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

18 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

who by chance had fallen into this sad, gloomy small-town society, upon which he hastily and at random poured his abundant knowledge and his vast experience of life... While Vladimir Gacinovié, distrustful and always cautious, would always direct us in a whisper to select secret groups of essentially revolutionary conspiracy, and to Russian revolutionary literature, Mitrinovi¢ opened up to us the horizons of world literatures and taught us mutual tolerance, the need for mutual national tolerance, the great idea of the Unity and brotherhood of the Yugoslav peoples.?7

It was at such gatherings that he would introduce to his friends and associates the new ideas and books that he had come across on his travels. He brought to their attention, amongst others, the works of Walt Whitman, which were later translated by Ivo Andrić. With his gift for foreign languages he was able to introduce the classical literature of Europe to the writers of Young Bosnia. According to Palavestra:

Most of the young writers gathered around him considered Mitrinovi¢ as their intellectual leader and as a kind of teacher . . . Mitrinovi¢ influenced powerfully the writers of Young Bosnia, being an almost uncontested arbiter on many issues in art and literature . . .28

Mitrinovic gave fullest expression to his views on art, the role of the individual and the artist, and the need for a new philosophy of culture and life in a series of articles published in Bosanska Vila in 1913 under the collective title of “Aesthetic Contemplations.” It is difficult to gauge the impact these articles had on his contemporaries. Certainly they make no concessions to the reader. They are the outpourings of an anguished soul and a troubled heart. They are filled with a sense of disgust and contempt for civilisation coupled with a sense of sorrow at the human condition. At the same time these feelings are linked with a sense of wonder at the potentiality of humanity, and an insistence upon the moral responsibility of the individual and the creative artist in particular to work to aid humanity fulfil this potentiality. They reveal the feelings and longings of one who, familiar with the major schools of philosophical thought, condemns them for their inadequacy and impotence to change the world, but retains a faith in the crucial role of ideas in changing the world. This faith in the role of ideas is tempered by the painful recognition of the problems of discovering the right way to act and the impossible task of revealing a single truth for people to follow; and yet there is revealed a Nietzschean faith in the ability of heroic minorities to change the world. The whole is informed