HOMELAND AND FOREIGN LAND: CHERRY TREE AND POETRY OF MILOŠ CRNJANSKI

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Miloš Crnjanski became familiar with the poetry of the East in Paris, towards the end of the 1920s, when he gathered material for his anthology of Chinese and Japanese poems. This was the moment when cherry blossom, not cherry fruit, entered his writings. While preparing and editing two collections of translated poetry Antologija kineske lirike (1923) and Pesme starog Japana (1928), he also wrote poems featuring the image of cherry blossom as an important symbolic topos. In his poems Sumatra (1920), Poslanica iz Pariza (1920), Povorka (1921), Serbia (1925) and Stražilovo (1921-1929) cherry trees appear to carry a particular symbolic message, especially the blossom. It creates a light, translucent, ethereal and often even mobile poetic image. This image blends the light and the dark, joy and sorrow, physical and metaphysical, life and death. The cherry tree consumed by fog creates an unusual picture in which everything simmers down in the arms of the nature. It may well be the very heart of the metaphysical, transcendental world of Miloš Crnjanski. The cherry entered his poetics from the East, from the lands he had never visited. At the same time, it created a real bond with his native Srem which he had left years before. It was connected to a real image of a foreign land, like Tuscany, where the poet was but a stranger. We can say that cherry blossom connects three spatial entities: the far-away homeland left behind by the poet; the foreign land where he lives as a stranger; and a distant landscape he had never visited.

A NETWORKED AVANT-GARDE: SERBIAN, FRENCH AND SPANISH SURREALISTS

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The surrealist avant-garde movement has set the ideological and cultural globalization processes into the very heart of their individual and collective research, relentlesly erasing geopolitical as well as artistic, cultural, linguistic and psychological borders alike. The cooperation and exchange of ideas among French, Spanish and Serbian surrealists was rooted in their personal aquaintances and personalised contacts starting from the 1920s. From 1923 to 1928, a rich network of contacts was built, while the widest and most prolific communication took place from 1929 to 1932, during the years of publishing the almanach Nemoguće–L’impossible (1930) and the magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde (1931-1932) (Surrealism here and today). Surrealist have fully used the mailing in order to internationalize their movement. In addition to letters and postcards, almost daily they exchanged telegrams and packages that arrived at their resident addresses – those dispersed throughout Europe, but also the ones found within quarters of the same cities. This intranet established along the lines of French/Spanish/Serbian cooperation, functionally removed Serbian surrealists from the geographical and cultural margines into a much wider net of communication that allowed a free flow of creative information, which altogether, whether coming from the centre or margines, offered equal participation in profiling globale contours of the surrealist avant-garde ideology.