Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

Nation, Tradition and Regionalism in

The Avant-Garde Magazine Zenith (Zagreb – Belgrade, 1921-1926)

Tzvetomila Pauly, PhD

an abridged and slightly different version of this paper, written in the Croatian language, has been published in the Review

for Slavonic Studies Riječ, Rijeka 15/3, 2009.

Summary: This paper discusses the paradoxical usage of nationalistic and traditionalistic rhetorical figures in

the cosmopolitan concept of the literary magazine Zenith, which is widely regarded as the epitome of South

Slavic avant-garde inter-culturalism and anti-traditionalism. It also takes into consideration the Balkan

intellectual atmosphere during the 1920s, in which two ideologies, that of revived right-wing nationalism and

that of leftist internationalism compete over the politics and aesthetics of art works. The paper detects a peculiar

convergence of these politics in the pages of Zenith where a nationalistic pathos and racial, as well as

occidentalist ideas, considerably affect the universalistic program of zenithism. The intermedial analysis of

zenithist images reveals a regional usage of the popular of the time ‘discontent in European modernity’, which

takes the form of anti-colonial imaging and has its parallel in the political idea of Yugoslavia.

Key words: Zenith and zenithism, South Slavic avant-garde of the 1920s, Balkan, nationalism, inter-culturalism

“To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely draw attention to its language and

rhetoric; …its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct the

field of meanings and symbols associated with national life.”

Homi K. Bhabha, Introduction, Nation and narration, 1990, p. 3.

It sounds quite inappropriate to combine notions such as ‘nation’, ‘tradition’ and ‘regionalism’

with the literary phenomenon of the ‘avant-garde’, which is per definition an international, anti-

traditional and universalistic art movement. The impetus to do so lies upon the discovery of a set of

tropes and imaginative constructions built on these notions in the rhetoric of an avant-garde magazine

like Zenith (Zagreb – Belgrade, 1921-1926) that is in many aspects representative of the historical

avant-garde in South-Eastern Europe.

However, the goal of this paper will not be only to study the peculiar transformations of the

national discourse into the genuine cosmopolitan ideology of avant-garde. Its ambition is, following

Homi K. Bhabha, to try to display “the wide dissemination”, the plurality and ambivalence of

meanings that nationalism, traditionalism and regionalism produce, especially in a discourse like that

of avant-garde, which is antagonistic towards them. In this regard, the Zenith’s bizarre intersections of,

for instance, local, traditional identifications with the ‘Balkan’ and the claims on internationalism are

of particular interest.

Although the Zenith magazine, the zenithist manifestoes of Ljubomir Micić and the zenithist

drawings of Jo Klek (artistic pseudonym of Josip Seissel) are not narratives in the strict sense of the

word, for the purposes of this analysis, we could view them together as a semiotic text, in the sense

given by Winfried Nöth’s Handbuch der Semiotik as a “cultural message of linguistic or nonlinguistic

Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

kind” (2000, 391, 392). Furthermore, the zenithist text could also be comprehended in the

“uncountable” and “plural” meaning given by Roland Barthes’ post-structuralist theory of textuality1.

The zenithist text, similarly to the ‘text’ of Barthes, is knitted together by conscious and unconscious

“quotations, references, echoes of cultural languages, … antecedent or contemporary, that are running

across it in an abundant stereophony” (463). The zenithist text is an avant-garde collage of “shreds,

scarps, patches and rags” (Gellner cit. by Bhabha, 294, 297) of different ideologies. It is a

constructivist composition, where opposite discourses traverse vertically and horizontally its “web”

(Barthes, 464) that engenders not simply a polysemy, but, according to Barthes, an “outburst,

explosion [and] dispersion” of meanings (463).

Before we enter the heterogeneous text of Zenith, it is necessary to give a cursory description

of the context in which Zenith appeared. Generally speaking, Zenith sprung from the unstable texture

of conflicting literary tendencies, in-between national literature and internationalization of the

literature. Like most of the avant-garde movements that blossomed between 1910 and 1930, zenithism

is usually understood as an art practice, denying and revolting against the tradition (Žmegač, 1967;

Flaker, 1984). The main ideological targets of the European avant-garde anti-traditionalism are the

nationalism and the class that created and supported this ideology – the bourgeoisie (Anderson, 1998;

Smith, 2000). The adverse attitude towards the bourgeois is a result of an avant-garde radicalization of

modernists’ critique on the European civilization which is accused of being based on an

epistemologically problematical scientific positivism, on a calculated rationality of capitalism, on a

false moral and on an insurmountable social hierarchy. It seems that the avant-garde revolt seeks to

destroy all kinds of cultural boundaries (between nations, classes, arts, genres, linguistic rules,

between life and art). Following Michel Foucault2, one could say that, by using grotesque or non-

realistic forms of representation, the nontraditional art of the twenties aims at destabilizing the binary

positions of power upon which the Western culture is founded (for instance, ‘reason/madness’ is

redefined in oppositions like ‘bourgeois/artist’, ‘bourgeois/madman’, ‘rational father/insane son’). By

certain forms of excessive and diabolized representations, the traditional power possessor is made

repulsive and eventually “un-masked”. For example, the modern civilization could be likened to a big

colonial machine of torture as in Kafka’s famous story In the Penal Colony (1919), or the European

culture could be depicted as an old whore of noble blood who seduces and rapes its wounded - in her

own wars - subaltern as in Miroslav Krleža’s novella Domobran Jambrek [Home-guard Jambrek]

(1922).

Right after World War I, the crisis of the national idea is rigorously discussed by the literature

and the arts. The avant-garde in South-Eastern Europe often considers nationalism as part of the

imported European values. It stresses on the nation’s ‘imaginative’ characteristics and labels the

nationalism as a “lie” (M. Krleža, Hrvatska književna laž3, 1919) or the Vaterland as a “chimera” (Geo

Milev, “Отечество – химера!”). In contrast to the first generation of modernists around 1900, for

whom the national mythology was still a productive source of modern stylizations4, the avant-garde of

the twenties claims to be disruptively abstract, noetic, universalistic, intolerant towards the genre

painting and folk-style imagination (Geo Milev, Родно изкуство, 1920). This persistent negation of

1 The term ‘text’ is detailed in the R. Barthes’ essay Work and text / L’oeuvre et le text (1971) [Bulgarian

translation Творба и текст, by Nadja Dionisieva, in Въображението на знака, 1991; Croatian: Od djela do teksta, this translation is given by Miroslav Beker in Intertekstualnost i intermedijalnost, 1988]. 2 M. Foucault, Die Ordnung des Diskurses, (1972), 2000, p. 11 and in the essay Der Wahnsinn, Abwesenheit

eines Werkes, (1964), in Schriften zur Literatur, 2003, p. 179. 3 M. Krleža: “U našim književnim magazinama, poslije kulta lažnih tradicija i poslije danuncijevsko-

bečkosecesionističkih rekvizita, pojavila se jedna nova dekorativna laž: laž inostrane (nažalost opet bečke)

marke, prebojadisana nacionalnom trobojnom crveno-modro-bijelom, laž svih evropskih nacionalističkih

malograđanskih programa, laž rasnog nacionalističkog heroizma”, Hrvatska književna laž, 1919. 4 See, for instance, the poetry of Vladimir Nazor or of Pencho Slavejkov, the sculpture of Ivan Meštrović, the

painting of Vladimir-Dimitrov Majstora.

Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

tradition and national affiliation gives a good reason to Croatian scholar Aleksandar Flaker to call the

avant-garde poetics in Eastern Europe “poetics of contest” (Poetika osporavanja, 1984).

The mistrust in the national idea runs parallel with a growing popularity of the Marxist

ideology and its Soviet applications, especially after the October Revolution of 1917. In almost every

avant-garde manifesto in South-Eastern Europe a piece of left-wing ideology is present. Ljubomir

Micić, the chief editor of Zenith, proclaims in the first issue of the magazine: “Art is common –

common to all people. That is because there is not a specific national art, even less class art” (article

Čovjek i umjetnost, Feb. 1921, Zenith. p.1, my emphasis). Prominent avant-garde artists in Slovenia,

Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria often fail to keep the desirable cosmopolitan and universalistic position.

They are inclined to fly into the orbit of a utopian supranational community of communism (S.

Kossovel, M. Krleža, Lj. Micić, G. Milev). Thus, the “internationalization of the culture” (A.

Lunacharski, Proletkult, Zenith, no. 1, 1921) is adopted by these avant-garde intellectuals as an exit

from the vacuum of nationalistic ideology as well as an escape from the “decorative” mimicry of the

European cultural models (M. Krleža, Hrvatska književna laž, 1919).

Despite the fact that the First World War causes a series of irremediable fractions to the

national ideals, according to Bulgarian critic Aleksander Kiossev5, it does not eliminate the ideological

frames of the nationalistic thinking (2001:200). As a consequence of the collapse of multiethnic

monarchies and the appearance of new nation-states and new national minorities in Central and South-

Eastern Europe, a revival and even a boom of new national and racial conceptions is to be observed6.

The new states need new models of identification that should not be critical, but nationally

constructive (Kiossev, ibid., 201). Thus, the popular literature and arts responded with a mass

production of homeland themes and motives7, which could be regarded rather as representative for the

period than the avant-garde nontraditional writings.

The anti-nationalism and anti-traditionalism of the avant-garde is actually an esthetic rejection

of these contemporary forms of art and ideology, yet it is not so much directed against an abstract

national idea. The nationalism, as remarked by Timothy Brennan8, should be understood both as

“institutional uses of fiction in nationalist movements”, but also as “a trope for such things like

‘belonging’, ‘bordering’ and ‘commitment’” (1990, 47). The polemic texts of Croatian writer Miroslav

Krleža, Bulgarian poet Geo Milev or Serbian publicist Ljubomir Micić repudiate the nationalism, but

they do not depart from the narrative address of the nation which is often conceived as unavoidable,

natural, even organic part of the artist’s identity. For example, Geo Milev compares the national

feeling with the sexual drive. According to him, both are “rudimentary psychological forces – mystic

elements”, “unconscious energies” that should not be “brought to the consciousness… otherwise they

transfer in nationalism and patriotism, respectively in pornography – with which the artist and the art

have nothing to do” (Milev, Родно изкуство, 1920, 167).

It seems that the avant-garde, in Milev’s words, claims ‘to feel’, but not ‘to think’ of the

nation, to refrain from ‘having it in mind’, to drive it out, to suppress it. Or, to continue in Freud’s

terms, the ‘nation’ in the avant-garde practices is exposed to Verdrängung, to displacement and

repression. The ‘nation’ becomes something dangerous, unheimlich for the avant-garde and precisely

because of that, it continue to ‘live’ in its discourses under an ambivalent series of aversion and

longing.

5 A. Kiossev. Avantgardismus, Nationalismus und ihre imaginären Räume, in Südosteuropa-Jahrbuch, Band 31,

2001, p.199 – 214. 6 New nationalistic movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes;

Racial movements like racism, zionism, Greek Megali Idea. 7 Czech ruralism, Bulgarian “родно изкуство”, German Heimatkunst, ‘Blut- und Bodenliteratur’ (Kiossev, ibid.

200) 8 Timothy Brennan. The national longing for form, in Nation and narration, 1990, 44 – 70.

Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

Zenith and the Zenitheums

It is common to consider that the avant-garde of the twenties was made public through

independent, provocatively designed periodicals for literature and culture. That is why a magazine like

Zenith (1921-1926) gives us a good opportunity to study the phenomenon. Zenith was published for

six consecutive years and it remained consistent in fulfilling its conception of being “an international

review for the recent art” 9.

The Zenith magazine is paradigmatic for the South-Eastern European avant-garde10

. On the

one hand, it is the only one that has produced a local avant-gardism: zenithism. On the other hand,

Zenith reflects all current tendencies in the avant-garde intellectual climate in the region. Thus the

introductive article of Ljubomir Micić The Man and the Art (Čovek i umjetnost, br. 1, 1921) is typical

for this generation - an enthusiastic reception of Nietzsche’s So sprach Zarathustra whose figures of

Übermensch and metaphors of the sun and the zenith probably gave the inspiration for the name of the

magazine. In the same article the editor declares his intention to follow expressionist esthetics,

messianism and cosmism and he expresses zenithist love towards mankind. Initially Zenith truly

follows the pattern of the German expressionist organ Der Sturm (1910-1932), but soon becomes

much more radical. However, the style of Zenith is considerably influenced by Italian futurism, by

international dadaism and, above all, by Russian futurism and constructivism.

Thus, Zenith could be regarded as a synthetic work which assembles heterogeneous cultural

messages on the principle of collage. The leading idea of this combinative type of representation

seems to be the construction of a new model of the world. The Serbian critic Stanislava Vujnović

states that this model could be called “decentralized”11

. Indeed, the first thing in Zenith that attracts the

reader’s attention is the variety of languages and addresses that really open a room for intercultural

polyphony. Stanislava Vujnović comments:

With its concepts Zenith has literally removed the boundaries between cultures: it has gathered

Russian, German, French, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, British, American, Spanish, Austrian,

Italian, Serbian, Croatian and other artists, whose works have been published in the original

language. It is worth mentioning that the language of some poems has not always been the

mother tongue of the artist, which is another step in erasing the boundaries inside the zenithist

universe. Furthermore, in the title of the work, next to the author’s name, it was obligatory to

give the name of the city where he resides at the moment. If one makes a catalogue of the

authors and the cities as they have been listed in the span of the six years of Zenith’s

publication, one would get a dynamic international topography: the contributors of Zenith

do not merely come from the above mentioned countries, but these avant-garde artists travel

around Europe, they try to spread their programs to other environments, or they join other,

foreign avant-garde currents. In this fashion, the concept of internationalism and the model

of a decentralized world have been realized, even if this is only on the pages of an

international magazine, respectively, in the activities of an international literary movement.

(Zenith has been also consecutively carrying out the concept of intermediality). (217, my

emphasis)

9 The magazine is available on the Internet under http://www.digital.nbs.bg.ac.yu/novine/zenit/. 10 In Zenith (Zagreb-Belgrad, 1921-1926) one could find the elements of various other reviews’ esthetic

conceptions like those of the Vijavica (Zagreb, 1917-18), Juriš (Zagreb 1919), Vezni (Sofia, 1919-1922), Hipnos

(Belgrad, 1922-1923), Misao (Belgrad 1922-23), Dada-Tank i Dada-Jazz (Zagreb, 1922), TANK (Ljubljana,

1927). 11 Stanislava Vujnović, Prevazilaženje opozicije svoj/tuđ u periodici srpske avangarde (časopis Zenit),

[‘Overcoming of opposition of own/foreign in periodicals of Serbian avant-garde (journal Zenit)’] in Miodrag

Maticki (ed.) Svoj i tudj [Own and Foreign], Belgrade, 2006, p.215–226,

Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

Vujnović emphasizes the modality and dynamic of the zenithist world as “one of the possible

worlds”, but she concludes that it has a chaotic structure without consecutively fulfilled dualism

(own/foreign) and it could be defined by the position of “anomie” or derangement.

Although the world and the text of Zenith seems quite disintegrated and decentralized in ‘an

international topography’, the zenithist manifestoes by Ljubomir Micić, the series of articles by Boško

Tokin and the zenithist drawings by Josip Seissel show, on the contrary, a very carefully constructed

composition. It is not just in disarray, but rather in a kind of a centrifugal motion and from the 8th issue

on, in which Zenith magazine is declared the organ of a new Balkan culture, the movement has found

its own “ground” and a new “center”.

Following Aleksander Flaker’s avant-garde theory, we could test his notion of “optimal

projection” that signifies this “constructive tenet of most of the avant-garde texts” and “the orientation

of such texts to the future” which allows us to reevaluate the past and to contest the present (1984:66).

Flaker stresses out that the avant-garde ‘optimal projection’ is not directed at any concrete location

with a perfect social structure, e.g. it should not be understood as utopia. It is rather a “movement as an

act of choice of an optimal variant to surmount the reality” (68). One of Flaker’s examples of this

movement, following Krleža12

, is the spiral metaphor of Marx and Engels’ dialectical materialism that

leads mankind towards a universal Gemeinschaft (community), an international world city, a

cosmopolis in which national and class antagonisms and conflicts will disappear, as well as the

economic, social and political (but not cultural) differences between the nations (67).

A more explicit form to this structure is given by the drawing of Russian constructivist

Vladimir Tatlin for the Monument of the Third International (1921, see appendix 1). The drawing is

published three times in Zenith (in no. 11 on p.1 and p.2, 1921 and in no. 17-18, 1922) together with

an article about the artist. Tatlin’s spiral tower most probably serves as the model for the zenithist

drawings by Josip Seissel, Zenitheum I and especially Zenitheum II (1923-24, see appendixes 2 and 3).

Both of the drawings show Seissel’s engagement to the zenithist model of the world.

Zenitheum I and II are buildings of concentrically orientated, white hemispheres that grow one on top

of the other towards heaven. They do not throw shadows, e.g. they are depicted at noon, at the sun’s

zenith. The first drawing resembles a Muslim mosque, respectively, an orthodox church13

, in which

the common monumental cupola symbolizes the heaven. Of course, all eventual religious symbols are

expurgated, but the construction, styled like a temple, still emanates harmony and transcendence. A

man, who stands under this cupola, would feel himself in the middle of the universe. Zenitheum II is a

further elaboration of this ‘optimal projection’. It is an architectural variation of the tower of Babylon:

a modern, lighted, spacious, human-made tower which consists of three spirally raising hemispheres.

Arcades of Renaissance humanism are combined with a modern construction of horizontal and vertical

planes. Zenitheum II is also reminiscent of a beehive and, thus, it suggests the ideal of the new society

enjoying equal rights, freedom and brotherhood.

Hence, Josip Seissel’s models of the zenithist world are not just optimal, but rather utopian

projections with symmetric and even hierarchic structure. In Zenitheum I and II the movement has

made its choice: these are the temples in praise of the coming new Man. The Zenitheums are at the

12 M. Krleža: “Da se zemlja ipak i usprkos svemu kreće… polagano, ali se ipak kreće, i ako na ovome svijetu postoji neka vrsta vječnog vretena, to je upravo ovo postojano trajno i tvrdoglavo kretanje ljudske pamjeti koja

se kao perpetuum mobile kreće ipak sve više i sve ustrajnije. U spirali uspinje se pamet ljudska…Kao lopta,

svakog krvavog stoljeća– za jedan jedva primjetljivi zavoj više, penje se u visine naša draga Zemlja… Leti

zemlja naša u susret zvijezdama, otela se zakonima mračnoga ponora, i ako postoji pod Kumovskom Slamom

zvjezdana logika, ona nam je pouzdanim putokazom da su ovaj put svi baloni historije iznad svih krvavih cirkusa

i menažerija uzletjeli ravno spram Kozmopolisa.” Eppur si muove, 1919. 13

Like St. Sophia in Istanbul, St. Al. Nevski in Sofia, St. Spirit in Skopie. However, Zenitheum I resembles the

most the architectural project of Vidovdan’s church designed in the romantic-nationalistic style by the Croatian

sculptor Ivan Meštrović in 1911.

Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

same time futurist and constructivist buildings, and they are, indeed, “one of the substantial examples

of Slavic avant-garde” (Vera Horvat-Pintarić, in the catalogue Avant-garde tendencies in Croatia, p.

55). Similarly, the texts by Boško Tokin and Ljubomir Micić are interwoven with utopian faith in the

reviving strength of the new Man and the ‘Balkan race’. They are also constructivist projections that

visualize a new model of the world.

In the sixth Zenith issue Boško Tokin combines Nietzsche’s Zarathustra with a new genius

Man-Sun whose “astral body – that moves on and puts the sexual body in motion – has the shape of a

globe” (Čovek Nadgenij – Sunce, no.6, p.2, 1921). In the same copy he expresses his fascination with

Einstein’s theory and gladly emphasizes the relativity of the notion of ‘center’14

. In the middle of his

euphoria from the decentralization of the universe, Tokin acknowledges the zenithist quest for Center:

“Yet, we seek for center!” And so, Man and Center become synonymous. A note from the German

expressionist Ernst Rohwolt, in his article about Carl Einstein (Zenith, no. 7, 1921), gives further

suggestions for the spatial orientation of the zenithist world: “The North Pole Spirit – the South Pole

Soul – at the equator somewhere is the Man … All lines and all meridians run across the poet. He is a

center – an equator”. Ljubomir Micić develops further this somewhat esoteric construct that

corresponds in many aspects to the marxist and Krleža’s spiral projections:

New thought whirls and ascends like a ring dance of fairies, up and around its axis, which is

zenithosophy. new thought is in action, in the spiral, in the vertical. zenithosophy is the last

vertical of the spirit … zenithosophy connects three of the most important points in space: the

earth – the sun – the man! This metaphysical triangle is the only zenithist symbol … to fix a

vertical line in the heart of a horizontal circle – zenithism!” (Zenith, nr. 26-33, 1924, my

emphasis)

One could conclude that the vertical in the zenithist universe (in the metaphoric axis of Sun-

Spirit-Zenith-Man-Genius-Center) is built in the pattern of the German expressionist messianism. The

horizontal line, yet, the fixation in the earth plane is conceived by an “Eastern invention”. On the first

page of the third issue of Zenith Micić publishes the poem Skits by Aleksander Blok (1918), which

introduces the motive and the image of the new barbarians – the Skits, the Slavs – whose mission is to

bring a new, better civilization to Europe15

. The idea is simple, occidentalist and it seems to fit the

German expressionist, and other avant-garde movements’ strong dislike for the academism of

European culture16

. Ljubomir Micić makes it an integral element of Zenith: the password “East -

West” (or in a manifesto “East against West”) becomes part of the title of issue eight. The influence of

the new Russian art on Zenith and the impact of its accompanying left-wing ideology drive the

zenithist cosmopolitanism to a centralization and further particularization. A point of intersection,

then, appears in the zenithist invention of the figure of Barbarogenius and his conquest of Europe.

Barbarogenius and the Balkanization of Europe

The Barbarogenius is a rhetorical figure that occupies a central position in the zenithist world

model (‘Sun – Man - Earth’). He is the embodiment of the new Man, a hybrid creation combining a

14 B. Tokin: “Kod Einsteina ima međutim vrlo pozitivnih vrednosti. Njegova otkrića i teorije izvršile su prevrat u nauci. Dokazao je da nema centra i da su svi centri, naši centri, relativni pojmovi. Ima miljun centara. (Međutim

mi tražimo jedan centar!). Sve je relativno.” (Einstein, Zenith br. 6, 1921, my emphasis) 15 The Russian futurist “skitism”, which has a long tradition in the Russian XIXth century mysticism, could be

regarded as a result of “the need of Russian intellectuals with metaphysical reasons to justify the problematic

political event of the October Revolution” (Vujnović, 219). 16 See also the zenithist manifensto written by the German expressionist, zenithist and later surrealist, Ivan Goll:

“O Europäer mit kurzen Stirnen...Glaubet nicht, dass wir wieder einmal mit Phrasen der Liebe zu euch kommen:

Genossen, Brüder, ihr traditionellen Gipsköpfe, verdummte Professoren, veralkoholte Beamten gehirne,

versäuchte Haut- und Seelenärtzte, nein! Wir hassen hassen hassen euch!“ (Zenith, no. 5, 1921, p.1-2)

Tzvetomila Pauly, dr.sc.

2012

western European prototype (Nietzsche’s Übermensch) with an eastern European archetype (Blok’s

Skits). Ljubomir Micić fits them together on the ‘Balkan’ grounds, which begin to signify the lowest

zenithist point, the Earth (see the constructive diagram in appendix 4, which Lj. Micić uses as a Zenith

logo from the 25th

issue of the magazine onwards, 1925). Nevertheless, Barbarogenius is not a

mediator between the West and the East, nor is the Balkan “bridge” that connects these two cultural

domains. The Barbarogenius is conceived rather as a warrior of his people, and the Balkan is seen as a

barricade17

. Thus, with the figures of Barbarogenius and the ‘Balkan as a barricade’, Micić introduces

the discourses of nationalism, traditionalism and regionalism in the very foundation of the zenithist,

allegedly cosmopolitan, universe.

On the one hand, Barbarogenius is the zenithist response to the general avant-garde desire to

vindicate the modernist vitalism and to follow the primitive. The coming Man should be like Adam,

without a culture, without a tradition, a pure force, the only one who would be able to construct a

better future. On the other hand, however, such primordiality and immaculacy correspond to the

virtues of a nation’s ascendant and are indispensable characteristics of a national hero. Oddly enough,

the Barbarogenius seems to satisfy both of the opposing political discourses – the left international

and the right national. And Ljubomir Micić does not hesitate to blend them together and to create “the

zenithist idea” in an elliptic and reductionist manner:

It is our privilege that we do not have a “cultural tradition”. Our only traditions are Krali

Marko and Kosovo… We are naked and pure! … A new spirit is born in the Yugoslavian -

Balkan cradle – integral, independent – the spirit of a creative individualism… A new spirit is

born by a strong race that has not yet had its arts and culture … The West was not strong

enough to give birth to it, because it [the West] does not possess a religion of the feelings, but

only a religion of the thought. The religion of the feelings and thought is born in the

SOUTHEAST… The Balkan man – the first zenithist. ZENITHISM: ETHICS OF THE

SPIRIT. Heroism of the Spirit: Barbaro-genius. Barbaro-genius: an optimal strength of the

spirit – a notion of Maximal Spirit (Lj. Micić, Delo zenitizma, Zenith, nr. 7, 1921).

Thus the rhetoric of Micić uses the figures of the nationalistic language that are often common

to the individual Balkan regions. Barbarogenius is a hero of the Balkan stock, similar to Krali Marko,

who is traditionally referred to in the Croatian Shtokave, the Serbian, the Bulgarian and the

Macedonian national mythologies, but now is also invoked by a cosmopolitan such as the editor of

Zenith. One can go even further and assert that the zenithist manifestoes could be read as an avant-

garde form of the ‘regional art’ (German ‘Heimatkunst’), as a paradoxical avant-gardism of the ‘blood

and soil literature’ (German ‘Blut- und Bodenliteratur’). These nationalistic writings have been praised

by fascism that, too, makes use of reading Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. However, zenithism’s affirmation

and transmission of nationalistic, racial or ultra-link, anarchistic messages is not a peculiar ‘Balkan’

characteristic of the avant-garde: it is “a common sin” to some of the leaders of the European avant-

garde. Well known are the precedents of inclination of Italian futurism and German expressionism to

fascism (Marinetti and Gottfried Benn), as well as of Russian futurism to communism (Majakovski).

Ultimately, the avant-garde presupposes aesthetical and ethical radicalism and it requires an active

political engagement, regardless of the ideology, and that is what makes it different from the moderate

critique of the modernism.

The particularization of Zenith’s cultural position, yet, deepens with Ljubomir Micić’s

development of the idea about the civilizing mission of Barbarogenius. The Balkanization of Europe,

17 Lj. Micić: “Balkan je MOST između Istoka i Zapada. On treba da je slobodan na najistočnijoj tačci za

strujanje i izlaz preko nas na Zapad, a zatvoren na najzapadnijoj protiv Zapada. Budimo straža protiv Zapada!

Istok protiv Zapada! Mi zenitisti najpre treba da učvrstimo most… Na njemu biće borba za prelaz” (Zenit, no. 8,

1921).

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2012

that this Balkan hero shall pursue, is considered by Micić not as the popular, western trope for a

separatist plague18

, but as a sort of apocalyptical revenge and at the same time a rebirth of Europe

triggered by its Balkan subalterns. According to zenithist texts, Europe needs to be conquered by the

new barbarians from the Southeast in order to be reborn: “Europe can be reborn only after being

impregnated with a raw strength and with new semen, but there is not a chance to be reborn on

her own’ (Lj. Micić, Zenitizam kao balkanski totalizator novoga života i nove umetnosti, Zenit, no. 21,

1923, Micić’s emphasis).

To express his negativism against Europe, Ljubomir Micić also makes use of the modernist

misogynist rhetoric. He considers the gender differences between ‘male’ and ‘female’ as the opposed

moral categories of “innocent/lecherous”, and thus, by using the inversed gothic images of “vital

young victim/ill old vampire”, he builds his arguments for the reviving potency of Barbarogenius

against “the dead point Europe” (Delo zenithisma, Zenith, no.8, 1921). In the 10th issue of Zenith

Micić states: “Balkan is a young man” and “Europe is an old woman”, “a whore” who “always picks

and chooses only the youth in order to amuse herself … to drink and to infect it with disease as a

revenge for being old”.

The desire to strengthen one’s own position drives the zenithist identification with

Barbarogenius to the point of embracing the patriarchal dominant virtues of ‘manliness, youth and

health’. This process is also typical of any anti-colonial discourse. In order to gain superiority, the

identity, which is in reality considered to be subaltern, slavish, colonized, female, and which looks for

reaffirmation, is apt to transvestism. In his self-imagining, or more so, in his imaginative narratives,

the colonized puts on the clothеs of the colonizer and plays his role. The heroic South-Slavic folklore

about the servile Ottoman vassal, Krali Marko is an excellent example.

However, there is one more requirement to the hero of the subjugated: he must look authentic

and his image must be “cleansed” from any contamination by his master. That is why Micić appeals:

“No! We will not be hermaphrodites anymore – Europe!” (Zenith, nr. 10, 1921). Racial purity for the

nationalistic thinking means ‘to be the master of one self’.

That is why zenithism is created from racial needs: for independence, for affirmation of our

youth and health – it is conceived as a counteraction to the European paralysis and degeneration,

which are incurable. (Lj. Micić, Zenitizam kao balkanski totalizator novoga života i nove

umetnosti, Zenith, no. 21, 1923)

It is interesting that, despite his heroism and virility, the zenithist ‘Balkan man’ remains mostly

in a passive position: he is ‘the object’ of Europe’s ‘amusement, drinking and infecting’. The fate of

the Balkans as ‘a victim’ of Europe is, as noted by Maria Todorova, a central pathos in all individual

Balkan discourses (91). There are the popular claims of historical self-reflections, such as ‘the Balkans

have sacrificed themselves for the salvation of Europe from Asia’. Ljubomir Micić reproduces this

regionalist thinking as well, but he elaborates on the figure of the ‘victim’, who becomes ‘a hero’, in

an occidentalist-colonial perspective. According to him, Europe is not only ungrateful to the Balkans,

but it is also depicted as a parasitic and cannibalistic “step-mother” (Zenith, no. 38, 1926). Micić aims

at a very negative imagining of Europe: it is “a hungry, greedy and hysteric frog” (no. 21, 1923), “a

stinking shark” and “a scabby old hyena” (no. 38, 1926). In order to keep its integrity, the colonized

identity keeps for itself the association with the human being and represents the colonizer as a

dangerous animal. The revolt of Barbarogenius against bestial Europe is built in accordance with the

mythological pattern of the fight between a folklore hero and a monster. Similarly, in the Balkan fairy-

tales, one of three brothers fights in the name of his human kin against the foreign aggressor who is

often depicted as a female dragon.

18 See M. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 1997; in the chapter The Balkan states, Nomen.

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2012

Therefore, one could conclude that Barbarogenius is a typical construct of a colonized

imagination. Poems about ‘brave deeds’ appear when there is a lack of ‘doers’, of heroes. The zenithist

turnaround of ‘inferior’ to ‘superior’, ‘uncultured’ to ‘civilizing’, ‘peripheral’ to ‘central’ seems like

an anti-colonial tactic that presents a chance to build a new world. In this fashion, even an avant-garde

and anti-traditional rhetoric, which has started as ‘cosmic’, is compelled to return to the community’s

myths, where the traditional patterns for the self-preservation of the collective identity are kept.

As a paradigmatic South Slavic avant-garde organ, that aims at blowing the boundaries between

nations, classes, aesthetics and ideologies, the Zenith turns out to be an artifact which mirrors another

political idea of the time, namely, the idea of a supranational, inter-cultural and multi-ethnic

Yugoslavia that has also sprung as an imaginative formation of anti-colonial, or more precisely anti-

imperial inspirations, and that has later constructed its own cosmopolitan ideal of non-aligned

independence. What is interesting in such a historical parallel between artistic and political phenomena

is the manner in which their avant-garde texts and universalistic discourses initially displace but

eventually reify the ideas of ‘nation’, ‘tradition’ and ‘regionalism’. The most striking effect of

similarity is, however, the progressive impetus to totalizing and centralizing policies that, in the case

of the late Zenith’s editions, has led to an almost one-author written periodical and, in the example of

Yugoslavia, to an authoritarian regime of society. Finally, the main lesson to be learned from the

twisting of ideology and this non-accidental coincidence between art and politics is, therefore, to

identify promptly the tropes of ideological fixations and to exercise critique on their discrete

dissemination and reproduction within aesthetic programs and social constructions of culture.

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Appendix 1: V. Tatlin, The Third International (1921)

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Appendix 2: Zenitheum I, Jo Klek (Josip Seissel), Zenith, no. 35, 1924.

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2012

Appendix 3: Zenitheum II, Jo Klek (Josip Seissel), Zenith, no.35, 1924.

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2012

Appendix 4, Composition with planes of zenithism, not signed, Zenith, no. 25, 1925.