ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the strategies employed by Miroslav Krleža as he sought to define a cultural politics for socialist Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. A mainstream interpretation suggests that Krleža served as a personified watershed against socialist realism and, in doing so, became one of the most important defenders of artistic freedom in Yugoslavia (Hawkesworth 2016, 84). This interpretation is not wrong, but it does impose a reductionist lens on Krleža’s positions. Rather than framing the issue through the binary opposition of “socialist realism” against “libertarian modernism,” it may be more productive to explore the complex interplay of “asynchronies” that shape Krleža’s argument. As will be demonstrated, the peculiarity of Yugoslavia’s position – and its consequent need for a specific cultural politics – was defined by Krleža as a temporal problem, a problem produced by the collision of different temporalities within an (ex-)“semi-colonial” (Krleža 1967, 70) revolutionary space.
