Miloš Crnjanski (1893-1977) was a famous Serbian writer. His works form an invaluable part of Serbian 20th-century literature. Just like his entire life, his creative work in the form of poetry and prose was marked by two key elements: wanderlust and existential drama.
At the Edge of Life
Crnjanski was born in Csongrád (a town in Hungary he referred to as “Siberia for clerks”), where his family lived quite humbly. Later, he moved to Timisoara, where he graduated from primary and secondary school, played football and wrote his first verses. In 1912, he relocated to Belgrade and later also to Rijeka. In Vienna, he began his studies of philosophy (1913-1914). As he was still there at the onset of the First World War, he was forced to join the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought in battles in Galicia and Italy on the Austro-Hungarian side. Although he managed to escape death, he was constantly surrounded by war atrocities.
At the end of the Great War, in 1918, Crnjanski went back to Belgrade. There, he enrolled in literary studies and became an editor of a periodical titled Dan. The first books he wrote portrayed the nonsense of wartime suffering and the tragic division of the young generation. A warrior’s return to his homeland is the central motif of his poetry collection Lirika Itake (The Lyricism of Ithaca) published in 1919. Therefore, it can be argued that Crnjanski was the author who laid the foundations of the early avant-garde movement in Serbian literature. This can be illustrated by a sentence he wrote in "Objašnjenje Sumatre" (The Explanation of Sumatra) in 1920: „ The world is yet to hear the terrible storm looming above our heads while the earth beneath us shakes – not due to political circumstances nor literary dogmas but due to life. Those will be the dead reaching out! They should be avenged.” The war motifs and indignation due to war carnage have also shaped the tone of his poetic novel Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (The Diary of Čarnojević) from 1921, which set a paradigm for reshaping tradition and fixed patterns that used to dominate Serbian novels of the time.
At the Edge of Poverty
For a brief period, Crnjanski travelled around Europe. At the time, he wrote about Tuscany with aesthetic exaltation. Upon returning to Belgrade, he married Vida Ružić, who remained his life-long companion. After graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy in 1922, he started teaching at the Fourth Belgrade Grammar School. Simultaneously, he published opinionated articles in distinguished periodicals, such as Politika, Vreme, etc. His articles published in the weekly periodical Ideje caused fierce literary and political debates as they were coloured with Radical Modernism.
Crnjanski’s professional journey further led him into the diplomatic service for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He worked in Germany (1935-1938) and Italy (1939-1941). When Yugoslavia took part in the Second World War, he was evacuated from Rome to Lisbon, across Madrid, and later he got to London, where he stayed until 1965 when he returned to Belgrade.
Crnjanski had a harsh life in London, as he had lost all his sources of income. Even though he had a university degree and spoke five languages (Hungarian, German, French, Italian and English), he spent some time working in a bookstore, delivering Christmas cards and as a bookkeeper in a shoe store. By the 1950s, he became a London-based correspondent of El economist, an Argentinian periodical published in Buenos Aires. Despite the hardships he endured, he still wrote prolifically. At the time, he wrote Roman o Londonu (A Novel on London), a powerful cosmopolitan work on exile taking place in London, with a Russian protagonist. He also wrote a masterpiece Druga knjiga Seoba (The Second Book on Migration) and a poetic odyssey Lament nad Beogradom (Lament over Belgrade). As a political emigrant, Crnjanski spent some time completely away from the Serbian literary scene. In the 1950s, he published some of his writing in periodicals of emigrants in America, Canada and Germany. However, when he returned to Serbia, some of his books had already been published there, including Seobe (Migration), Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (A Diary of Čarnojević), Konak (Lodging), Itaka i komentari (Ithaca and Comments) and Druga knjiga seoba (The Second Book on Migration).
Therefore, to Crnjanski, life in emigration represented a drama on cultural marginalisation, which had a powerful impact on his creative work. The feeling of being a foreigner affected his inner self, with the central figure in his works being a man in a foreign place. He portrayed emigrants, outsiders and people living on the margins of society. With the power of extraordinary literary language, Crnjanski managed to show that a man at the edge of existence could still possess a shine of true greatness. At the same time, Crnjanski’s genius is reflected in the fact that his works enable us to truly feel the spirit of the epoch we still live in (for instance, neoliberalism in Roman o Londonu).
He was finally able to live his elderly days peacefully in his homeland. Soon after he returned from his 20-year-long exile, his Sabrana dela u 10 tomova (Collected Works in 10 Volumes) were published in 1966. In 1971, he received the distinguished NIN Award and the Most Read Book of the Year Award for Roman o Londonu. He died at the age of 84 after he refused to eat and take his medication.
His widow gifted his complete legacy by testament to the National Library of Serbia. In 1993, the Miloš Crnjanski Foundation published a critical edition of his works.