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

42 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

At the end of November Pa&ié sent a reply to the London Legation: “Let Mitrinovié work as he proposes.” Mitrinovié, for his part, took a short course in Spoken English at the Berlitz School of Languages in order to prepare himself for the public speaking engagements that he anticipated would accompany his new commission.

For Mitrinovié the cause of Serbia and Yugoslavia could no longer be confined to a narrow nationalism. The development of his ideas with the Young Bosnians, expressed most fully in “Aesthetic Contemplations,” had prepared the ground for his involvement with Kandinsky, Gutkind and van Eeden in the movement for a new European order. Now, with the outbreak of hostilities there came the impetus to join the two strands together: the fate of his homeland with the future development of humanity as a whole. This concern to relate the specific to the general, the micro to the macrolevel, was one of the key features of his approach to the world and to life. The true significance of a single part could be appreciated only within a context that embraced an organic view of the whole, within which the single part had a functional role to perform. In an article published in September 1914 he addressed the question of “Who should possess Trieste?” Writing as the Secretary of the “Serbo-Croat Organisation for Political Union” he combined a detailed analysis of the conflicting claims and interests of Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia and the embryonic Balkan Federation with a perspective which stressed that “the question of Trieste should be settled not in the interest of one nationality or the other, but in’ the interest of the peace of the world.” He argued that “in the independence and neutralisation of these two important towns (Trieste and Constantinople) lies the only way of achieving a permanent and peaceful settlement.” Such a settlement, he suggested, would enable “the great Southern Slav state of tomorrow” to fulfill its historic function as “the connecting link between the New Europe and the New East.’

During the first few months immediately following his arrival in Britain Mitrinovi¢ was very much taken with the idea of going to America to further the aims of the Blut-bund and continue his work on the preparation of the proposed yearbook, Aryan Europe. He had heard that the wife of the Serbian foreign minister was travelling to America from Nis on Red Cross business, and he wrote to Slavko Gruji¢, the minister, offering his services as a secretary on November 19th 1914. In his letter he informed the minister of his project with regard to the yearbook and stressed the importance of propaganda work for the Yugoslav cause in America:

Having fled from Munich here, firstly to be of use to the Serbian Legation here, and secondly to maintain myself materially while the war lasts, I have assisted