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

14 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

... someone who is not an old man, spiritually old, old fashioned, old-Slav. I emphasize that what has been done in literature must be done in art: let the young speak; let them tell us what they have; let them work, let them show their artistic value, their national value.!*

This concern of the Young Bosnians with the spiritual and moral regeneration of their people followed naturally from their belief in the importance of working towards the cultural revival of a suppressed people as a necessary preliminary to any move towards a political revolution. This feeling was expressed by Mitrinovié in an article he wrote for Bosanska Vila (issues 9 and 10) in which he proclaimed:

Our national tasks are very difficult, but urgent. Our enemies are very powerful: however our social, spiritual and physical milieu is too weak for hopes of victory to be close or sure. Our job today is to awaken dormant national energies, to make use of anything that may serve our ends, to raise the irresolute, to goad the lazy, to educate the unconscious, to show the path, and follow it as the best example, to encourage, spur on without pausing, to assemble and organise national energies and differentiate these energies for various great and arduous tasks.!5

In emphasising the importance of the exemplary action of the individual he was echoing not only the Russian populist and revolutionary martyr Chernishevsky, but also the founder of Serbian socialism and one of the first to encourage the Yugoslav ideal, Svetozar Markovic. One of Mitrinovic’s contemporaries, the literary critic Jovan Skerli¢, summarised an important aspect of Markovic’s socialist idealism with the words: “Particularly in small countries, ideas are worth only as much as the men who advocate them.” !®

Such an emphasis on the significance of an ethical morality in the private and public life of the individual naturally led the Young Bosnians to adopt a critical stance towards political parties in general, and the social democratic parties in particular. They were attacked for their lack of principle and internal democracy, and their revealed tendency towards an authoritarian bureaucratization. In his article, “The Democratization of Science and Philosophy” published in Bosanska Vila in 1908 when he was aged twenty, Mitrinovic expressed this feeling forcefully:

The greater part of our activities, particularly in domestic party politics, have not arisen from reasonable and principled convictions, but from spite, envy, egoism, hatred and similar unworthy motives. Caprice often takes the place of principle. We shall never make any fundamental progress as long as the majority of our actions are not undertaken with serious and noble intentions . . . often a naive