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Melancholic Dispossession in the Diary About Čarnojević

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Melancholic Dispossession in the Diary About Čarnojević Melancholic Dispossession in The Diary about Čarnojević Davor Beganović At the end of the First World War, poet Miloš Crnjanski was a corporal in the defeated Austro-Hungarian Army. A Serb from Vojvodina, he was deeply trau- matized by his wartime experience and his political poems written immedi- ately after the war already show the extent of his scepticism towards the new political system that was supposed to replace the old, imperial regime. In these poems, the issue of the possibility of patriotism comes to the fore. It is impor- tant to note that this theme was central to most European literatures dealing with the meaning or meaninglessness of the First World War. The anthological poem that at very first sight could be associated with this strong sentiment is Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen, but there are plenty of other examples too.1 Let us remain with Owen for a moment however. The last verses of his poem read: If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs, Obscene as a cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores of innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To the children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Owen qtd. in Silkin 183 Owen’s lyrical subject obviously speaks to those who from the safety of the island try to persuade the future and present soldiers that the war is something noble and necessary. The propaganda is uncovered here as a lie that does not have anything to do with the actual situation at the front. A sharp dividing line is drawn between binary oppositions of here and there, young and old, soldier and civilian. The alleged main division—between friend and foe, English and 1 In his anthology The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, Jon Silkin collects anthological poems with a focus on Great Britain, but includes some other European poets too. Southern Slavic poetry is completely excluded from this collection. See Silkin 1979. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004353930_009 160 Beganović German is omitted, curiously enough. There is only the deep misunderstanding on the part of politicians who are ready to sacrifice the lives of their subordi- nates for goals that are not entirely clear. The same applies to the high-ranking officers. They very often lead their soldiers, for whose lives they should be re- sponsible, to senseless deaths. Glory is left behind. What remains is slaughter on the fields of Flanders. And the horror of that slaughter is expressed in the grotesque representation of men’s bodies. They are “knock-kneed”, they “went lame; all blind; drunk with fatigue”. There is nothing heroic about them. As a sad testimony to the failed enterprise, they wander on the battlefield, waiting to be annihilated in an act of war which they cannot influence. Captured by hopelessness, only lethargy remains for the soldiers. The description of their situation is admittedly lyrical, but it is impossible to oversee the realistic com- ponent hidden behind the poetic rhythm. All of this is amassed to underline the ugly side of the war in itself, separated from its righteousness. The pessi- mism expressed in the poem is therefore not turned against the concrete ideol- ogy that led to the war, but against the general state of affairs. How can Owen’s situation be connected with the situation in which Crnjanski finds himself? The question of loyalty is certainly different. While Owen is, despite his criticism, a faithful servant of the British Empire, it is not possible to say the same about Crnjanski. “His” empire was actually falling apart. On the horizon a new state was looming to fulfil the alleged longing of all Southern Slavic peoples for a homogenous and coherent configuration in which they would be treated as equal. Such a situation is prone to the pro- duction of split identities. The Serbs living in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, especially on the borderline, had a feeling of uneasiness due to their status of being Orthodox on the territory of a Catholic monarchy. They always looked to Russia as the Promised Land that was so difficult to reach.2 Now they found themselves in an even more precarious situation. In a peculiar metonymic turn they became the enemies of empire because the murder of the heir to the throne was a Serb. This precarious situation in which Crnjanski found himself is well documented in his memoirs integrated in poetry collection Lirika Itake i komentari (The Lyric of Ithaca and Commentaries).3 2 Crnjanski thematised this in his later novel Seobe (Migrations). 3 Gert Buelens comments on this and places Crnjanski in the broader context of European First World War poetry. Nevertheless, his only source is Crnjanski himself. He does not ap- pear to have engaged with Crnjanski’s poetry either. Therefore his analysis falls short of any deeper insight. Here is an example of his superficial approach: “After the murder of the heir to the throne Crnjanski hid for a couple of days in the woods in the vicinity of Hinterbühl, .
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