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

MUNICH 31

of the movement, on the significance of the potential contributors to the Yearbook, and on such prophets as Solovyov and Dostoyevsky. He was also planning a series of lectures which he hoped to present in Berlin, prior to a trip to Russia with Kandinsky where he planned to lecture on the theme of a “pan-Europe.” Trips to London and Paris, Serbia and America were to follow the Russian tour.

In a letter to Kandinsky of June 25th 1914 he begged the artist to come up to Munich for a couple of days in order to discuss these plans. Informing Kandinsky of the progress made in relation to the Yearbook, he continued:

...1 shall write myself to Mr. Volker directly and with confidence because it seems to me that “die Siderische Geburt” is worthy to be the true religion of a pan-Europe. But I ask you also to write to him about the movement; not to lose too much time over it, but all the same to do it; for I think that Mr. Volker, with you, with Chamberlain, Papini and Braun will be the principal thought-bearers of the movement . . . it is necessary that you support me to these gentlemen; Volker, after all, does not know me at all...I am so completely nameless that I cannot command the respect of anybody, at least in Europe.

“Volker” was the pen-name adopted by a young German, Erich Gutkind, who had published in 1910 Siderische Geburt (Sidereal Birth). Kandinsky had been heavily influenced by this book, had corresponded with the author, and had in turn introduced Mitrinovi¢ to the work. It had an immediate and profound impact on the young Serbian. In a letter to its author of June 27th 1914 he wrote:

. Mr. Kandinsky has given me a picture of you which truly inspires reverence .. . He has drawn my attention to Siderische Geburt and has strongly recommended it. This book, dear sir, has to my joy become a book which supports and uplifts me...I am indebted to Sidereal Birth as to hardly any other of my pan-human experiences, and was deeply moved on reading it and transfigured much as I was with the first Kandinsky exhibition which I experienced . . .

Sidereal Birth has been variously described as “a curious work . . . (which) consists of a large helping of mystical word salad, for the most part unintelligible but with occasional passages conveying at least a semblance of a meaning to the reader,”!5 and as “a hymnodic rhapsody to a new age, written with little attention to organisation or system, but with an exuberance of poetic imagery.”!¢ In fact, the book revealed certain similarities with the theology of Solovyoy: the same kind of intuitive mysticism, the vision of the history of the world as a single cosmic process, the recognition