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Response: Camp Literature: Archetype for Dissent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

Oskar Gruenwald
Oskar Gruenwald*
Affiliation:
Santa Monica, California
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Extract

I would like to thank the Slavic Review, and its fair-minded editor, Sidney Monas, for allowing me to break the silence on certain taboo themes and respond to critics—civilities practiced mostly in the breach in the societies we study. Due to space limitations, I shall respond fully to Robert Hayden, who raises many issues, apart from the problem of definition, and trust that in the process I may encompass also Matt Oja's thoughtful remarks. Hayden's critique of my article on Yugoslav camp literature is based on two premises, which he fails to prove: that camp literature is not well defined and hence includes a good deal of official writings, or, alternatively, that it lacks internal consistency; and that the very concept of camp literature “misrepresents the political and intellectual currents in the country.” Much of his commentary is an ad hominem argument. Curiously, much of it, even if inadvertently, substantiates my central thesis: Yugoslav prison and camp literature represents a catalyst in the current processes of liberalization, democratization, and humanization in both politics and culture in post-Tito Yugoslavia.

Type
Ongoing Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 280 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

1. Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbignicw K., Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966)Google Scholar.

2. Gruenwald, Oskar, The Yugoslav Search for Man: Marxist Humanism in Contemporary Yugoslavia (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1983) 218 Google Scholar. This book is distributed by IIR, 2828 3rd St. #11. Santa Monica, CA 90405, for $35. See also Danilo Kiš, “The State, the Imagination and the Censored I,” New York Times Book Review (3 November 1985), 3, 39, and Drakulić, Slavenka, “Comrade Inspector Calls: A Chat With My Censor,” Nation (12 March 1988), 336–338 Google Scholar.

3. Human Rights in Yugoslavia, eds. Gruenwald, Oskar and Roscnblum-Cale, Karen (New York: Irvinglon, 1986), 495–558 Google Scholar; Amnesty International. Yugoslavia: Prisoners of Conscience (London: AI 1985), 6, 14.

4. A case in point is Vladimir Mijanović, one of the “Belgrade Six,” who finally made his way to Canada and the United States, participating in a symposium on Yugoslavia: The Failure of “Democratic” Communism (New York: Freedom House, 1987).

5. CDFTE, “Recommendation for the Establishment of Political Democracy in SFRY,” Belgrade, 25 November 1987, translated in CADDY Bulletin, no. 45 (January 1988), appendix. 1–4.

6. On the psychological reasons why some western intellectuals admit only minor blemishes, if any, in Communist systems, see Hollander, Paul, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Beloff, Nora. Tito's Flawed Legacy: Yugoslavia and the West, 1939–84 (London: Gollancz, 1985)Google Scholar. Beloff, a noted British journalist, was expelled from Yugoslavia in 1984, and her book banned in 1985.

7. Ljubomir Tadić, “Islina i ideologija socijalizma” [The truth and the ideology of socialism], Theoria [Belgrade] 25, no. 3–4 (1982): 211. 222. For biographical sketches of Tadić and other Praxis theorists, sec my contributions to Biographical Dictionary of Neo-Marxism, ed. Robert A. Gorman (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985).

8. For reviews of recent American studies on Yugoslavia by Lászlo Sekelj, a Yugoslav social scientist, see Telos, no. 71 (Spring 1987): 200–207.