Cultural Marxism in Practice: Yugoslav Left Intellectuals between the Wars and the Parties

Mario Kikaš, Nord Universitet

The cultural and political life of interwar Yugoslavia was strongly marked by the almost quarter of a century-long debate among literary intellectuals linked to the socialist movement and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav Conflict on the literary left (1928-1952) included significant figures of, dominantly, Serbian and Croatian literature of the first half of the 20th century. In short, it was a debate mainly on literature’s social role and autonomy of literature in a turbulent period of the 1930s and 1940s characterized by the rise of fascism in Europe and the consolidation of the “Stalinist cultural world.” Similar discussions simultaneously occurred among French left-leaning writers and German-speaking Marxist intellectuals. Considering this, the dominant interpretative approach to the debates of Yugoslav “cultural Marxists” focused either on the nuances of the aesthetic and literary arguments in the debate or on the dynamics in power relations between the Moscow-centered Communist International and the local Communist Party. They provided infrastructure, established the political line, and set a normative framework for vibrant interwar intellectual life and debates among Party members and fellow travelers. The paper aims to read this long debate beyond dominant interpretations of political history and literary studies by asking the question: what kind of social knowledge these debates produced, considering interwar Central Europe's broader sociocultural, political, and intellectual dynamics? Secondly, focusing on the normative aspects of the discussion that are often overlooked in secondary literature, my more specific question would be: How did this particular debate lay the foundations of future literary and cultural policy in “new” and “Marxist” Yugoslavia?

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 173. Power and Normativity in Society and History IV: The Contested Cultures of Political Modernities