The (Auto)Polemical Agon of Branko Miljković

Abstract

The paper deals with the polemical potential of Branko Miljković’s essays and critical reviews, bearing in mind the cultural and political setting of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Of primary interest are the rhetorics of hiding ideologically suspect ideas in autopoetically charged sections. We also intend to outline the subversive elements of the poems about the leader of the Yugoslav revolution and symbols thereof, considering the poet’s autopolemic poetics. From the present-day vantage point, it is easy to underrate the subversiveness of the “neosymbolists” on the tumultuous literary landscape of the time, a mere decade after the Second World War and the radical social upheaval that immediately followed it.
Miljković takes up the programmatic development of neosymbolism, with noticeable polemic drive towards the nihilism of the surrealist doctrine (originally in the essay Poezija i oblik [Poetry and Shape], in which he takes up a clear position concerning the main literary camps of the time). The editor the third volume of the new edition of Miljković’s Collected Works (Eseji i kritike [Essays and Criticism], 2018), Snežana Milosavljević Milić, points out how in the subtext of the poet’s critical reviews and essays “one can trace the history of the poetic and ideological turmoil of the late 1950s Yugoslavia”, which is what we endeavoured to do in this paper. Insofar as one can speak of Miljković’s polemical strategy, in the milieu of limited polemics, the great mosaic essay Milosavljević Milić mentions represents an elaborate and fervent polemic of a bright poetic and critical mind wearing the façade determined by the circumstances and givens of the literary landscape of the late 1950s communist Yugoslavia.