Now, Now : Dimitrije Mitrinović in London and His Practical Approach to World Peace in the 1930s
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Born in Herzegovina, to Serb parents, Dimitrije Mitrinović spent his youth studying philosophy, learning languages and traditional Serbian poetry. From 1906 he began pubslihing poetry of his own as well as critical and philosophical texts in Bosanska Vila, a Serb cultural and literary review of the early 1900s in Sarajevo. According to his biographer Andrew Rigby, under Mitrinović's influence, the magazine, initially focused on cultural and artistic tradition of Serbs in the region, became a space for the promotion of modernist art and literature. Mitrinović corresponded with some important European artists and intellectuals of his time very early on, having also studied in Munich and Rome. Already in 1910s he befriended and lectured on Wassily Kandinsky and Ivan Meštrović, as well as corresponded with Frederik van Eeden, Erich Gutkind, and Alfred Adler to name but a few. In this paper, however, I focus on his work of 1930s in London (where he moved before the First World War to escape the Austro-Hungarian mobilisation), especially his 1933 column "World Affairs" in the New Britain magazine. While the first of these articles, all signed M. M. Cosmoi, begins: "Certainly, life; and certainly, future...", in my paper I argue that Mitrinović was not just a visionary, but a person who paid the greatest attention to the way how the present could be used to influence the future. Not only did he propose a new world order based on federalism and peace, he worked hard to realise it in practice, gathering various influential figures around him and constantly creating new organisations and initiatives for the advancement of humanity. |
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