Prospect Magazine, Issue 1, October 1995

The Yugoslav tragedy by Aleksa Djilas

As the war in the former Yugoslavia moves towards a denouement,

Aleksa Djilas, son of the late dissident Milovan Djilas, disputes the view that it is a peculiarly Balkan horror.
Instead, he argues, it is part of the unstoppable process of border formation and ethnic homogenisation already
experienced throughout the rest of Europe

Aleksa Djilas lives in Belgrade. He wrote The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution,
1919-53.

Many years ago I was discussing with a cousin The Mountain Wreath, an epic drama in verse written by Petar II Petrovic Njegos, a 19th century prince and Eastern Orthodox bishop of Montenegro. The drama-the "Paradise Lost" of Serbian literature- is about the early 18th century "ethnic cleansing" of Montenegrins who had converted to Islam.

As a ruler, Njegos did not pursue extreme anti-Muslim policies. But his poetry reverberates with profound enmity to Islam. He considers the struggle against it to be of cosmic significance, beyond considerations of ordinary morality. In macabre and beautiful verse, Njegos warns that the Christian and Muslim faiths will swim in blood; the faith which does not sink will have proved its superiority.

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Noel Malcolm's previous books include a biography of a twentieth-century Romani an violinist and composer, a volume engagingly called The Origins of English Nonsense, a history of Bosnia, and a life of a sixteenth-century Venetian heretic who studied rainbows. Since he seems to select his literary targets at random, it is tempting to dismiss Malcolm as a popularizer or charlatan. But in Kosovo: A Short History, Malcolm emerges as a talented amateur historian, trying hard -- the book has 1,154 endnotes and a bibliography in a dozen languages -- to produce a serious book about Serbia's southern province, with its almost 90 percent Albanian majority. He is only partly successful.

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Prospect Magazine, Issue 51, April 2000

Lament for England by Aleksa Djilas

After English pilots started dropping bombs on me I began to reconsider my Anglophilia

Aleksa Djilas is a writer living in Belgrade

Jorge luis borges noticed how English friendships begin with avoiding intimacies and are soon transformed into occasional exchanges of books and journals. I was an Anglophile long before I first arrived in England in the early 1970s-to discover with delight that the cliffs of Dover really were white and the police unarmed.

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Prospect Magazine, Issue 57, November 2000

Kostunica's shoes by Aleksa Djilas

Damn them. They had the revolution without me!

Aleksa Djilas is a Serbian writer

Last spring, when Nato bombs were falling, I was in Belgrade. This autumn, when Milosevic was falling, I was in Washington at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars. The Centre is heaven for research and the riches of the Library of Congress are at my disposal. But in my spacious office I felt left out and lonely when the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) triumphed in the elections. It really is impossible to live by email and telephone alone. My homesickness increased when the protests and strikes erupted and finally the federal parliament and the state television were stormed.

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On novelty and oblivion: What we can learn from dissidents under Communism

Belgrade, February-March, 2007

At the beginning of his essay “Of Vicissitude of Things,” Francis Bacon stresses the futility of all human endeavors: “… ‘There is no new thing upon the earth.’...all novelty is but oblivion…the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.” Who has not experienced such weariness? Everything changes but is eternally the same. Nothing is truly new – it only appears so because we have forgotten. And soon we realize this. Like the dead in Hades we drink from the river that makes us forget but, alas, oblivion is merely temporary, and novelty vanishes.

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       EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES

4th Annual Serbian-American Lecture: Of Novelty and Oblivion, What Can We Learn From Dissidents under Communism

Tuesday, April 10 2007

Event Summary

At the beginning of his essay “Of Vicissitude of Things,” Francis Bacon stresses the futility of all human endeavors: “… ‘There is no new thing upon the earth.’...all novelty is but oblivion…the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below.” Who has not experienced such weariness? Everything changes but is eternally the same. Nothing is truly new – it only appears so because we have forgotten. And soon we realize this. Like the dead in Hades we drink from the river that makes us forget but, alas, oblivion is merely temporary, and novelty vanishes.

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Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, Volume 9, Number 3, December 2007

REVIEW ARTICLE

The academic West and the Balkan test

ALEKSA DJILAS

SABRINA P. RAMET, Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates About the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005), 328 pp., ISBN 10: 0-521-61690-5 (pbk), L17.99

JOHN R. LAMPE, Balkans into Southeastern Europe: A Century of War and Transition (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2006), 338 pp., ISBN 10: 0-333-79347-1 (pbk), L16.99

A territorial dispute as subtle and ill humored as those forestalled by international law brought him up against Paul Kelly, the famous leader of another gang. The boundary line had been established by bullets and border patrol skirmishes. Eastman crossed the line late one night and was set upon by five of Kelly’s men. (Jorge Luis Borges, Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities)

Sabrina P. Ramet, a professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, has written a book which is most impressive in its scope. Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates About the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo is a discussion of more than 130 books, mostly in English but also in the languages of former Yugoslavia and a few in German and Italian, all listed at the beginning. It is divided into 13 chapters with titles that are meant to attract the attention not only of scholars but of all interested in former Yugoslavia, such as ‘Who’s to Blame, and for What? Rival Accounts of the War’ or ‘Milošević’s Place in History’ or ‘Debates about Intervention’.

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