Miroslav Krleža

Miroslav Krleža (born July 7, 1893, Zagreb, Croatia-Slavonia, Austria-Hungary [now in Croatia]—died Dec. 29, 1981, Zagreb, Yugos. [now in Croatia]) was an essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright who was a dominant figure in modern Croatian literature.

Krleža trained in the Austro-Hungarian military academy at Budapest. He tried unsuccessfully to join Serbian forces twice, in 1912 and against the Turks in the Second Balkan War of 1913. For this latter action, he was expelled from the academy and subsequently sent to the Galician front as a common soldier during World War I. This firsthand experience of the “Great War” profoundly marked Krleža’s work. Owing to his leftist politics, his works were banned in the interwar period, but his opinions influenced greatly the cultural and political arenas of post-World War II Yugoslavia. His critical stance on Socialist Realism—with its emphasis on the didactic flattening of literature in the service of socialist tenets—proved decisive in extinguishing that mode of writing from postwar Yugoslav letters. Krleža directed the Croatian Institute of Lexicography and became president of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union.

A man of vigorous, powerful intellect and wide learning, Krleža wrote with great intensity, fearlessly criticizing political and social injustices. The strength and importance of his work should be judged from his entire opus—some 40 volumes of stories (e.g., The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall and Other Stories, 1972), essays, political commentaries, plays, poetry, as well as several novels—rather than from any one text in particular. The vast scope of his themes spread out across his texts, which often function as interdependent parts of one organic unity. His novels, such as Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (1932; The Return of Philip Latinovicz) and Na rubu pameti (1938; On the Edge of Reason), have as central characters intellectuals who have lost their power to act in a world characterized by the willingness to enslave one’s mind for material gains or for a sense of belonging. With its first volume published in 1938, his three-volume novel of ideas, Banket u Blitvi, 3 vol. in 1 (1961; The Banquet in Blitva), deals with characters and events in an imaginary eastern European country; it portrays in an allegorical and satirical manner both eastern European backwardness and western European decadence and opportunism in response to rising fascism in the interwar period. Krleža’s dramatic trilogy Glembajevi (1932; “The Glembaj Family”) is an indictment of the decadence of the Croatian bourgeoisie under the rule of Austria-Hungary. He also wrote works concerned with the past exploitation and sufferings of the Croatian peasants—for example, the stories in the collection Hrvatski bog Mars (1922; “The Croatian God Mars”) and the Balade Petrice Kerempuha (1936; “Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh”), which is considered by most to be his single best work.

Krleža’s works are characterized by his relentless commitment to humanism and the freedom of the individual mind against the social and mental confines of either a developed bourgeois society or a dogmatic socialist one. He was arguably the greatest writer of 20th-century Croatian literature.