TIME IN THE NOVELS OF MILOS CRNJANSKI - Nottingham eTheses

CHAPTER ONE
between his ceneration and earlier movements corresponds
more to another modernist version of time, which
Poccioli describes as
a humanistic version of the notion of
modernity, for example, conceived of as a
return, at once spontaneous and willed,
to eternal values. lone forcotten or
buried but which a reborn or renewed
historical memory makes once acain
present (63).
This duality in Crnjanski's views towards history and
time is characteristic of his whole outlook on the
question of time and narrative in his novels.
Durinc the twenties and thirties Crnjanski
Published the two early novels which form part of the
Subject matter of this thesis, and other loncer prose
works too. Dnevnik 0 Carnoj,vi6u is written as a
diary of the memories of a soldier returned home from
the First World War.
His mother has died. he has
tUberculosis. his marriace has failed, and the
confessional tone of his diary is an attempt to come to
terms with his life and its meaninc_
He recalls events
and scenes from the war. and from much further back in
time. laverinc his memories with references to Serbian
historv and mytho~oCY.
His recollections are presented
as a chaotic series of memories and thouchts with no
chronolocical order, but there are suscestions of
Personal -and private connections between the disparate
memories in the narrator's mind.
This contributes to
the dreamy nature of much of the narrative, and to the
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