Rastko Petrovich: “Equal, so unequal to me” – Brothers at War

Abstract

The motif of fratricide and civil war has a concrete biographical basis in the cycle of poems Tužbalice i balade (Lamentations and Ballads), which Petrovich (1898-1949) wrote mainly in the last years of his life in American exile. In the autumn of 1944, his nephew Sreten Luković, a member of the Serbian fascist Ljotić movement, was killed in battle against the partisans. But the motif does not only appear in this posthumously published volume, it is omnipresent in Petrovich’s opus: from the poetry collection Otkrovenje (Revelation) to the travel writing Afrika and Ljudi govore (People Talk) to Dan šesti (The Sixth Day). Three texts are at the forefront of the analysis of this motif: the short story “Za kičevskoe, za makedonskoe” (“For Kichevo, for Macedonia”, 1921), the novel The Sixth Day in two parts (first part finished in 1935; second part written in the USA) and Lamentations and Ballads. These texts show that Petrovich interprets fratricide (as the most tragic manifestation of human aggression) in the spirit of the avant-garde’s cyclical concept of time. He condemns warlike aggression, but sees the individual as ultimately powerless at the mercy of human nature, reflected in a age-old construction of the (male) hero. In this respect, Petrovich appears to be the antithesis of Miroslav Krlezha, who sees war as an instrument of imperialist and capitalist interest groups that will lose their background only in a classless society.