TIME IN THE NOVELS OF MILOS CRNJANSKI - Nottingham eTheses

CHAPTER ONE
stru~~le
of the earlv Romantics.
The connection between modernism and the Romantics
has been commented on in the West too.
Edmund Wilson
described modern svmbolist poetrv as' "not merelv a
de~eneration
or an elaboration of Romanticism. but
rather a counterpart to it. a second flood of the same
tide" (54).
In the approach of the modernists Bradburv
and McFarlane point to a similar link in that "the
intense subjectivitv of the Romantic school remains
central to the modern arts" (55).
For Crnjanski.
Romanticism was a term which was evocative of the new in
Serbian literature. a reaction a~ainst
the dead hand of
lan~ua~e
as practised bv manv of the pre-war ~eneration.
When speakin~
about his affinitv with the Romantics in
an interview with Branimir Cosi6 in 1926 he remarked:
Naloj je knji!evnosti potreban pre sve~a
jedan dubok romantizam. To zna~i
vra6anje njenim knji!evnicima. od
sociolo~a. filolo~a i u~a koji su
avansovali u poznavaoce potreba srpsko~
naroda (56).
Our literature needs above .11 a deep
Romanticism. That means a return to our
writers. awav from the sociolo~ists.
'. philolo~ists and peda~o~ues who have been
projected as the experts of the needs of
the Serbian people.
Crnjanski's call is for literature to be taken out of
the handS of its critics. who have no feelin~
for the
intrinsic value of literature. His call is for a return
to writers as the source of inspiration and meanin~
of
literarV works. and for it to be taken out of the hands
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