Original scientific paper
The Role of August Cesarec and Miroslav Krleža in the Creating of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
Zorica Stipetić
Abstract
An enormous, though mostly fragmentary and occasional, literatury research on writers M. Krleža and A. Cesarec does not necessarily mean the evaluation of their complete activity; on the contrary it had omitted, most regrettably, the ideological and political content of their work, while they were the two most emminent political writers; their influence was incontestably great, but the direct political activity was even more important. This essay follows the line of describing those already cited components of their activity, their entering the struggles to create and develop the field of action of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, in the period between the end of 1918 to the end of 1920. In the eve of World War I, Cesarec and Krleža had both quite understandably grown out of the movement of "Yugoslav National and Revolutionary Youth", to join then, after the October Revolution and towards the end of 1918, the nucleus of left social-democrats in Croatia who had been trying to create a united Yugoslav Communist Party. Besides, both Cesarec and Krleža became members of the illegal communist organization (which had been started by returned communists, ex-prisoners from the Soviet Russia) which had been working together with the legal worker class organizations; their aim was to incite revolutionary ideas in worker movement as well as in different social strata, which would then lead to bursting out of Yugoslav revolution and making it become a part of world-wide revolution. Thus, at that time, the ideological and practical preparations for the revolution had become the basic incentive to both Cesarec and Krleža. Though engaged, active revolutionary workers with their daily political tasks, their activity is by far the most important in the sphere of the ideology of the movement. The Croatian "milieu" had been without an intellectual socialism tradition while socialism had by tradition continued to be represented as counter - and anti-cultural ideology; so Cesarec and Krleža by their exceptionally great written work pointed to the deeply humanistic and completely cultural meaning of the socialist revolution, and had been doing that at the time of strong anti-bolshevik campaign. Trying to inject the revolutionary ideas into the social conscience they were pointing to the false, mythic and archaic constituents of nationality ideology as well as to the reactionary basis upon which Yugoslavia was being built.
Their negation attitude towards the false values of tradition also represented the basis for their re-valuation as well as new creative sign-posts upon which the large front of left intelligency had continued to grow. Meanwhile, they were the only creative representatives of that intelligency. Regarding the problem of the movement, it could be said that Cesarec and Krleža had been considering and describing a number of actual social problems, and although they had not given a wholesome nor very often a right answer to them, their diagnosis of the essence of society had been the right one. Analyzing Yugoslav problems they tried to show that revolution was an authentic and thorough solution for a social crisis; that, together with a true susceptibility of the problem of Croatia had made them surpass their contemporaries who had been declaring themselves the representatives of national interests. However, regarding the ideological and political level of their questions and answers, it could be remarked that they never abandonned the limits of the movement which again had a number of structural weaknesses. But that, by the power of their creating, they were exceptional characters not only of the movement but of the society as a whole. Their part in creating the Communist Party of Yugoslavia can't be easily passed over when analyzing the history of the Party, just as it should not have been forgotten in the analysis of their written work.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
219280
URI
Publication date:
29.12.1973.
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