TIME IN THE NOVELS OF MILOS CRNJANSKI - Nottingham eTheses

CHAPTER ONE
movements at the end of the First World War.
Fo11ow1n~
the publication of his poem "Sumatra" and the
accompanyin~ essay "Obja~njenje 'Sumatre'''. his views on
art. aesthetics. and his personal literary style became
known as sumatraizam (sumatraism).
He was not the
only fi~ure
to have a personal style associated with his
name; there was Rade Drainac's hipnizam and Ljubomir
Mici6's zenitizam.
However. unlike the others. whose
styles tended to be short-lived and associated with the
PUb1ication"of one or other little review. "the term
sumatraism remained associated with Crnjanski throu~hout
his literary career. Durin~ that period its
implications underwent chan~e.
but these tend to have
been chan~es
in emphasis rather than fundamental chan~es
in the views which he expressed durin~
the period of
Serbian modernism.
Thus far. it has been stressed that Crnjanski's
early work was concerned with the all that was new in
Serbian literature. His search for the new continued
throu~hout
his career, but" became tempered with a
respect for the traditions of Serbian literature. This
other aspect of sumatraism has to be seen in the li~ht
of the ways in which the Serbian modernists used the
terms Romanticism and lyric. The term Romanticism
causes particular problems because of the lonsevity of
the tradition amon~st Serbian poets, which ~ave it a
currency even into the 1890s. and which led to the
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