The Role of the Hrvatski Književni list/Croatian
Literary Gazette in the Croatian National Revival in the Late 1960s
Ante Čuvalo
(Presented at the Spring Meeting of the Ohio Academy of
History, Ohio Wesleyan University, April 25, 1987)
Since the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes in 1918 (known as Yugoslavia after 1929), the unresolved question of
inter-national relations in the country, or perhaps more correctly, a design of
a Greater Serbia, has been the Achilles heel of the country. In 1941, the state broke up because the
Karadjordjević dynasty, the Belgrade regime, and the Serb-dominated bureaucracy
and military treated the country merely as an expanded Serbian state. Soon after the Second World War, the
Communist Party, specifically its leader, Josip Broz Tito, proudly declared:
“The national question … has been solved and to be precise, solved very well,
to the general satisfaction of all our nationalities. It has been solved in the way Lenin and
Stalin have taught us...”[i]
However,
centralism, unitarism, and “Yugoslavism” of the post-1945 regime were
experienced by non-Serbs as expressions of the same old Serbian hegemony
reinforced by Communist ideology and its claims to monopoly of power. Slowly the Party “liberals” and intellectuals
among the non-Serbs began to oppose growing powers of Belgrade and the Serbs at
the expense of others. Thus, after the
ouster of the Vice-President Aleksandar Ranković in July 1966,[ii]
changes began to take place; in particular, more freedom of discussion was
allowed.
Leading
Party “liberals” at the time attempted to control discussion on national issues
by wrapping them in Marxist phraseology, but some younger intellectuals began
to “unwrap” the crucial issue and started to talk more in national rather than
in class terms. The March 1967 Declaration
on the Croatian Language was clearly a product of the on-going change.[iii] The Declaration was the result of
cooperation between Croatian Marxist and non-Marxist intellectuals. It was also the first public act in which the
Croatian national question was openly discussed in the post-War period. It clearly indicated that a national revival
was in the making.
HKL – First Independent Paper
In April 1968, the Hrvatski književni list (HKL)
or Croatian Literary Gazette began to publish in Zagreb, capital of
Croatia. The paper, a kind of a
sensation from the outset, was the first fully independent paper in the country
since World War II. Its readers fell
neatly into two categories: they either enthusiastically praised it or
condemned it. However, both sides agreed
that the paper, even in its short existence (April 1968 – October 1969), had a
significant impact on the development of the Croatian national awakening in the
late 1960s. It also contributed to process
of widening the political and social space on the unresolved economic,
cultural, and even political relations of Croatia to the federal center in
Belgrade.
The paper
was published by the Association of Independent Writers – TIN, an organization
founded in 1968 upon the unification of three smaller groups of artists: the
Independent Group of Writer – TIN, Society of Worker Writers, and a small
circle of writers who were in the process of forming an independent group but
decided instead to join the TIN group.[iv]
The name
TIN was taken in honor of a Croatian poet Tin Ujević (1891-1955), who was
well-known for his bohemian life style and sharp criticism of everything that
restrained freedom of the human spirit: “This is why we follow Tin. The colors of our flag are the magnitude of
the World, and power of the Letter; true Love and freedom of Truth”[v]
- the paper declared.
A number of
characteristics distinguished this group of writers and their paper from other
literary circles in Croatia at the time.
This was the first independent paper in the country, published without
any institutional or government support.
It was also the first to be identified as Croatian in its tile
name. In the first issue, the publishers
stated: “The title of our paper clearly defines its [Croatian] identity and its
initiators, but we explicitly emphasize that its pages are wide open to all.”[vi] The paper also stressed its closeness to the
common people, and it opened its pages to literary talents who were not
acceptable to the cultural establishment.
It criticized the existing literary journals and their publishers for
living in “an ivory tower” distant from the cultural needs of the people. Because of their snobbery, HKL maintained,
Croatian culture had been losing ground and its true tradition.
We ask who
are the guilty ones? The immediate creators of such a cultural climate are
sailing today
on the Adriatic. They are buying baroque furniture or are
immersing themselves in cabalistic texts;
to them
everything is boring, about disappointments we will not even talk.[vii]
The editors
of the new paper believed that the existing literary publications in Croatia
were ignoring national heritage and local talent while showing off their
supposed cosmopolitanism by paying too much attention to foreign writers and
literary trends. In their program, the
TIN group announced: “We, in contrast to some other attempts, are starting in
another direction – the opposite way – from the national towards the
international.”[viii] They also emphasized that their goal was to
raise the cultural level of the Croatian people, not by rejecting the nation's
heritage but by building on old foundations. It was declared:
Culturally
inferior people are not able to cooperate on an equal basis with other peoples.
Their
position will remain inferior! That is
why we firmly stand in the defense of traditions
and consider its affirmation our main goal.[ix]
Socialism
was accepted by these young writers, but they praised a different kind of
socialism than the one they lived in:
Socialism
is on our hearts, the real one, the inspired human life in socialism, full of
beauty and justice;
the one
which our forefathers wanted for us, life free of insinuations by its
enemies! We are for truth and
victory of
true self/management, where we will truly govern with our voice in our
realm. We are not for
social
reform in word only, we are for the reform of human relations...[x]
The HKL
attempted to close the existing gap between different social, regional,
ideological, and even ethnic groups in Croatia.
The members of the board ranged from the best known Croatian composer of
the century, Jakov Gotovac, to worker and peasant writers. They resided in different places in the
republic and came from various religious and ideological backgrounds: Catholic,
Orthodox, Muslim, Marxist, and non-Marxist.
The paper covered a variety of subjects that other cultural literature
or school textbooks had ignored since World War II. It provided an opportunity for the younger
generations of Croatians to discover their national heritage.
In the HKL,
the young learned about people like Grgur Ninski, the leader of the Croatian
Catholic church in the Tenth century who fought for the use of the vernacular
in church liturgy;[xi]
Markantun de Dominis, a Croatian humanist and “heretic” of the Sixteenth
century;[xii]
Ante Starčević (1823-1896), founder of the Croatian Party of Right and advocate
of an independent Croatian state;[xiii]
and the brothers Antun and Stjepan Radić, founders and leaders of the Croatian
Peasant Party, that became the most important political force among the
Croatians in the inter-war Yugoslavia.[xiv]
Testing the Waters
Besides unveiling the past, the paper slowly began to
deal with the problems of the time. A
number of touchy issues were brought to the public's attention: a massive
Croatian emigration,[xv] the
economy,[xvi]
division of “surplus of labor,”[xvii]
etatism,[xviii]
resolutions of the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party,[xix]
World War II casualties,[xx]
and other. The question of subordination
of the Croatian language was mentioned one way or another in almost all of the
gazette’s nineteen issues. Actually,
what broke the camel's back in the eyes of the regime, as far as the existence
of the paper was concerned, was the November 1969 article on the use of
language in the Yugoslav armed forces by Jaka Avšič, a retired army brigadier
general from Slovenia. The regime used
the article as an excuse to ban the paper.[xxi]
The board
of the Republican Fund for Advancement of Cultural Activities refused to grant any
financial aid to HKL. In its explanation
for the refusal, the board denounced the “conceptual and esthetic orientation
of the paper,”[xxii]
but without giving any specific objections to the paper's content. The publishers made public and legal appeals
in response to the verdict, but all their efforts were in vain. It was clear that the Party stood behind all
of the anti-gazette decisions.
The paper,
however, proved that it could exist on its own.
In its eighteen months of existence, its circulation tripled, from 12 to
35 thousand copies. It had “far more
[readers] than all other literary journals combined in Yugoslavia” at the time.[xxiii] Even Party officials publicly acknowledged
that “the circulation of the HKL was growing [too fast] and that the phenomenon
should be examined.”[xxiv]
HKL was
discussed at a number of Party meetings including those of the Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia (CC LCC). The paper was unanimously condemned by all of
them. At one such meeting Party members
declared that “some papers and magazines” in Croatia, “especially the HKL,”
insist
on a
re-evaluation of the recent Croatian cultural and political past. Hrvatski
književni list,
from issue
to issue, publishes treatises from cultural history in which it tries to
correct the
judgments
of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia....[xxv]
Although
the official reaction to the appearance of the HKL was one of condemnation,
Party leadership did not ban the paper immediately or confront the publishers
with trials and imprisonments. This was
a major departure from traditional dealings with “nationalist elements.” The bulk of public confrontation with the
paper and its publishers was “delegated” to those who were “paid to write,”[xxvi]
to the Zagreb Committee of the LC, and to other groups under Party
control. Their duty was to discredit the
paper on intellectual, esthetic, and ideological levels. One of the chief accusations was that the
paper dealt only with ghosts of the past and not with present needs and
problems. But once the paper began to
discuss contemporary problems, especially economic ones, it was attacked for
meddling in political issues.[xxvii]
Under Fire
The most vehement attacks on the paper, as well as on the
alleged rise of nationalism, came from Miloš Žanko, Vice-President of the
Yugoslav Federal Assembly at the time, a Party “conservative” from
Croatia. His fierce onslaughts, however,
came without the blessing of the republican Party leadership in Zagreb. He wrote a series of articles in Borba,
the Party organ, immediately before the Third Plenum of the CCLC of Croatia
(February 21, 1969). It was obvious that
he was not only condemning the alleged rise of nationalism but also putting
pressure on the Central Committee LC in Croatia to change its “liberal” policies. Eventually, those articles and another series
published in the same paper from November 17 to 21, 1969 cost him his political
career.
Even though
the Central Committee condemned the paper and the Zagreb League of Communists
in July 1969 declared that the paper “has formulated ideas and a political
program directly opposed to the policies of the League of Communists,”[xxviii]
its publication continued. The Party's
new method of dealing with the situation was expressed by an official who
stated at a Zagreb meeting on “socio-political questions” (May 1969) that the
Party must face “certain problems” and influence them “not by decrees, but more
often by contacts, arguments, and confrontations.”[xxix] Because of such new tactics, the paper and
its supporters experienced constant “confrontations” which in reality were
blatant harassments. For example, the
post office would simply “fail” to deliver the paper to the readers. Or teachers would “caution” students not to
read it.[xxx] Borba announced that workers in
various print shops in Croatia refused to print the paper because of its
anti-socialist ideological content, and for that reason, Borba alleged,
its printing site was changed four times, ultimately moving to Ljubljana,
Slovenia. HKL, however, maintained that it had excellent relations with
workers but was required to change printers in Croatia because of financial
reasons and strikes in printing plants.
The paper also accused “political and administrative” officials of putting
pressure on the printers in order to prevent its publication.[xxxi] But when the paper ceased publishing in
October 1969, it was alleged that workers in the name of self-management
refused to print it. Hence, Savka
Dapčević-Kučar, President of the Central Committee LC of Croatia, boasted at the
Tenth session of the CCLC of Croatia (1970) that the paper “died out without
being banned.”[xxxii] In 1974, however, one high Party official in
Croatia openly stated that the paper had been practically “banned.”[xxxiii]
Significance
Hrvatski književni list had
an important impact on the development of the Croatian national movement in the
late 1960s. Most of all, it tested the
waters before the movement shifted into a higher gear after the Tenth Plenum of
the CCLC of Croatia in January 1970. It
is interesting to note that the paper did not attract open support among most
of the best known names in contemporary literary life in Croatia, as the Party
leadership was proud to point out.[xxxiv] But neither did they come out against
it. There are several possible
explanations for why the Croatian cultural establishment as a whole did not
lend its name to HKL. As mentioned
earlier, the paper distanced itself from that establishment from its
beginning. After the affair with the Declaration
on the Croatian Language, the leading intellectuals and institutions
possibly held back in order to see what would happen to HKL and the people
associated with it, individuals who were younger in age and less known. But even more importantly, while declaring
that it accepted socialism as an ideal the paper and its publishers were
critical of socialism as implemented in Croatia and the country as a
whole. At the same time, mainstream
Croatian intellectuals began to accept the “liberal” platform of the Party,
deciding to work through the existing system.
While HKL
was still in existence, new cultural periodicals began to appear in
Croatia. They followed the course
charted by HKL. However, these new
periodicals had firmer ground to stand upon than an independent paper like
HKL. They were published by old and
established institutions like Matica hrvatska (Latin: Matrix Croatica),
the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences or the Writers' Association of
Croatia. Their contributors were leading
professors at the Zagreb University and other intellectuals, many of them
active members of the Communist Party.
One
semi-official interpretation alleges that there was a “conspiracy” between
individuals associated with HKL and the mainstream intellectual establishment
in Croatia. Allegedly, Hrvatski
književni list served as a diversion while other forces, namely those
around Matica hrvatska, were better organized[xxxv]. Although there is no evidence of such “plot”
the proponents of the regime felt the need to create such theories in order to
justify the persecutions of the students, intellectuals, and others in the
post-Croatian Spring period (December 1971 and after). However, the paper might have attracted too
much of the Party's attention and that provided more space for other groups of
intellectuals in Croatia to strengthen their position.
HKL also
had a mobilizing and unifying effect among the Croatians at large. From its beginning in April 1968, the number
of readers grew quickly. By informing
them about their culture, history, as well as contemporary problems and
inequalities, it increased the interest of the readers, especially the younger
generation, in their national past and present, as well as in the future
prospects. Its liberal socialist tone
also provided a platform for national reconciliation between the Marxists and
non-Marxist, even anti-Marxists.
Probably
the most significant contribution of the Croatian Literary Gazette was that it
served as a catalyst in the process of differentiation within the communist
party elites in Croatia. On one side,
Žanko and the “conservatives” attacked HKL and the growth of the national
movement in general. On the other,
“liberals” were relatively silent about the issues raised by the paper. The “liberals” regarded Belgrade unitarism as
a greater threat to the country and the system than an open discussion of
national history and inter-national relations in the Federation. However, many of the “liberals” of 1969
became “neo-conservatives” before the 21st Session of the Presidium
of the CC LCY on December 1, 1971, which marked the end of the Croatian
national movement, know also as the Croatian Spring. Among those who were purged or jailed after
December 1971 were many of the contributors to HKL, despite the fact that its
publishing was halted in October 1969.
Zlatko Tomičić, its founder and editor, was sentenced to a five-year
jail term. The Croatian national movement
was crushed. The Party's “democratic
centralism” was strengthened, and inter-national relations in Yugoslavia
continue to be unresolved.
Bibliography
Documents
“Declaration
Concerning the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language” Journal
of Croatian Studies Vol. 7-8, 1966-67, pp. 6-9.
Deseta sjednica CK SK Hrvatske.
Zagreb: Vjesnik, 1970.
Books
Bilić, Jure. Revolucija koja teče.
Zagreb: Narodno sveučilište, 1975.
Haberl, Othmar Nikola. Parteiorganisation
und nationale Frage in Jugoslawien. Berlin: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976,
Hondius, Frits W. The Yugoslav Community
of Nations. The Hague: Mounto, 1968.
Ostojić, Stevo. Javni dnevnik.
Zagreb: Globus, 1980.
Perić, Ivan. Suvremeni
hrvatski nacionalizam. Zagreb: August Cesarec,
1976.
Newspapers and Journals
Encyclopaedia Moderna
Hrvatski književni list
(HKL)
Politika
Vjesnik
Vjesnik u sijedu
Notes
[i]
Cited
in Frits W. Hondius, The Yugoslav Community of Nations. The Hague:
Mounton, 1968, p. 182, n. 347.
[ii] The Fourth Plenum of the CC LCY was held on
the Brioni Islands on July 1, 1966. It is best known for the removal of Aleksandar
Ranković from his high positions in the communist party, government, and
police.
[iii] “Declaration Concerning the Name and Position
of the Croatian Literary Language” was published in Telegram on March
17, 1967. Its English translation is found in Journal of Croatian Studies
Vol. 7-8, 1966-67, pp. 6-9.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid. A number of writers from other
republics and nationalities did contribute to the paper during its short
existence.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid., No. 14, June 1969.
[xii] Ibid., No. 7, October 1968.
[xiii] Ibid., No. 13, May 1969.
[xiv] Ibid., No. 7, October 1968.
[xv] Ibid., No. 8, November 1968.
[xvi] Ibid., No. 17, September 1969.
[xvii] Ibid., No. 11, February 1969.
[xviii] Ibid., No. 17, September 1969.
[xix] Ibid., No. 12, April 1969.
[xx] Ibid., No. 15, July 1969.
[xxi] The article by Avšič was published in Sodobnost
(Slovenia) No. 4, 1970, pp. 408-427 and in Encyclopaedia Moderna
(Croatia) No. 12, Spring 1970, pp. 111-119.
[xxii] HKL No. 3, June 1968.
[xxiii] Ibid.
[xxiv] As cited in Stevo Ostojić, Javni dnevnik.
Zagreb: Globus, 1980, p. 169.
[xxv] Plenum of the EC CC LC of Croatia held on May
26, 1969, as in Politika, May 27, 1969.
[xxvi] HKL No. 9, December 1968; Vjesnik April
20, 1968; Ibid., December 14 and 28, 1968; Ibid., February 15, 1969; Vjesnik
u srijedu December 25, 1968; Ibid., January 25 and 29, 1969, and August 13,
1969.
[xxvii] HKL No. 15, July 1969.
[xxviii] Borba July 20, 1969 as
cited in Othmar Nikola Haberl, Parteiorganisation und nationale Frage in
Jugoslawien. Berlin: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976, p. 116.
[xxix] As cited in Ostojić, Javni dnevnik, p.
169.
[xxx] See, for example, HKL No. 10, January 1969.
[xxxi] Ibid. No. 15, July 1969.
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