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Rebecca
West’s
“Constantine
the Poet”
by Michael D. Nicklanovich
March/April 1999, vol. XV, no. 4
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A Serbian girl wearing a folk costume from a region
near Belgrade, 1930's. Courtesy of the Dorothy Lakich Collection.
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The fascists’
bombs were falling on her own country when one of the Serbs’ greatest admirers
wrote: “Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped nearby,
I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb.’ ”
For three generations, American
Serbs, Serbs around the world, and others who have loved the Serbian ideal
have read, reread and now are again reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb
and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia, the great English novelist-journalist’s
1941 masterpiece. This work is much more than the travelogue it appears
and, much like the Serbian ideal of freedom, has refused to go away.
Not only
has her greatest work continued to be reprinted, but a number of biographies
of Rebecca West also have been published recently, both because of her
increasing recognition as one of the 20th century’s greatest English women
writers and because of the current Yugoslav crisis which, in many ways
and to many people, seems eerily familiar, a replay of the disintegration
of Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II and its invasion in 1941.
West’s
authorized biographer, Victoria Glendinning, wrote that “it was the poetry
and courage of the Serbian character which chiefly caught Rebecca West’s
infatuated imagination.” Indeed, West’s guide, the man who took her on
an intimate journey through Yugoslavia, is “Constantine the poet” who seems
to be an incarnation of those ideals—her teacher and spiritual companion,
her muse, and a delightful creature of her imagination leading her in a
kolowhere
the dance and the dancer and the poet and the poetry are inseparable.
Many thought
that the story of Constantine, a Serbian-born Jew who was baptized in the
Serbian Orthodox church, and his German wife, “Gerda,” who hates the Slav
and the Jew in her own husband, was a purely fictitious tale woven into
West’s travelogue for propaganda purposes, but it turns out there was a
“real Constantine,” who was a living Serbian hero and a poet. His parents
were Jews from Poland.
It was
the journalist, Stoyan Pribichevich, who—in his critical review of West’s
book in The Nationon June 8, 1941—revealed that “Constantine” was
Stanislav Vinaver, the press bureau chief for the Yugoslav government under
Prime Minister Milan Stojadinovic in 1936-1938. That was the exact time
that Rebecca West made several visits to the country, and those visits
became the basis of Black Lamb and Grey Falconwhich is written as
one journey.
Pribichevich
was a critic of the Yugoslav government of the 1930’s, and he believed:
“The basic mistake Miss West made was to accept as her sole cicerone (talkative
guide) through Yugoslavia, Stanislav Vinaver, alias ‘Constantine,’ a man
who earned his living as a censor in Stoyadinovich’s Press Bureau...” It
is true that Vinaver’s life was caught up in the tumultuous 20th-century
history of both Serbia and the first Yugoslavia. It is also true that he
has been immortalized in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
His story, as told in West’s book, continues to be a subject of literary
studies.
Forty-five
years later, in a 1986 article in the South Atlantic Review, Clare
Colquitt described him provocatively: “Of the Slavs whom West knows and
loves, it is her friend Constantine, ‘a true poet’ who ‘knows all about
things he knows nothing about,’ who most clearly embodies the Slavic Lebensfreude(joy
of life) West celebrates, as well as the ‘compulsion to suicide’ she decries.
A chief character in West’s travels, Constantine is both hero and victim,
Churchill and Chamberlain.”
In The
New Yorkerof October 25, 1941, Clifton Fadiman reviewed West’s book
and recognized the importance of Constantine’s story in the work: “A certain
narrative thread is provided by the astonishing and presumably non-fictional
figure of Constantine, a Serb poet who accompanies Miss West and her husband...on
most of their travels. Constantine, a great talker, a Niagara of a man,
starts out as a cocky Serb patriot, a self-confident genius, a polyhistor.
“As the
book progresses, he gradually wilts and softens under the hammer blows
of his fiendish wife, Gerda, a pure Nazi type, though she is not aware
of it herself. The disintegration of Constantine may be said to be the
‘plot’ of the book...”
West gave
Stanislav Vinaver the alias of “Constantine” likely for the early Eastern
Roman Emperor who tolerated Christianity and built the great city of Constantinople.
In her work, the name was symbolic of the Byzantine and Orthodox Christian
world. There is no doubt that West’s portrait of Constantine (Stanislav)
is the most colorful ever written, but one still questions how much the
real Stanislav resembled or differed from Rebecca West’s “Constantine,
the poet,” the character who occupies, in small or large part, nearly a
thousand pages of her 1,150-page book.
The Real Constantine
Stanislav Vinaver
was born in Sabac, Serbia, on January 3, 1891. He was the son of Josif
and Ruza (nee Ruzic) Vinaver. After emigrating to Sabac in the early 1880’s
from the Russian part of Poland, his father had become a prominent Serbian
physician. Rebecca West described his father as “a Jewish doctor of revolutionary
sympathies, who fled from Russian Poland ...and became one of the leaders
of the medical profession...”
West wrote
that Constantine had told her that “his mother was also Polish-Jewish”
and a “famous musician,” a concert pianist from the homeland of Chopin.
Apparently, she had passed on her love of music to her son who told West
that he had studied music in Paris at the Sorbonne with the noted Polish
pianist Wanda Landowska (1877-1959) before the First World War.
After Stanislav
finished high school in Belgrade, Yugoslav sources concur that he studied
mathematics in Paris at the Sorbonne. While Dr. Drasko Redjep of Novi Sad
wrote that the young Vinaver studied music in addition to mathematics in
Paris, the character “Constantine” told West that he had studied philosophy
under Henri Bergson, and there is little question that Stanislav was a
disciple of Bergson, the most famous French philosopher of Vinaver’s student
days who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
Rebecca
West’s journey and her overriding interest in Constantine’s views of life
are related to the philosophical debate which developed around Bergson—the
creative vs. the practical. Bergson attempted to prove, in powerful and
highly figurative language, that ultimate reality is an elan vital,
a vital force or impulse which can only be grasped by intuition. His view
went against the dominant school of French philosophy which held that reality
had a logical or geometric structure which could be seen through the reasoning
of the scientist and logician. This philosophical debate pervades Rebecca
West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falconand her portrayal of the Serbian
ideal.
Almost
everything about “Constantine” was Bergsonian, and West wrote that “when
he was deeply moved” he almost always spoke of “the days when he was a
student under Bergson.” Of his old mentor he said: “...it was to miss the
very essence in him to regard him only as a philosopher. He was a magician
who had taken philosophy as his subject matter. He did not analyze phenomena,
he uttered incantations that invoked understanding...we were the sorcerer’s
apprentices.”
Constantine
claimed to recognize Bergson’s sorcery as the result of his own childhood
experiences “...in my town, which is Shabats, there were three houses in
a row, and in one house lived my father who was the greatest doctor in
our country, and in the next there lived a priest who was the greatest
saint in my country, and in the next there lived an old woman who was the
greatest witch in my country, and when I was a little boy I lived in the
first and I went as I would into the other two, for the holy man and the
witch liked me very much, and I tell you in each of these houses there
was magic...” When he first met West in the mid-1930’s, Vinaver was likely
working on a memoir of his hometown which had been ravaged during foreign
occupation in World War I (1914-1918).
Even before
World War I, when he was in his early twenties, his first book of poetry,
Mjeca,
and a collection of stories, Price koje su izgubile ravnotezu(Stories
which Have Lost their Balance), were published in Belgrade in 1911 and
in 1913 and had established his reputation as a brilliant young writer,
or “Wunderkind,” as he described himself referring to his
youth before “the war came along and changed everything.”
World War I
Biographic
sketches of Vinaver say he was a volunteer in the Serbian army and served
from 1914 to 1919. West also wrote that Constantine “fought in the Great
War very gallantly, for he is a man of great physical courage, and to him
Serbian history is his history, his life is part of the life of the Serbian
people.” West regarded him as a Serb “...by adoption only, yet quite completely,
a Serb.”
One of
his personal war stories related in West’s book might have occurred during
the Battle of Cer Mountain on the heights above his hometown of Sabac.
It was a tragic and horrifying tale of fraternal strife:
“There
was a hill in Serbia that we were fighting for all night with the Austrian
troops. Sometimes we had it, and sometimes they had it, and at the end
we wholly had it, and when they charged us we cried to them to surrender,
and through the night they answered, ‘The soldiers of the Empire do not
surrender,’ and it was in our own tongue they spoke. So we knew they were
our brothers the Croats, and because they were our brothers we knew that
they meant it, and so they came against us, and we had to kill them, and
in the morning they all lay dead, and they were all our brothers.”
While serving
as a physician in the Serbian army, Stanislav’s father died in the terrible
typhus epidemic of 1915. His mother was thrown out of her home by enemy
forces and served as a nurse until the end of the war.
Vinaver’s
native Sabac lies on the right bank of the Sava River on the edge of the
plains of Macva not far from where the Drina joins the Sava. It was right
in the path of the first Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia in 1914, and
the enemy occupied it briefly before it was liberated by Serbian counterattack.
It was again occupied in the second Austro-Hungarian offensive of 1915
and again liberated by Serbs following the Battle of Kolubara River. After
the Austro-Hungarians were joined by the Germans and the Bulgarians in
the triple attack on Serbia in late 1915, the Austrians occupied the city
until the end of the war.
Sabac suffered
severely during its Austro-Hungarian occupation, and the enemy executed
many of its townspeople. The town’s suffering is immortalized in the nearby
village of Prnjavor where there is a memorial chapel with a tomb dedicated
to those who died in the wars of 1912-1918. Rista Bocaric’s murals on the
chapel walls depict the executions and hangings of local citizens and the
burning and pillaging of villages in the vicinity.
In one
of his poignant reminiscences about his hometown, Constantine tells West
and her husband: “In Shabats we were all of us quite truly people. There
were not many people who spoke alike and looked alike as there are in Paris
and London and Berlin. We were all of us ourselves and different. I think
it was that we were all equal and so we could not lift ourselves up by
trying to look like a class that was of good repute. We could only be remarkable
by following our own qualities to the furthest. So it is in all Serbian
towns, so it was most of all in Shabats, because we are a proud town, we
have always gone our own way.”
Then he
told of an incident in which King Peter I, visiting Sabac, asked a farmer
how he was doing. The farmer, trusting the king, confessed that he was
doing very well with smuggling and the pig trade. Constantine observed
that, though the Serb might break the law, he would die for the king. He
continued: “In the war we were a very brave town. The French decorated
us as they decorated Verdun.”
The fate
of the Vinaver family during the First World War was not unusual for most
Serbs. Stanislav’s sister had died of tuberculosis before the war, and
his mother, who was alone after her husband and son went to serve, was
notified of her husband’s death in 1915 but did not know the fate of her
son until she learned that he had been sent to Russia in 1916.
After the
Albanian retreat, Vinaver was one of the Serbian officers sent from Corfu
to Russia in order to organize a volunteer division made up of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes willing to fight against Austria-Hungary and participate in
the liberation of the South Slavic lands. Most of the South Slav volunteers
were prisoners-of-war, draftees who had been captured by the Russians or
had defected.
Most of
the Serbs and many of the Croats and Slovenes of the Volunteer Corps were
transported from Odessa to Salonika where they joined the Serbian army
in the summer of 1917 and, with their French and English allies, fought
in the Monastir offensive the next summer.
In Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon, Constantine introduced West to two Yugoslav friends
who had been with him in Russia. One was Croatian, the other Slavonian.
All three had been together at the fortress of Sts. Peter and Paul in St.
Petersburg, and the Slavonian had been imprisoned with Stanislav. Both
had been condemned to death, and the Slavonian told West that notre
bon petit Constanin(our good little Constantine) had in fact been sentenced
to die twice.
After the War
Perhaps it
was during the Monastir offensive that Stanislav became familiar with Macedonia,
but a Jewish biographic source, written before his death in 1955, states
that he was once a teacher in Skoplje. For certain, between the world wars,
from 1919 to 1941, Vinaver worked as a journalist for the Belgrade newspaper
Vremena(The
Times), for Radio Belgrade and for the press bureau. At various times he
served as a book and music reviewer and as an art critic.
In 1920,
another collection of his poetry, Varos zlih volsebnika(The Town
of Evil Magicians), was published in Belgrade, and the same year his Pantologija
novije srpske pelengirike(The Pantology of New Serbian Peasant Trousers)
appeared. He wrote essays in addition to poetry and critical reviews. Redjep
described Stanislav’s verse: “Vinaver’s poetry, from his first book of
poems entitled Mjeca, maintains a diffusion of light, grotesque
turns and broken rhythms.”
Vinaver
was likely best-known for his parodies of Yugoslav authors, and he was
considered a very good critic. Although his poetry was little translated
and he has not been accorded a high place in the history of Serbian poetry,
he was well-known by almost all the Yugoslav writers of his day, and he
had a definite influence on the course of Serbian literature in the interwar
period.
He had
a good sense of humor and often wrote in the satirical vein. Two more of
his books, Gromobran svemira(Universal Lightning Rod) and Nova
pantologija pelengirike(The New Pantology of Peasant Trousers) were
published in the early 1920’s. By the mid-1920’s Stanislav’s literary reputation
was well established.
In 1925
he married the German Lutheran, Elsa, whom Rebecca West called “Gerda”
in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. It may be pure fiction, but West
explained that one of the few things the couple appeared to have had in
common was a love of the German Romantics. The real Stanislav and Elsa
Vinaver had two sons, Vuk and Konstantin.
About Elsa,
the biographer Glendinning believes: “...it is doubtful whether she was
as terrible as Constantine’s wife Gerda in the book, where she became a
hate-figure, personifying insensitivity, stupidity, and everything Rebecca
feared and disliked about the German mentality of the late 1930’s. Vinaver’s
German wife had, in her turn, reason to dislike the dynamic foreigner who
took up so much of her husband’s time, for Vinaver fell romantically in
love with Rebecca, as he made clear in an elegant letter in French written
after her final departure from Belgrade.”
Early in
his marriage, Stanislav completed two more books, Cuvari sveta(The
Caretakers of the World), in 1926 and Goc gori, jedna jugoslovenska
simfonija(The Drum is Burning: A Yugoslav Symphony) in 1927, but it
would be almost a decade before his next book appeared.
Vinaver visited
Germany frequently in conjunction with his work and spoke excellent German.
In the late 1920’s he was there representing King Alexander in contract
negotiations with a German firm to make the mosaics for the walls of the
Karageorgeevich memorial church of St. George at Oplenac. These were copies
of medieval frescoes in Old Serbia and Macedonia, and Vinaver may not have
been totally pleased with them. In the book, Constantine warned West and
her husband “...so you will make no error at Oplenats, you will take these
mosaics as an indication of what you will see in Macedonia, in South Serbia,
not for themselves. All the Macedonian frescoes are painted, and these
have been copied in mosaic...a fresco that is meant to be painted and is
worked in mosaic is a mongrel...”
Stanislav Vinaver and Rebecca
West
By the spring
of 1936, when Rebecca West met Vinaver on her first trip to Yugoslavia,
he held an important post in the government as the Secretary of the Yugoslav
Central Press Bureau. The British Council invited West to lecture in Yugoslavia
because she was herself an important journalist as well as a novelist of
note who had written articles and reviews for The New York Times,The
New York Herald-Tribuneand The New Yorkerin addition to pieces
for British newspapers and periodicals.
West recalls
her first impression of the voluble journalist: “The first time I was in
Yugoslavia, Constantine took me down to Macedonia so that I could give
a broadcast about it, and when we arrived at Skoplje, I thought I would
have to run away, because he had talked to me the whole time during the
journey from Belgrade, which had lasted for twelve hours, and I had felt
obliged to listen...”
She found
Vinaver physically unattractive, but she valued his brilliant scholarship
and teaching abilities. As a well-known and important official of the government,
he had access to all places, and he had many interesting friends. Unquestionably
he was her single most important “resource person,” guiding her not only
through Yugoslavia but also into its most interesting history with his
tremendous and infectious exuberance.
West wrote:
“I never heard anybody else in Yugoslavia speak well of Stoyadinovitch
except Constantine.” In the book, he laments, “Nobody outside Yugoslavia
understands us. We have a very bad press, particularly with high-minded
people, who hate us because we are mystics and not just intelligent, as
they are.” He goes on in this vein to complain of the Parisian journalist,
Genevieve Tabouis: “She suspects us of being anti-democratic in our natures,
when we Serbs are nothing but democratic, but cannot be because the Italians
and Germans are watching us to say, ‘Ah, here is Bolshevism, we must come
in and save you from it.’ And really she is not being high-minded when
she makes this mistake, she makes it because she hates the Prime Minister,
Mr. Stoyadinovitch; and it is not that she hates him because he is a bad
man, she hates him because they are opposites.”
In West’s
private letters which were recently released following the death of Anthony
West—her estranged son from her affair with H.G. Wells—she had written
to her husband, the banker Henry Andrews, and described her rebuff of Vinaver’s
physical advances in Macedonia. The author of a 1996 Rebecca West biography,
Carl Rollyson, suggests that her letter “provided a cover and served as
a diversionary tactic” for the fact that she “had resumed a romance with
an old roue, Antoine Bibesco, during her evenings in Belgrade.”
One finds
it hard to imagine that West could have remembered so much of what “Constantine”
said, but she did keep a journal, and his remarks were almost always striking.
The fact that he loved West was an inspiration to him and her as well.
In contrasting himself with professional tour guides who pay attention
to detail and the whole, he said: “We can be responsible for what we love,
our families and our countries, and the causes we think just, but where
we do not love we cannot muster the necessary attention.”
On her
second visit to Yugoslavia in the spring of 1937, Rebecca West brought
her husband along almost as a chaperon. As Fadiman noted, she seems to
have “generously” put the “profoundest remarks” in Henry Andrews’ mouth.
This raises the question of whether she put any words in Stanislav’s.
The places
in which they sound alike, however, are in his description of the philosopher
Bergson and in her characterization of Bishop Nikolai, but it must be remembered
that both she and Vinaver were romantics who bordered on the mystical and
sought out people of great vitality. These were the very characteristics
which West most admired in “Constantine.”
Although
there are three guides in Black Lamb Grey Falcon, West wrote little
of the other two. One was “Valetta,” a Dalmatian professor of mathematics
at the University of Zagreb with some Croatian separatist sentiment, the
other “Marko Gregorievitch,” a Croatian journalist and Yugoslavist. She
writes mainly of their arguments with Constantine.
Valetta,
who is a critic of Belgrade corruption and the lack of Croatian representation
in the government, raises Constantine’s ire. Constantine berates the Croatians
for their lack of Slavic identification and preference for Austrian identity
and for their lack of loyalty to Yugoslavia and their constant criticism
of the government.
Stoyan
Pribichevich’s review criticized West for the lack of a balanced treatment
of the country: “The Serbs have monopolized all Miss West’s love—and they
well deserve it. But with the zeal of the enamored, Miss West turns on
anybody who may reasonably or unreasonably disagree with the Serbs. The
Croats, for instance, she dislikes wholesale, from beginning to end. The
Slovenes...she mentions on three out of the 1,150 pages. There is something
odd about English women: when they become interested in the Balkans, they
are more partisan than the Balkanites themselves. And just as Miss Edith
Durham was a violent hater of Serbs, Miss Rebecca West is a merciless critic
of non-Serbs.”
Pribichevich
held Stanislav Vinaver at least partially responsible for the distortion.
After revealing Constantine’s true identity and calling Stanislav a censor,
he continued his attack on the press bureau official: “‘Constantine’ was
a ‘writer and a poet,’ as Miss West calls him. But he was first of all
Stoyadinovich’s official; second a talker; third, a writer; and fourth,
a thinker. So that Miss West’s elaborate political analysis of Yugoslavia
is what the Press Bureau wanted her to say...”
Pribichevich’s
article was a pre-publication review appearing in The Nationon June
8, 1941, after Yugoslavia had just disintegrated and been overrun by the
Nazis. The book came off the presses in the fall of 1941 in New York and
early in 1942 in London. West told Glendinning that Britain’s declaration
of war on Germany in September of 1939 changed not only the ending of the
book but its whole spirit and intention. West especially rewrote the epilogue
with those events that the book “preternaturally predicted” having come
to pass between 1939 and 1941.
After citing
several of West’s errors and distortions and calling her generally naive,
Pribichevich asked “...what good does it do at this time to rake up this
unpleasant past?” Then he closed saying that, in spite of its distortions,
“Rebecca West’s book is a magnificent piece of writing. Her pages pour
over you sometimes like an irresistible torrent, sometimes like a monotonous
drizzle... Reading it, you actually see, smell, hear and touch as well;
and you experience an intense sensual joy.”
Those last
three words sum up much of what Rebecca found in Yugoslavia and in Constantine,
especially, as well as in others. That her words evoked that feeling in
the critical Pribichevich is a measure of her success.
Fadiman
in his post-publication review of 1941 also saw “a little too much of Constantine”
as well as “a little too much of everything in the book. Unless one loves
Yugoslavia, the Serbs and ‘Constantine, the poet’ as their representative,
the huge tome—whose former two volumes are now combined in one—is difficult
reading. Although West did recreate at least one of their political discussions,
she mostly avoids his politics and describes the poet as an extraordinary
human being following his heart. Much of her most poetic prose in the book
appears in describing him.”
West and Constantine in Yugoslavia
In Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon, West explores the initial reaction of an upper
class English woman to her guide. She first describes Constantine as she
and her husband are getting off the train in Zagreb: “Constantine, the
poet, a Serb, that is to say a Slav member of the Orthodox Church from
Serbia.” She wrote that he had “a head like the best-known satyr in the
Louvre, and an air of vine leaves about the brow, though he drinks little.
He is perpetually drunk on what comes out of his mouth, not what goes into
it. He talks incessantly. In the morning he comes out of his bedroom in
the middle of a sentence, and at night he backs into it, so that he can
just finish one more sentence. Automatically he makes silencing gestures
while he speaks, just in case somebody should take it into his head to
interrupt.”
However,
there is much more than just a saving grace about Constantine, a quality
which overrides the first impression. As West begins to take a deeper interest,
she explains: “Nearly all his talk is good, and sometimes it runs along
in a coloured shadow show, like Heine’s Florentine Nights, and sometimes
it crystallizes into a little story the essence of hope or love or
regret, like a Heine lyric. Of all human beings I have ever met he is the
most like Heine: and since Heine was the most Jewish of writers it follows
that Constantine is Jew as well as Serb...”
She said
the journalist spoke beautiful French which had “preserved in it all the
butterfly brilliance of his youth” when he studied in Paris. He was a spell-binder
who could come up with the “perfect phrase,” as “his hands grope in the
air before him as if he were unloosing the neckcloth of the strangling
truth.”
In Zagreb
he advised West and Henry that the Old Town, whose villas and mansions
were built in the Viennese style of the 18th and 19th centuries, should
be seen in the evening “for in the walled garden before the house we will
see iron chairs and tables with nobody sitting at them, and you will recognize
at a glance that the person who is not sitting there is straight out of
Turgeniev. You cannot look at Austria as it was the day before yesterday,
at us Slavs as we were yesterday, by broad daylight.”
The first
place where they spend some time is Sarajevo where the mingling of the
various cultures of Yugoslavia was most vivid. Constantine said that as
a Serb he had felt that Sarajevo was “a Slav city in captivity” during
its Austrian rule. He had come to think of it as his own and, as a veteran
of the Serbian army of World War I, he believed that he and his fellow
soldiers had fought not only for Serbia but also for the liberation of
their South Slavic brethren from foreign domination.
He appreciated
the Muslim contributions to Yugoslav culture, particularly the “conception
of love which made us as small boys read the Arabian Nightswith
such attention,” and he introduced West and her husband to the Bosnian
songs of lovesickness or sevdah. He explained that this image of
love which demands secrecy and danger was “too beautiful.” He said it gave
Sarajevo a special vitality and imparted to the Bosnians “a sensuality
that is also a mysticism.”
In the
city of the famous assassination, where Gavrilo Princip shot the visiting
Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on St. Vitus Day (Vidovdan) in
1914, Constantine spoke of the inevitability of World War I and how
unfair it was that “the little ones”—as he called the youthful patriots
who shot the Austrian archduke—and the Serbs had been blamed for causing
the war. According to him, Austria-Hungary was spoiling for the fight and
had been for years. They nearly had gone to war with Serbs in 1912 over
the Albanian question in the First Balkan War.
Constantine
believed that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was oppressing its majority
Slav population, feared independent Serbia because of its potential as
an ally to the unhappy Slavs inside the empire. He despaired that Western
Europe did not understand: “Behind the veil of our incomprehensible language
and behind the veil of lies, the Austrians and Hungarians have told about
us and our wrongs, the cause of the war—more than that, the reason for
the war—is eternally a mystery to the vast majority of the people who took
part in it and were martyrized by it. Perhaps that is something for us
South Slavs to know, a secret that is hidden from everybody else.”
Constantine
did much more than simply show the English couple the sights. He knew that
West was after insights. After he and his Bosnian friends had explained
the favoritism that the Austrians had shown toward the Muslims during the
occupation between 1908 and 1918, he took her and her husband to a Sarajevo
reception for the Turkish Prime Minister Ismet Ineune and his War Minister
Kazim Ozalip.
The crowd
did not applaud the Turkish officials when they spoke of the necessity
of maintaining the unity of the Yugoslav state to prevent the aggressive
powers from taking over the Balkan Peninsula. Accompanied by the Yugoslav
War Minister, General Marits, the ministers had been sent by the Stojadinovic
government to deliver this message to the Bosnian Muslims who, on the eve
of World War II, felt that Austrian rule had been the next-best thing to
the restoration of Turkish Empire.
In his
conversations with Muslims and Croats who were critical of either the government
or of the entire Yugoslav idea, Constantine said repeatedly: “...they think
that all the time they must die for Yugoslavia, and they cannot understand
why we do not ask them to do that, but now we ask another thing, that they
should live and be happy.” At this very critical time, Vinaver’s job was
to
keep the lid on things, and he constantly insisted that anybody who criticized
the government did not believe in the Yugoslav ideal.
West describes
a restaurant scene in which a young rebel poet, “dressed in the style of
a French Romantic,” like the ghost of Constantine, upbraided him for abandoning
the opposition and joining the government. Constantine replies that
“for the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul”
he had “given up the deep peace of being in opposition” and sighs: “Dear
God, I wish the young would be more agreeable to my generation, for we
suffered very much in the war, and if it were not for us they would still
be slaves under the Austrians.” Perhaps this incident is why, as Pribichevich
noted, Constantine did not introduce West to any of the other great writers
of Yugoslavia.
Constantine
was at his charming best at a party in Sarajevo with Jewish friends. He
also had a certain magnetism which brought forth the children in people.
He attracted a group of gypsy youths while he was pointing out the sights
above Sarajevo on the way to Trebovice: “Something about the gestures of
Constantine’s plump little arms as he showed us the city brought them tumbling
about us.” West believed his charm was “a mixture of amused indulgence,
as of a grown-up watching a child at play, and ecstatic expectation, as
of a child waiting for a grown-up to tell it a fairy-story...”
After seeing
the sights of Jajce, the falls, the ancient Mithraic altar in a cavern,
and the ruins of the old fortress on the hill, West tells the poet how
her imagination often fails to find a way to use such scenes as a “point
of departure.” Constantine compares the mind to an old soldier and then
tells an old story of the defence of Jajce against the Turks.
After a
pause, he returns to his remarks and tries to explain the role of war in
Balkan history and in the Balkan mind: “You have seen that all sorts of
avenues our artists and thinkers have started lead nowhere at all, are
not avenues but clumps of trees where it is pleasant to rest a minute or
two in the heat of the day, groves into which one can go, but out of which
one must come...we have not had so many artists and thinkers, but we have
something of our own to think about, which is war, but a little more than
war, for it is noble, which war need not necessarily be. And from it our
minds can go on many adventures.” Constantine seemed to sense that war
was coming again even though he was part of a government accused of appeasement.
On the
train from Sarajevo to Belgrade, a trip which took thirteen hours, Constantine,
in typical form, conversed with the English couple and other passengers
nearly the whole time. He reminisced about Sabac, and, by chance, encounters
his first love who had notpromised to wait for him. He asked her:
“Why did you treat me so? When I was very young, I was very handsome, and
my father was rich and already you knew I was a poet and would be a great
man, for always I was a Wunderkind(whiz-kid).” Her reply was similar
to West’s criticism: “There is too much of you! You talk more than anybody
else, when you play the piano it is more than when any other person plays
the piano, when you love it is more than anybody else can make, it is all
too much, too much, too much!”
Constantine’s
anger and hurt is temporary, but after he sleeps and wakes, he talks once
more of Bergson until “his black eyes twinkle.” West completes his portrait:
“He was indestructibly, eternally happy.”
Gerda in Yugoslavia
After Constantine’s
wife Gerda joined the touring group, according to the review written by
Larry Wolff in 1991: “The narrative acquires the quality of a nightmarish
novel...” One would think that West made up the marriage of Constantine—a
Slav and a Jew, the two groups most targeted by the Nazis—and the German
Protestant Gerda. It is a perfect literary device to describe the eve of
World War II, and it is true.
West’s
husband, Henry Andrews, did speak German and frequently visited Germany
where, in the 1930’s, he and many other Britons and Americans had investments.
Obviously, he was not as much of a Germanophobe as was his wife, but even
the cool Englishman was finally piqued by Gerda’s behavior at the German
war memorial at Bitolj (Monastir).
The fact
that the fortress-like structure on the hill had no names shocked Rebecca
West. An enraged Gerda asked West’s husband if he agreed. To her disappointment,
he responded: “I don’t like it because it pays no sort of respect to the
individuals who are buried in it and because it is a tactless reminder
of the past to an invaded people.” West was sure that it was a sign that
they “intend to come back and do it all over again as soon as they are
given a chance.”
After ruining
the Macedonian tour, Gerda finally left, and Constantine was on the verge
of a nervous breakdown. His world was coming apart, and he finally also
departed for Belgrade.
What Ever Happened to Constantine
The real Constantine,
Stanislav Vinaver, survived this novelistic demise in Black Lamb and
Grey Falcon. In fact, in the last half of the 1930’s, he produced six
books which reflect this period when the lights were going out in his corner
of the world. They also record the past with a powerful nostalgia for the
things that he loved. Some had disappeared in World War I. Others were
about to be extinguished in World War II.
The first
was Sabac i njegove tradicije(Sabac and its Traditions) which was
published in his hometown in 1935. Cardak ni na nebu ni nazemlji(The
Veranda Neither in Heaven nor on Earth) came out in Belgrade in 1938, a
year in which three more of his works appeared: Momcilo Nastasijevic,Najnovija
pantologija srpske i jugoslovenske pelengirike(The Very Newest
Pantology of Serbian and Yugoslav Peasant Trousers) and
Zivi okviri(Living
Frames).
That same
year Stojadinovic’s government fell after he attempted a concordat with
the Vatican. All could see the war coming, and in 1939 Vinaver’s Ratni
drugovi(Wartime Friends) was published. Another of his works from this
time or slightly earlier is Nemacka u vrenju(Germany Boiling). In
the interwar period he also published translations of English children’s
literature, and his other works from this time include Ruske povorke(Russian
Processions) and Vidovitost generala Blika (The Clairvoyance of
General Blik).
According
to Glendinning, “When the Second World War broke out, Rebecca and Henry
offered Vinaver asylum in England, but he preferred to stay in his own
ravaged country.” He joined the Yugoslav army in 1941 as the country braced
itself for the blitzkrieg-to-come after the military coup which
overthrew the government and invalidated its agreement to let the Germans
pass through Yugoslavia to Greece.
It appears
that, during the Second World War, Vinaver was a prisoner-of-war in a German
camp. Rebecca West sent him food packages through the Red Cross. Although
he survived the war, they never met again.
After the
war, Vinaver returned to writing. Godine ponizenja i borbe, zivot
u nemackim “oflazima”(Years of Degradation and Struggle: Life in the
German Oflags) was published in Belgrade in 1945, and in 1952 his
book-length poem Evropa noc(European Night) appeared in print. Drasko
Redjep said it “captures a lyric moment in occupied Europe, in the concentration
camps.” Also in 1952 Vinaver’s Jezik nas nasusni(Our Daily Tongue)
was published in Novi Sad.
Stanislav
died at Niska Banja in 1955 at the age of 64. Rebecca West died in 1983
at the age of 91. When they first met in 1936, she was 44, and he was 45.
Two of Vinaver’s works, Nad gramatika(Beyond Grammar) and Zanosi
i prkosi Laze Kostica(The Delirium and Defiance of Laza Kostich), were
published posthumously in Begrade and Novi Sad, respectively, in 1963.
Vinaver
is well-remembered for his superb translations and excellent criticism.
Drasko Redjep pays tribute to that work: “In the field of translations,
Vinaver has left a long line of translations such as those of Rabelais
which even today are known for their masterful and rich lexicon.” In Umetnost
i kriterijumi(Art and Criteria), the Yugoslav critic Sveta Lukic
said Vinaver “brilliantly reconstructs Rabelais, Villon and the German
Romantics. He does it freely, seemingly nonchalantly, and yet completely.”
Rebecca
West was similarly praised by Fadiman who said that Black Lamb and Grey
Falconcontained “an assemblage of characters shaped in the round by
the hand of a skilled novelist.” Constantine is the foremost character
to arise from its pages, and Rebecca West’s portrait of him in mid-life
will endure as long as the book is read.
The Book and the Ideal
Fadiman’s review
of the book was probably the best. Both he and Pribichevich found the book
heroic. In 1941, Fadiman wrote that “Yugoslavia satisfied in her a passion
for a kind of life that seemed to be dying out in (Western) Europe, a life
of nobility, richness, ardor, even ferocity. Mass propaganda, the rise
of dictatorship, and the mechanization of man had conspired to throttle
in western European life the one quality that, I should venture, moves
Miss West more than any other—the quality of intensity.”
As the
leading ideas of the book Fadiman cited “the non-materialist quality of
the South Slav character” and the struggle that character has had in order
to survive the oppression of empires. He wrote: “Miss West’s anti-imperialism...leads
her to defend nationalism, the spirit that makes the Serbs a great people,
‘the national equivalent of the individual’s determination not to be a
slave.’” He noted that, of all the victims of Hitler, they alone made the
conscious choice to die rather than surrender. As West said, they fought
for life, not for martyrdom.
“Rebecca
West: This Time, Let’s Listen” is the title of a remarkable review written
more recently by Boston College history professor Larry Wolff for The
New York Times Book Reviewof February 10, 1991, after the recent civil
war in Yugoslavia had begun. Because Wolff was writing a book about the
origins of Western Europe’s attitudes about Eastern Europe which he felt
should be revised after the end of the Cold War, he was likely drawn to
Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon.
He wrote
that he agreed with Rebecca West whose message to Europe was that it was
incomplete without Eastern Europe. In his opinion, she found Western Europe
poor and sick without the “complement of Eastern Europe’s health and wealth.”
Indeed, with Constantine as her guide, she found a “civilization” which
stood out in stark contrast to its “uncivilized” stereotype.
Wolff even
found the prejudicial images in Fadiman’s otherwise wonderful review of
Black
Lamb and Grey Falconwhich “invoked precisely the perspective that she
sought to efface: ‘Why should this highly cultivated Englishwoman make
pilgrimage after pilgrimage to these dark lands and these violent and primitive
peoples?’”
Wolff’s
modern reading of Rebecca West was careful, and one passage evokes Constantine’s
speech on veils: “The Iron Curtain of the cold war so emphatically defined
Eastern Europe on all of our mental maps that it was almost impossible
to see that curtains of less solid stuff had been drawn across the continent
for two centuries. The idea of Eastern Europe as the continent’s backward
half was invented in Western Europe to illuminate by contrast the greater
glory of ‘Western’ civilization. Rebecca West was a journalist on the trail
of that dishonest, self-serving appropriation of Eastern Europe, seeking
to invert a tradition of condescension and to redefine the mapping of civilization
in Europe.”
Wolff wrote:
“In the intense bitter rivalry between the Serbs and Croats that was tearing
apart Yugoslavia in 1937, as it is today, Rebecca West was a partisan of
the civilization of Serbia and the unity of Yugoslavia.”
Rebecca
West also said that the courage of the Serbs in the face of the Nazis should
be an example to Britain and the rest of the West. They should stop thinking
of Eastern Europe as black lambs to be sacrificed by the great powers.
One might say that Constantine was wrong: in order to “live and be happy”
the people did have to be willing to die for Yugoslavia. And Vinaver himself
had to pick up his arms and fight the Germans again; the appeasement of
Fascist Germany by sacrificing Eastern Europe had failed.
Wolff concludes
that it is time to read Rebecca West again, to follow her in discovering
Eastern Europe anew. He quotes the prayer she uttered as the fascist bombs
were falling about her: “Let me behave like a Serb.”
At the
time she completed Black Lamb and Grey Falconin 1941, the bravery
of the Serbs was again the admiration of the world as it had been in World
War I. She had loved not only Constantine the poet and the Serbs, but also
Yugoslavia. In return, many loved her, not the least of whom was Constantine
who helped teach her what it meant to be a Serb.
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this publication may be reproduced without the express written permission
of SERB WORLD U.S.A. Copyright 1999 by SERB WORLD U.S.A.
