milovan Đilas rediscovered Lenin's early thesis that as a nation moved closer to socialism the state would begin to “wither away.” Unlike the Soviet Union, where state power had become increasingly centralized and expansive, these theorists instead argued that Yugoslavia should move towards a more decentralized, participatory form of governance, a policy that came to be known as “self-management socialism.” In a series of reforms introduced from 1949–53 the Yugoslav leadership decentralized administrative powers to local institutions, expanded participatory forums in the workplace and municipalities, and generally sought to augment the autonomy of society from the state.Footnote 17 Authority that had once been invested in the federal government was devolved first to the constituent republics and then even further to municipal and regional governments.Footnote 18 Enterprises were to be controlled by workers’ councils and, as the decade progressed, economic reformers began to introduce markets as a further means of breaking down the remnants of the command economy.
To be sure, many of these policies were at best only partially implemented. The effective monopoly that the governing party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, continued to hold in most sectors of the state, ensured that much of the decentralization remained inconsequential in practice. Furthermore, as Susan Woodward and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica have demonstrated, although self-management was officially promoted as an effort to democratize the state and give workers real control over the means of production, its primary motivation was budgetary. Cut off from Soviet aid and initially hesitant to become indebted to the west, after 1949 the Yugoslav leadership began to wind down the rapid pace of industrialization. Workers’ self-management, in this climate of austerity, served to decentralize responsibility for cost cutting and layoffs to shop floor authorities, and thereby, in theory, defuse a potential conflict between labor and the state.Footnote 19
Nevertheless, the shift to self-management had an enormous impact on discourses of socialism and modernity within Yugoslavia. One important way this shift was manifested was in the revision of the scales of socialist modernization. Decentralization and devolution of power was, in effect, a policy of rescaling the frames of socialist construction, drawing attention away from grandiose architectural schemes or industrial projects and towards the more intimate transformations of everyday life. Unable to fund the large-scale projects of heavy industry and urban expansion, at least in these early years of reform, Yugoslav communists made a virtue of necessity, tailoring their visions of socialist modernity to the smaller horizons of the local community, the small town or the individual workplace.
Self-management socialism, this article contends, was a Yugoslav iteration of a wider set of scalar reconfigurations that took place globally in the middle-decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 20 Despite our tendency to associate this period with the grand projects of high modernism, throughout the century large-scale visions of social transformation were also continuously challenged by those who sought to preserve or return to smaller, more local and more intimate measures of life. As Daniel Immerwahr notes of this phenomenon:
That many people would be interested in diminishing the scale of social life around the middle of the twentieth century should not come as a shock. The years 1935–65… saw global war, economic depression, famine, violent revolution, the rise of totalitarian governments and the threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation. It was hardly radical to propose that humans had somehow lost control of their own creations.Footnote 21
By the second half of the century, that is, the ground for critically rethinking the scale of industrial modernity was especially fertile. This was true not just for those conservative forces that sought to preserve traditional social relations from the disrupting effects of capitalist modernization but also, as in the case of Yugoslavia, even of some socialist states that sought radical social transformation but remained suspicious of the centralizing paradigm of Stalinism. Although Yugoslav leaders never abandoned the large-scale development projects that characterized high modernism, continuing to invest in expanding industry, modernizing infrastructure, and in monumental, brutalist architecture, these efforts coexisted alongside more modest projects whose scale was focused on everyday life at a local level.
By reading self-management as a project to rescale socialist modernity, what I hope to offer is a reinterpretation of the Yugoslav system as an effort to reconcile the tension between autonomy and centralization that was inherent in revolutionary socialist thought. As a vision that sought to secure the conditions of collective human liberation through the mechanisms of political power, socialism required its advocates to walk a fine line between fostering social autonomy and pursuing state intervention. Yugoslav self-management was one attempt to find a new way of nestling the local community within national, federal, or global structures. As we will see, this rescaling project was often justified through the language of humanism, contrasting the bureaucratic, state-led project of Stalinism with a humbler, more “human” vision of socialism. It is here that the conceptual overlap between self-management theory and what I am terming “small socialism” becomes clearer. Through cultural projects that refocused attention on the smaller, local, or more intimate details of socialist life, Yugoslav intellectuals hoped to correct the balance between autonomy and centralization that had been upset by the centralizing excesses of Stalinism and to craft a socialist culture of “human measure.”Footnote 22
Descaling Urban Space
The refocusing of the scale of socialist construction was perhaps best evidenced in the fields of architecture and urban planning, the exemplary modes of high modernist practice.Footnote 23 To be sure, Yugoslav planners and architects certainly did not abandon the monumentalism and grandiose designs that they had inherited from the Soviet example. Large-scale projects, including hydroelectric dams or the modernist suburbs of Novi Beograd or Novi Zagreb, continued to occupy pride of place in the urban imaginary of Yugoslav socialism well into the 1980s.Footnote 24 Nonetheless, beginning in the early 1950s an alternative discourse, critical of Soviet-inspired urbanism, emerged in Yugoslavia. These anti-Soviet critiques highlighted the problem of scale. In 1952, for instance, the prominent journalist and leading official Vladislav S. Ribnikar, published a critique of the use of Gothic facades on Moscow's skyscrapers. For Ribnikar, these tasteless and anachronistic architectural embellishments reflected the desire to “decorat[e] Moscow with monumental buildings that must manifest the power and force of the state and the ‘greatness and glory of Stalin's epoch.’”Footnote 25 Such a description points to what Katerina Clark has identified as the sublime aesthetics of High Stalinist culture, which were manifested in such tropes as the dizzying verticality of urban structures, the awe-inspiring achievements of long-distance aviation or the sweeping expanse of the steppe or the polar ice fields.Footnote 26 For Ribnikar, such sublime aesthetics spoke to the “megalomania of the Soviet ruling bureaucratic caste” and led, ultimately, to an anti-socialist architecture. While not a rejection of high modernist urbanism in general, Ribnikar's critique certainly gestured towards what he understood as an authoritarian and dehumanizing tendency within monumental architecture.
It was criticism of this sort that prompted a rethinking of socialist urbanism through a smaller, more local, more “human” scale. This was nowhere more apparent than in the early work of the young Serbian architectural theorist, Bogdan Bogdanović. Bogdanović came from a well-known Belgrade left-wing family; his father, Milan, was a prestigious writer, theatre director, literary critic and was close to figures on the left wing avant-garde.Footnote 27 The young Bogdanović earned his revolutionary stripes in WWII when he joined the partisan struggle in Bosnia and became a member of the Communist Party. Following the war, he finished his studies in architecture at the University of Belgrade, and, upon graduating in the midst of Yugoslavia's cultural reforms, became a fresh, critical voice in architectural and urban theory.
Bogdanović's first book, tellingly entitled Mali urbanizam (Small Urbanism, 1958), was a collection of short essays that had been published over the early 1950s. These pieces explored a variety of seemingly disconnected topics but were underpinned by a common methodological orientation towards the problem of harmonizing spatial scale and human experience. Decentering the high modernist perspective of the state, Bogdanović sought instead to explore the signs and structures of urban space through the horizons of the human subject. As Vladimir Kulić has argued, in his efforts to center urban theory on the intimacy of human experience, Bogdanović anticipated the later work of architectural phenomenology.Footnote 28
The concept of small urbanism, which Bogdanović borrowed from early twentieth century Italian architectural theorists, served several interventions that resonated with Yugoslav self-management socialism during the early 1950s. First, it articulated a suspicion of the large scale of modern urban planning, both in the Soviet Union and the west. Small urbanism, that is, intended to bring the built environment closer to the human individual by disrupting the tendency towards larger urban forms. Bogdanović insisted on the importance of these small, artistic architectural interventions that often went unacknowledged in the schemas and grand designs of great urbanism.Footnote 29 The youthful playfulness of small urbanism, he argued, subverted the austere monumentalism of modern cities, populating their uniformly-designed spaces with “accidental, almost naïve” styles.Footnote 30 These small-scale creative interventions, which would ultimately “humanize” the modern city, precisely because they were conceived and realized within a “human scale,” required autonomy from the over-bearing designs of planners and project managers.
Second, small urbanism emphasized the importance of the local characteristics and regional diversity of urban spaces across Yugoslavia. Rather than the homogenizing, standardizing scale of high modernism, Bogdanović argued for an urbanism that sought to preserve and build on distinct regional cultures and spaces. Writing on the problem of landscape, for instance, he criticized the uniformity of modern architecture in Yugoslavia:
Such architecture emerges on the desks of project organizations that often don't have the necessary feeling of responsibility or care for the landscape. Indeed, very often they have never even seen the place in which their buildings will be raised. I think, therefore that it is pertinent today to raise the already determined question: how can we defend ourselves from this architecture of uniformed demands, an architecture which is the same for all landscapes, the same for the diverse, rich, traditions of the regions of our country?Footnote 31
Rescaling socialism's vision of urbanization was essential if planners were to preserve the diversity of Yugoslavia's cultures and landscapes. That the same concrete block of flats or monumental public square could be erected against the background of Ottoman Sarajevo, baroque Ljubljana, or along the muddy streets of a humble provincial Serbian town, indicated a disregard or even contempt for the regional variations of the country. This was not just an argument about different national architectural traditions, but about the myriad local specificities in climate, landscape, building material, and cultural traditions that gave each town and village of the federation its own distinct identity. In insisting that modern architects and planners rescale their projects to this local level, Bogdanović was counterposing his own “humanist” socialism with what he saw as the dehumanizing, grand scale of Stalinism.
Finally, Bogdanović identified small urbanism with a universal or mythic human feeling that stood in tension with his emphasis on the local and the particular. This thesis, in turn, stretched the temporal horizons of his analysis in surprising ways. Unlike the functional, geometric form of modern architecture, small urbanism's sensitivity to local environment subordinated architecture to landscape, thereby evoking a universal “primeval desire” in man, an “architectonic folklore” that spoke to deep, unconscious human yearnings.Footnote 32 This argument was very much influenced by the ideas of surrealism, which had seen a rehabilitation in Yugoslavia during the cultural reforms of the early 1950s. Indeed, Marko Ristić, one of the leading figures of Belgrade's vibrant interwar surrealist movement and a prominent cultural authority in the new era of reform, was an important mentor of Bogdanović.Footnote 33 With his interest in the unconscious structures, primeval desires, and folkloric archetypes of the human mind, Bogdanović's theories clearly drew on the psychoanalytically-informed universalism of the surrealists. In so doing he projected the horizons of a deep history of humanity that asserted the unconscious continuity of man's mythic, “primitive” past with contemporary civilization.
In Mali urbanizam Bogdanović reflected on those spaces that drew man out of the modern world and put him back in touch with this deeper sensitivity for the land. In a short piece on the development of tourist accommodations at Lake Biograd in Montenegro, he noted that the national park served as an escape from contemporary civilization, a kind of “psychological holiday.”Footnote 34 Lake Biograd had such a profound effect precisely because on its shores all “feeling of measure is lost.”Footnote 35 The expanse of the lake's surface, the density of the surrounding trees, the towering mountains all served to draw man out of the modern world. To preserve this otherworldly sense, Bogdanović insisted, the built environment of the space must correspond to this deep, unconscious impulse:
This landscape is outside of our time, it doesn't belong to our civilization and therefore it must remain outside of it. And so also must be the architecture here, which we are involuntarily (nehotično) imagining. Something that will complete this natural fairytale; narrated, woven, brought out in stone by rough peasant hands.Footnote 36
Here we begin to see the counter position of spatial and temporal horizons that informed much of the small socialist culture of the 1950s in Yugoslavia. Spatially, Bogdanović narrowed the scale: it is his insistence on the specificities of the locale, the natural environment and building material, an almost phenomenological approach to the intimate human experience of the space that informed his vision of the national park. Temporally, however, this analysis operated within a deep, expansive scale, identifying unconscious structures, desires, and feelings that he associated with an archaic, primal stage of human civilization. This deep temporality resonated with earlier surrealist arguments that sought to critique or seek an escape from bourgeois modernity in the exoticization of the tribal and “primitive” cultures of Africa, Australasia, or the pre-Colombian Americas.Footnote 37 While Bogdanović eschewed this primitivist language, he undertook a similar conceptual effort, looking to draw on a civilizational unconscious in order to escape from the alienation of modernity. What is significant for my argument here is that this escape was effected through the rescaling of urban space. By orienting towards the local, the regional, and the small, Bogdanović argued, architects and urban planners could tap into, manifest, and even refashion these primal, unconscious desires to better nestle the human individual within socialist modernity.
Devolving Socialist Poetics
A second manifestation of the turn towards the small scales of socialist culture was a reappraisal of literature and poetry in dialect. This reappraisal was most significant in Croatia, where, owing to the cultural differentiation and administrative fragmentation of the territory, the standard literary dialect of štokavian had historically competed with the coastal čakavian and the north-western kajkavian. All three dialects laid claim to a rich literary legacy, whose roots went as far back as the Renaissance, but since the Illyrian Movement of the 1830s, štokavian had become hegemonic among nationalist activists.Footnote 38 The interwar period saw a brief but vibrant return to the use of dialect by several prominent writers, including Vladimir Nazor, Drago Gervais, Miroslav Krleža, and Ivan Goran Kovačić. Although its use was typically limited to poetry, it was also incorporated into the naturalist techniques of social realist writers in order to give their work a sense of regional place.Footnote 39 Despite this common use by left wing writers, dialect largely fell out of favor among communist intellectuals by the middle of the 1930s with the turn towards New Realism. For critics like Milovan Ðilas or Radovan Zogović, who drew on the theories of Georg Lukacs and Soviet advocates of socialist realism, the use of dialect was a “naturalist” error that fetishized empirical description over historical narrative.Footnote 40
New realism's distain for dialect informed the first years of post-war cultural policy in Yugoslavia, as prominent party critics sought to encourage writers in Serbo-Croatian to transcend their locales and to develop wider, Yugoslav horizons.Footnote 41 In an article from early 1948, for instance, the Bosnian critic Eli Finci criticized regionalism in post-war literature, which he warned could lead to an unhealthy revival of “consecrated schemas of the past.”Footnote 42 The focus on regional dialect, style, thematics and ideas, Finci went on to argue, prevented the author from deducing the totality of living reality and hence prevented him or her from moving beyond the level of a local chronicler or a teller of folk stories.Footnote 43 To be sure, however, dialect continued to find its defenders, especially within Croatia, where its proponents included the very prominent writers Vladimir Nazor and Miroslav Krleža. Authors that utilized dialect in their prose, such as Vjekoslav Kaleb or Petar Šegedin, continued to be published, and prominent journals such as Republika still occasionally carried dialect poetry.Footnote 44 Nonetheless, despite this relatively tolerant climate, it is clear that party critics understood dialect as, at best, an inaesthetic relic that would die out as the project of socialist construction and modernization gathered pace. This position was best articulated by the Croatian critic and poet, Marin Franičević.
A native of the Adriatic island of Hvar, Franičević had begun his literary career writing poetry in čakavian. Joining the partisan struggle in 1941, he quickly rose in the ranks of the Croatian communist movement and, after the war, became a leading cultural official for the new regime. With his rise to political prominence, Franičević also revised his earlier literary commitments. In a 1948 piece, “The problem of regionalism in Croatian literature,” he set out his criticism of the use of dialect, specifically taking as his example the fate of čakavian. Although Franičević acknowledged the rich legacy of literary, dramatic, and poetic texts in čakavian from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he largely rejected the interwar efforts to revive the dialect. In his analysis, these efforts stemmed from two inter-related factors: first, the Italian occupation of Istria and Dalmatia following WWI, which inaugurated a period of intense Italicization and threatened to wipe out local Slavic culture; second, the weakness of a “socially tendentious” literature in interwar Croatia, which could have served to mobilize political opposition to Italian rule. These two factors, Franičević argued, fueled a “nostalgia” and a “sentimentalism” for a disappearing čakavian culture. This sentimentalism, however, was politically toothless and unable to offer a vision of national liberation.Footnote 45
The hope for real national liberation came in the summer of 1941 with the anti-fascist struggle. When it arrived, Franičević pointed out, it spoke štokavian. As the partisans sought to unite the Yugoslav lands against the fascist occupation, “čakavian man” was integrated into a “štokavian world.” “To speak about the national liberation struggle in čakavian,” Franičević argued, “is difficult and one would need to find adequate forms for what has actually played out in štokavian.”Footnote 46 With the victory of the partisans and the unification of Croatia within a wider Yugoslav federation, čakavian man transcended the confines of his narrow coastal province and had been integrated into a larger, štokavian culture. In an age of national independence and socialist construction, he argued, the use of dialect “impedes correct development, which leads towards a tighter connection and not towards fragmentation.”Footnote 47 The future, that is, lay in greater centralization and linguistic homogenization, an argument very much in harmony with the high modernist paradigm that animated Stalinist understandings of nation-building and informed the language politics of socialist realism.Footnote 48 Franičević concluded: “[T]o speak to čakavian man today about his future in čakavian already sounds like an anachronism.”Footnote 49 Here spatial and temporal scales were in alignment; as socialism modernized Croatia, accelerated its progress and expanded the horizons of the future, the regional spaces of čakavian would dissolve into the national space of štokavian. Socialist modernization, that is, was the final štokavianization of Croatia.
And yet, far from dying out, in the decade that followed the 1948 split, dialect poetry in both kajkavian and čakavian underwent a revival. In large part, it was the reorganization of cultural life that grew out of the self-management reforms of the early 1950s that altered the fate of dialect literature in Croatia. Not only did the new paradigm dilute the censorial role of the official critic and liberalize the space of publication, but the rescaling of socialism's horizons also fostered a reappraisal of local literary cultures.
In 1952, the linguist Dalibor Brozović criticized Franičević's earlier rejection of dialect poetry. While Brozović, like Franičević, clearly bemoaned Croatia's history of national fragmentation, he encouraged his readers to see the tradition of dialect literature as a consolation for this unfortunate history. Dialect poetry, he argued, was “still a great treasure for Croatian literature, a wealth such that many better and greater literatures do not possess.”Footnote 50 Here Brozović challenged the high modernist assumptions of Franičević's earlier Stalinism. It was not that he disagreed with Franičević's analysis of the conditions that gave rise to dialect literature, but that he rejected its devaluation as a “relic” of a now eclipsed past. The historical processes that had given rise to dialect literature might now have vanished, but these literary “treasures” were a central part of Croatia's literary culture and could continue to shape its growth. National unification under self-management socialism did not have to lead to the stifling of local or regional cultures; these could find a place to thrive within a larger Croatian and Yugoslav cultural framework.
History would bear out Brozović's thesis. By the end of the 1960s Croatia had witnessed a rebirth of dialect literature, with the year 1968 seeing the founding of both the kajkavian journal Kaj, one of Miroslav Krleža's efforts to promote the use of dialect, and the Čakavski sabor, a cultural organization dedicated to the fostering of čakavian literature.Footnote 51 This revival of dialect poetry, however, had already begun during the early years of Yugoslavia's cultural reforms. A year before Brozović penned his reappraisal, the Istrian poet Drago Gervais published his čakavian collection, Istarski kanat. Its largely favorable reception helped to lay a precedent for later writers, and there followed a series of similarly celebrated publications, such as Ante Cettineo's Magarčićeve ekloge (1954), Nikola Bonifačić Rožin's Šesti kontinent (1957), and Zlatan Jakšić's Zavitri i spjaze (1958), all composed in čakavian. Kajkavian, too, saw a revival in the years that followed the self-management reforms, with Nikola Pavić's Antologija novije kajkavske lirike published in 1958.Footnote 52 Further testifying to the reappraisal of dialect was the 1956 decision of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Science to launch a journal specifically dedicated to the study of the topic, the Hrvatski dijalektološki zbornik. Already by the end of the 1950s, then, dialect poetry had undergone a revival that belied Franičević's earlier estimates of its rapid decline. As the vision of socialism moved away from the centralizing and standardizing culture of Stalinist high modernism and began to focus its attention on smaller scales of concern, a space for promoting historically marginalized regional cultures was opened.
Although the reappraisal of dialect was most pronounced in Croatia, it was not limited to that republic. In Serbia, too, there was a—admittedly more modest—turn to rethink the place of dialect and “local speech” in literary production.Footnote 53 In a 1950 lecture before the Belgrade Club of Young Writers, for instance, Stanislav Vinaver praised the melody of the spoken language and called on a new generation of writers to pay closer attention to the regional differentiations of linguistic harmony and intonation. Vinaver had been a prominent interwar modernist, famous for his idiosyncratic translations of the work of Francois Rabelais and Lewis Carroll. As an ardent anti-communist and Serbian nationalist, he had been marginalized within official cultural circles during the period of socialist realism. With the liberalization of cultural policy in the 1950s, however, he was gradually able to rebuild some of his previous public persona as a radical literary innovator and satirist.
In his 1950 lecture, Vinaver contrasted the diverse melodies of spoken language with what he termed the “‘Belgrade novel,’ that is, a purely bureaucratic novel, without any intonation. This is a style in which there is neither anger nor wrath, neither horror nor fear, nor anxiety nor pain, nor frenzy nor disgust…There is none of this, but only a gradual, bureaucratically tired, contrite enumeration.”Footnote 54 Although Vinaver was far from a fellow traveler of the regime, his critique of the socialist realist novel was certainly in keeping with the anti-bureaucratic concerns of self-management reformers of these years. What is significant for my argument, however, is that Vinaver contrasted the stale bureaucratic language of Yugoslav Stalinism, with a return to the diversity of local speech. For him, dialects were “something foundational: softer, warmer or more epic, wordier, sharper, more rugged, looser.”Footnote 55 Attention to dialect, he concluded, brought the writer out of the dry, stagnant world of the state and into the vital realities of everyday life. His literary intervention mobilized the diversity of local, everyday dialects as an alternative to the homogenizing, standardizing language of state power.
The revival of dialect culture in the 1950s in Yugoslavia spoke to the new scalar politics that came to orient the self-management project of this decade. Just as a figure like Bogdanović attacked high modernist urban planning for stamping out local cultures, so too did authors writing in dialect disrupt earlier assumptions of socialism as a centralizing, homogenizing national project. Freed from this high modernist paradigm, poets and critics could turn to regional dialects to subvert, enrich or bypass entirely the standard literary language. The effect was literature that reflected the diversity of local cultures and set out to position them within the horizons of socialist modernity.
Disaggregating National Culture
The rescaling of socialist culture during these years of reform was also expressed in domestic travelogues, texts that explored the diverse local cultures of the country. The travelogue had an important place in Yugoslav literature. During the interwar period it had been a popular genre, especially for modernist writers traveling through western Europe.Footnote 56 While the genre declined in the first years of socialist rule, it underwent a resurgence in the 1950s, most notably with the emergence of the Third World travelogue, in which diplomats, writers, and journalists began to recount their experiences traveling in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.Footnote 57 Alongside these international travelogues, however, Yugoslav readers also began to see the publication of travel writing that remained within the borders of the federation. These included serialized reportage, such as Ervin Šinko's regular column in Književne novine, which analyzed the impact of socialist construction in his native Vojvodina, Zlatko Tomičić's Nestrpljivi život (Impatient Life, 1956), Ivo Braut's Kruženja u malom svijetu (Orbitings in a Small World, 1957), Petar Šegedin's metaphysical reflections along the Adriatic coast in Na Putu (On the Road, 1953), and Oto and Liza Bihalji-Merin's study of Yugoslavia's rich and varied cultural heritage in Mala zemlja (1954).Footnote 58
The growth of domestic travelogues was a curious phenomenon. By its nature this was a genre of reportage that tended to highlight otherness, foregrounding the differences in climate, culture, and language of the places and people it described.Footnote 59 As scholars like Larry Wolff and Maria Todorova have demonstrated, travelogues were central to the construction of east European alterity in the mind of the west.Footnote 60 Even among the Third World travelogues of the 1950s, which were ostensibly composed to highlight Yugoslavia's solidarities with post-colonial states in Asia and Africa, writers were often drawn into exoticizing their subjects. The appearance of domestic travelogues, therefore, poses an unusual question: what did it mean to explore one's own country through a genre of writing that foregrounded the otherness of the cultures described? Significantly, these were rarely framed as national differences. Šinko and Šegedin's works both centered on their own native regions of Vojvodina and the Dalmatian coast, respectively, while Tomičić and Braut's travels remained largely limited to an imagined Croatian national space. Rather, the domestic travelogue explored the local variations among cultures both between and within Yugoslavia's constituent nations and nationalities. In their attention to such local and regional variations, these travelogues rescaled the horizons of socialism in ways that we have already seen in Bogdanović's early work and among advocates of dialect literature.
The most ambitious effort to explore the regional diversity of Yugoslavia through the travelogue form was Oto and Liza Bihalji-Merin's Mala zemlja. Published in 1954, this work was a curious piece of “contemplative” reportage, weaving history and fantasy and replacing the progressive, developmental temporality of historical materialism with fragmentary, non-linear historical vignettes. The book recounted the authors’ journeys from Belgrade through Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and up along the Dalmatian coast. Along the way they reflect on the cultural heritage and distinct histories and characteristics of the peoples of Yugoslavia.
As with the previous case studies, Mala zemlja articulated doubts and anxieties around the monumental scale of high modernism that had characterized the Stalinist project. Although the authors at times celebrated the strides in industrialization and modernization that Yugoslavia was making, they also reflected on the ambiguities of this development. While touring the Macedonian capital of Skopje, for instance, they bemoaned the impending displacement of traditional leather craftworkers by advancing industrialization, noting that these modern products did not have the same gentleness and subtlety of touch as the hand-crafted, artisanal works.Footnote 61 In a scene in Mostar, the authors befriended a young Muslim resident, Hasan, who described the destruction of the neighboring forests: “It was wonderful here once,” he explained to the Bihalji-Merins while visiting the banks of the Neretva on the outside of the town. “Sometimes my father and I would come here on a trip. Giant trees rose up over the wellsprings. In their shadows stood little taverns and kiosks, in which we ate trout and drank fine wine. The Ustaša destroyed all that. They cut down the old trees to make the ground more easily observable because partisans raided from the nearby hills.”Footnote 62 Unlike the “imperial sublime” of High Stalinism that presented the daunting expanse of natural space as a stage of heroic conquest, Hasan's scene evoked a pleasant harmony between human leisure and the natural world. Conquest of nature, when it comes, arrives not in the form of intrepid communist explorers or heroic Stakhanovite workers, but in the destructive forces of fascism.Footnote 63
The ambiguity of high modernism that ran through much of the Bihalji-Merins’ reflections is nicely expressed in the story of the Ðurđević bridge on the Tara River in Northern Montenegro. On a tour over the bridge the authors celebrated its modernity, describing it as “a great richness in this poor land, a symbol of what is possible.”Footnote 64 Although this language certainly recalled the celebrations of industry and modernization that animated socialist realism, the authors also crafted a more complex legacy. In one vignette they acknowledge the partisan fighter and engineer of the bridge, Lazar Jauković, who, during the war, blew up his bridge in order to cut off the enemy's pursuit. Jauković was killed in the process.Footnote 65 Here, the bridge served not as a synecdoche of socialist construction, as it might have in a more doctrinaire socialist realist text, but was rather downgraded to an element of the landscape across which the partisans’ struggle for freedom played out. Humanity was not compelled to inhabit the high modernist scale of industry, but rather industry was rescaled, brought down to size, subordinated to a greater narrative of human liberation.Footnote 66
The cultural plurality of Yugoslavia was a central motif of Mala zemlja. Indeed, as a travelogue, the Bihalji-Merins’ book was drawn towards precisely this diversity and variety of traditions, cultures, and histories. Importantly, this cultural variation was not simply delimited by the borders of the respective national republics, but included the local differences within the constituent nations, contrasting coastal from mountain communities and fishing or farming villages from industrial towns or newly designed capital cities. Given Oto's training as an art historian, the book also highlighted the diverse artistic and architectural legacies that had left their mark across the country, from the overlaying heritage of the Romans, Illyrians, and Byzantines to the Venetians, Bogumils, and Ottomans, the powerful influence of Mithraism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as the myriad of local folk cultures that continued to thrive from village to village. Such a fragmented, kaleidoscopic set of cultures meant that Yugoslavia was not only a “small land between worlds,” but also a small land that contained worlds.Footnote 67
As with Bogdanović's reflections on socialist urbanism, Mala zemlja married a narrowed spatial scale with deepened temporal horizons, presenting the “small land” of Yugoslavia as a dense tapestry of interwoven histories, some of which stretched back to the dawn of human civilization. This effort was most evident in descriptions of those regions of the country in which the historical heritage of past civilizations had survived the ravages of war and conquest. The Bihalji-Merins were, for instance, awed by Diocletian's Palace in the Adriatic town of Split, where they reflected on the town's humble position at the heights of Roman domination.Footnote 68 While Diocletian allowed the Bihalji-Merins to think about the integration of the Balkans into ancient empires, many of their other examples highlighted the region's history of resistance. In the Macedonian town of Ohrid, they noted the city's importance as the capital from which Tsar Samuel of Bulgaria led his resistance to Byzantine expansion.Footnote 69 While passing through the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro, they recalled myths of the local Illyrian queen, Teuta, and celebrated her revolt against the Roman Empire.Footnote 70 During their treks in the mountains of Bosnia the authors mused on the heretical Bogumil sect and their spiritual resistance to both the Byzantine and Roman empires.Footnote 71 Such historical reflections were attempts to identify a common spirit of resistance to empire that could situate contemporary Yugoslavia's anti-fascist struggle and defiance of Moscow in a longer historical legacy.
But these reflections also evoked a deeper, almost primal human history of the kind that also underpinned Bogdanović's notion of “architectonic folklore.” The Bogumils, for instance, offered the Bihalji-Merins an opportunity to reflect not just on the worldly history of political regimes and theological disputes, but also the universal, unconscious desires that inspired human creativity:
We consider the far away face of the Bogumil idols. Neither in this earlier age was this strange species, known as man, satisfied only with naked, expedient forms. Pots for collecting food are decorated with intertwined motifs and signs. Are the spirals of Neolithic man a lesser innovation than the arenas of the Greek amphitheater? The same impulse which created symbols of maternity also created the Venus de Milo.Footnote 72
Here the ruins of the Bogumils served as a muse to evoke a deeper history of humanity, one that stretched back to the very birth of the human species. Drawing parallels between the Bogumils, the pre-Colombian cultures of the Aztecs, and the people of Tiwanaku and even the work of Pablo Picasso, the authors wove this obscure Balkan gnostic sect into a universal history of human culture. Narrowing their focus to the isolated mountains of rural Bosnia allowed the Bihalji-Merins to excavate deeper temporal horizons through which the diverse cultures of this “small land” could be understood as local expressions of a shared human creative impulse.
The Bihalji-Merins’ Mala zemlja and Bogdanović's “small urbanism,” therefore, both demonstrated an interest in narrowing the spatial scale of their inquiries while simultaneously deepening their temporal horizons, reaching back centuries or even millennia to excavate the history of the local regions they examined. The idea of a longue durée humanity was a concern they shared with many cultural intellectuals in reform-era Yugoslavia. It was especially pronounced in the Third World travelogues of this period as well as internationally-facing journals like Književne novine and Republika, which, from the mid-1950s carried articles exploring the cultural heritage and contemporary cultural production of peoples from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While a full account of this phenomena exceeds the scope of the present article, an explanation for these deepened temporal horizons can be found in the new paradigm of cultural internationalism that spread through Yugoslavia during this first decade of reforms.
Breaking with the visions of global proletarian revolution that characterized an earlier communist internationalism, Yugoslav cultural internationalism of the 1950s drew from notions of one worldism and ideas of a common humanity then promoted by international institutions like the UN and UNESCO.Footnote 73 This understanding of world culture had its roots in an earlier concept of world literature that, as Aamir Mufti has argued, relied on a “chronotope of the indigenous,” that is, a paradigm that linked peoplehood, language, and culture to habitation in a place over deep time.Footnote 74 It at once celebrated the global heterogeneity of national and regional cultures and insisted on the universal elements that underpinned all human creativity. From the myriad of cultural, religious, linguistic and national differences the spirit of a common humanity could be distilled.Footnote 75 Such a paradigm resonated powerfully with Yugoslav socialists precisely because it spoke to the same reconfiguration of autonomy and centralization that animated the self-management project. It is little surprise, then, that we see a similar layering of local space and deep time in the work of Bogdanović and the Bihalji-Merins. While highlighting the local cultural diversity of Yugoslavia, these socialist intellectuals simultaneously sought to position their country within the framework of a global humanity.
The rescaling of socialist culture in Yugoslavia during the 1950s was part of a larger effort to recalibrate the measure of social and political life in the post-war world. This was especially true for so-called “small nations,” those states that had up until this point been relegated to the margins of the modern, Eurocentric order. As peripheral states of the Second and Third Worlds sought to more confidently assert their political independence and pursue alternative models of economic and social development, they set out to recalibrate the dimensions of modernity. For some, this rescaling took the form of the high modernism that had animated first German and then, more radically, early Soviet models of development.Footnote 76 Such a scale promised a rapid and totalizing campaign of modernization that could underwrite their newly-won political independence.Footnote 77 Other states, however, wary of the destabilizing and often destructive consequences of such high modernist plans, turned to more decentralized, small-scale campaigns of development. These plans, which sought to preserve traditional ways of life while pursuing modernization, set out new models for situating the local in the national or global scales of political, economic, and cultural life.Footnote 78 Although Yugoslav socialists had initially looked to the high modernism of the Soviets as the only viable path of development, their rupture with Moscow prompted them to reassess the appropriate measure of socialist construction.
This rescaling of socialism's horizons was registered in the cultural production of the 1950s, as intellectuals set out to rethink the framework of socialist culture in the new period of liberalization. As the three case studies examined here demonstrate, this strand of cultural production expressed suspicion, doubt or ambiguity toward the high modernist scales of Stalinism and instead set out to focus their lenses on the small or local. This refocusing of the horizons of socialism in turn led to a recognition and even celebration of the diversity of local and regional cultures and traditions in the country.
These different efforts to craft a small socialism are evidence of the conceptual imbrication of Yugoslavia's political-economic reforms and its cultural production during the 1950s. Just as self-management theory advocated the decentralization and localization of political and economic decision-making, rejecting the command economy and centralized, bureaucratic power of Stalinism, small socialism sought a new measure of culture gauged not by the monumental visions of the state but by the proximities of the human individual and their local community. In so doing these intellectuals deployed a new spatio-temporal discourse that broke with the globalizing, developmentalist discourse of Marxism. Their new discourse at once narrowed spatial horizons while radically expanding its temporal scope; local or regional cultures were no longer to be cast as “anachronisms,” marginal relics of previous historical stages, but were resituated within the longue durée timeline of human civilization or the deep, universal structures of the human psyche. To be sure, many of these small socialist intellectuals did not reject the plans of socialist modernization outright, nor did self-management mean a rejection of large-scale industry. Rather, these cultural projects sought a new constellation through which the local could be better nestled within the larger national, federal, and global scales of socialist modernity.
