Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE EXILE 37

Mitrinovicé took charge of the funeral arrangements, issuing the formal announcement of death, and accompanying the coffin to Highgate Cemetery where Popovic was buried not far from the grave of Karl Marx.

The end of the war left Mitrinovic facing something of a crisis in his life. He was still receiving a salary from the Serbs but his heart was not in the work. “You are even paid for more than you do,” he remarked to Mairet* He was bitterly disappointed by the realisation that Mestrovic’s Temple of Kossovo, the planned monument to the Serbian heroes of Kossovo, would never be acceptable as a symbol of the new Yugoslavia as it would antagonise the Croats and Slovenes. He was disillusioned with the professional politicians and careerists who had, to his mind, distorted the ideals and values that had informed the movement of Young Bosnia. The revealed impotence and eventual collapse of the Blutbund project had left him bitter about the failure of the leading representatives of the cultural and scientific worlds to respond to a call for an initiative for world reconstruction, the apparent inability of the ‘great names’ to cooperate together on a common venture that transcended narrow national interests.

During the months following the cessation of hostilities he spent more of his time down at Ditchling where Helen Soden had rented a small cottage and to where Mairet had returned in 1919 after completing a prison sentence as a conscientious objector. It was a time of anguish and self-doubt, and his physical health suffered also. Stephen Graham witnessed this period and was moved to observe that “he was so disastrously melancholy I feared he would end up by taking his life.”3> After a period confined to bed in a guest house at Ditchling his health and spirits started to recover. He had come to a decision. He would not return to his native land. He would forfeit the promised security of a diplomatic career.3° He would devote his life to the greater vision of a recreated world order. It was not an easy decision to reach, and it was with some trepidation and doubt about what the future might hold that he took it. “I am jumping off into nowhere,” he told Philip Mairet on one of their walks across the Sussex Downs, “No one will even know I am doing it. But this is bravery.”37 To Helen Soden he wrote, “I am determined more than ever and really to act and live according to my real conviction. Let that also give new orientation to yourself and real hope and faith.”3