OK, let's unpack this. We have a tendency, I
think, when we look back at the history of the
20th century to focus on the heavy hitters. You
know, we look at London and we look at Berlin,
Moscow, Washington. We read the history of the
winners or at least the major power. The great
power narrative. Right. It's the standard way
history is taught. Right. But what if I told
you that to really understand the absolute insanity
of the last century, the collapse of empires,
the rise of fascism, the friction of the Cold
War, the role of the intellectual in totalitarianism,
You shouldn't be looking at a capital city in
the West. You should be looking at a specific
villa in Zagreb, Croatia. That is a bold claim.
But, you know, looking at the stack of research
we have here, it actually holds up. It really
does. We're diving deep today into the life and
work of Miroslav Kurledzha. And frankly, just
calling him a writer feels like we're underselling
it massively. Oh, completely. It's like calling
Da Vinci a sketch artist. Exactly. Based on the
source material, this man was a novelist, a playwright.
A poet, an essayist, a philosopher, an encyclopedist
and a military critic. It's an insane resume.
And a political rebel who then. somehow became
a political institution. That's the part that's
so hard to wrap your head around. It really is.
He is widely, and I mean widely, considered the
greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century.
But beyond all the accolades, his life is this
perfect, jagged line through every single major
geopolitical earthquake of the region. Just think
about the timeline for a second. He's born in
the Austro -Hungarian Empire. Right. He lives
through its collapse. He lives through the chaotic,
messy creation. of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
He survived the fascist puppet state during World
War II. Which was incredibly dangerous for someone
like him. Terrifying. And then he becomes a central,
pivotal figure in socialist Yugoslavia. And he
dies just one year after Marshall Tito. His life
is the story of that century in that part of
the world. He didn't just survive these eras.
He defined a cultural response to them. And that's
the mission for this deep dive. We want to figure
out how one man could be, and this is a great
phrase, a communist of his own making. How he
could be a close personal advisor to an authoritarian
president and at the same time be a literary
rebel who absolutely refused to write propaganda.
It's the ultimate story of the insider outsider.
How do you maintain your intellectual soul when
the world around you is constantly demanding
total obedience? And to understand that, we have
to go right back to the start. Because the contradictions
in Kruller's life, they start literally with
his education. They really do. It's the perfect
place to begin. Let's get into part one then,
the soldier and the spy. So the origins. He's
born July 7th, 1893 in Zagreb. And it's crucial
context to remember that Zagreb at that point
was in Croatia, Slavonia, which was part of the
Austro -Hungarian Empire. So not an independent
nation. Not at all. It was the periphery of a
vast, multi -ethnic empire ruled from Vienna.
And his background wasn't aristocratic, was it?
He didn't come from money. No, not at all. Quite
modest. His father was a police constable. So,
you know, a state functionary, but very much
lower middle class. But Miroslav, even as a kid,
was clearly different. Oh, a prodigy. By all
accounts, he was fiercely brilliant, incredibly
intellectual, very sensitive, always reading.
And you have to put yourself in the mindset of
the Austro -Hungarian Empire. If you have a bright,
disciplined boy from a modest background, there
was one very clear, very established path for
social mobility. The military. Precisely. The
officer corps. So this future literary titan,
the sensitive poet who would write some of the
most scathing anti -war literature ever, he starts
up by choice in a military academy. That's the
paradox. That's the first great irony of his
life. He is enrolled in a preparatory military
school in Pax, which is in modern -day Hungary.
And from there, he goes to the very prestigious
Ludovicium Military Academy in Budapest. So he
is being groomed to be an officer of the emperor.
He's wearing the uniform. He's learning the discipline,
the tactics. He is inside the machine. He is
in the belly of the beast. But you have to understand
the atmosphere of, say, 1912, 1913. The air is
electric. The whole system is starting to fray.
It's crumbling. Nationalism is boiling over everywhere,
but especially in the Balkans. Young Croats,
young Serbs, young Slovenes are looking around
and feeling like they're living in what they
called a prison of nations. And they're looking
across the border. They are looking across the
border at the Kingdom of Serbia. Serbia was seen
as the Piedmont, right? That's the historical
comparison I've seen. Yes, that's the term they
used. Just as the kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia
had united Italy, the South Slavic nationalists
believed that Serbia would be the magnet, the
force that would unite all the Slavs against
the Austrians and the Hungarians. For them, Serbia
was the beacon of freedom. So Kraljeles, the
promising young cadet in the emperor's army,
makes a massive life -altering move. He defects.
It's an incredibly dramatic moment. It's 1913.
The Balkan Wars are raging. He literally runs
away from the academy. He leaves his uniform,
crosses the border, and presents himself to the
Serbian authorities. Now, in his mind, what does
he expect is going to happen? Well, you have
to imagine. He's a young romantic. He sees himself
as a hero, a patriot. He's leaving the oppressor
to offer his sword, or more accurately, his military
training and his intellect to the cause of South
Slavic liberation. He probably expects a parade
or at least a warm welcome. And this is where
the movie script takes a very dark, very ironic
turn. He doesn't get a parade. He doesn't even
get a handshake. Instead, the Serbs look at him,
this very proper young guy with a stiff Austrian
military bearing, speaking perfectly educated
German and Hungarian, and they get deeply suspicious.
They think he's a spy. They are absolutely convinced
he is an Austrian plan, a provocateur sent to
infiltrate them. So instead of giving him a uniform
and a rifle, they interrogate him. They humiliate
him. And eventually they just kick him out. They
declare him a spy and send him packing right
back to the empire he just deserted. That is
a profound double trauma. You betray your country
for a cause and then the cause itself says, we
don't want you. You're not one of us. It's a
complete rejection from both sides. He has nowhere
to go. So he has to walk back to Austria -Hungary,
knowing what's waiting for him. And what is waiting
for him? He goes back. Yeah. And obviously he
is immediately arrested. He's a deserter in wartime.
Frankly, he's lucky he wasn't court -martialed
and executed, which was a very real possibility.
So what did they do to him? They stripped him
of his rank. They cashiered him from the officer
corps. So when World War I breaks out just a
year later, in 1914, Mirzal Kralisza isn't an
officer leading men from the back. He is a common
soldier. A grunt. And they send him to the worst
possible place. They send him to the Eastern
Front. To Galicia. To fight the Russians. We
hear so much about the Western Front. You know,
the trenches in France. The poetry of Wilfred
Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But the Eastern Front
was a different kind of hell, wasn't it? It was
a different kind of meat grinder. It was more
mobile in some ways, but it was just as brutal.
A chaotic, muddy, freezing hellscape. And for
Krulica, this was the single most formative experience
of his young life. Because he wasn't in a headquarters
moving flags on a map. No. He was in the mud
with the Domobran, the Croatian home defenders,
the common soldiers. And these were peasants,
mostly. Exactly. Poor, uneducated Croatian peasants
who didn't care about the Emperor Franz Josef
in Vienna, who probably couldn't point to Vienna
on a map being ordered to slaughter and be slaughtered
by... equally poor and uneducated Russian peasants.
He saw the absolute pointless absurdity of it
all. The complete senselessness, the bureaucracy
of death, the incompetence of the officers, the
suffering. It burned away any last shred of romanticism
he might have had about war or about empires
or about authority. And this experience is what
fuels his first major literary breakthrough,
a book called The Croatian God Mars. Hrvatsky
Bog Mars. It was published in 1922, a few years
after the war ended. And it's technically a collection
of short stories, but reads like a single cohesive
scream against war. The title alone is fascinating.
Mars is the Roman god of war, obviously. Why
the Croatian qualifier? What does that imply?
It's a deeply cynical and historical title. It
implies that the god of war has a special, specific,
and insatiable hunger for croats. It's a commentary
on the history of the nation. How so? For centuries,
Croatia saw itself as the antemural Christianitatis,
the bulwark of Christianity. They were the border
guards of Europe fighting the Ottomans, meaning
for centuries they were the ones dying in faraway
lands to protect the comfortable center of Europe,
whether it was Vienna or Budapest. So Croatia
is basically saying, we are the designated victims
of history. We're the cannon fodder. That's it,
exactly. And the stories in the book, they're
not about glory. There are no heroes. They are
about dysentery and frostbite and bad boots and
incompetent officers and the sheer grinding,
dehumanizing misery of the trenches. It cemented
his lifelong anti -war stance and his deep, deep
cynicism toward any kind of authority. You simply
cannot understand Khrushchev as a leftist, Khrushchev
the rebel, without understanding Khrushchev as
a common soldier who saw the empire feeding its
own people into a cannon for no reason at all.
Which leads us perfectly into part two, the literary
titan. Because he survives the war. The empire
collapses in 1918. We get the kingdom of Yugoslavia.
And Korolyzha just, he unleashes. The output
is, it's just staggering. It's hard to even quantify.
In the 1920s and 30s, between the wars, he is
writing in every conceivable genre. And we need
to talk about his style because it's very, very
distinct. The sources we looked at describe it
as a combination of visionary poetic language
and sarcasm. That is the Kroger signature right
there. He uses this incredibly rich. dense, baroque,
almost poetic language. His sentences can go
on for a full page. They're full of subordinate
clauses, rich descriptions, philosophical asides.
But it's not just beautiful language for its
own sake. No, because he cuts it with this razor
-sharp irony, this acidic sarcasm. It's like
he's painting a beautiful classical oil painting
full of detail and texture, and then he takes
a knife and just slashes the canvas to show you
the cheap, ugly wall behind it. He builds up
the beautiful facade of bourgeois society, and
then he shows you the rot underneath. And his
main target is that bourgeois hypocrite. Always.
The hypocrisy and conformism of the old Austria
-Hungary and then of the new kingdom of Yugoslavia.
He saw it as the same class of people, just with
a different flag. Okay, let's break down the
works, starting with the plays. Because if you
study theater in that part of the world, Kralja
is, I mean, he's the god. He is the central pillar
of 20th century Croatian theater. He started
out with some very experimental expressionist
plays, things like Adam Maiva or Michelangelo
Buonarroti, very avant -garde, very symbolic.
But he evolved into something more psychological,
more naturalist. And that evolution brings us
to the Glembe's. Monsieur's Glembe, published
in 1929. If there is one single work that our
listeners might have heard of or maybe should
know, it's probably this one. What is the setup?
Imagine a hugely wealthy, powerful banking family
in Zagreb in the early 20th century, the Glembes.
They are the absolute pillars of society. They
have the sprawling mansion, the priceless art
collection, the political connections, the flawless
public reputation. But because this is Croatia,
I'm going to assume they are not happy, well
-adjusted people. Oh, not in the slightest. They're
a nest of vipers. The entire play and the cycle
of plays and stories it belongs to is a meticulous
dissection of their moral, psychological, and
even biological decay. Biological decay? What
do you mean? It's about bad blood. Coolidge was
obsessed with this idea of inherited neurosis
and criminality. The Glenbay fortune was built
on a crime generations ago, and that crime has
poisoned the family line. So underneath the veneer
of high society, there are secrets, embezzlements,
affairs, suicides and eventually murder. It sounds
a bit like a more literary version of the show
Succession, but set in the 1920s. That is a fantastic
comparison. It is exactly that. It's about the
rot at the heart of a powerful ruling class family.
It's about how money and power corrupt everything
they touch. There's a famous line in the play.
The blood has fallen asleep. The blood has fallen
asleep. What does that mean? It suggests. that
their vitality, their life force, is gone. It's
been replaced by decadence, neurosis, and a kind
of spiritual exhaustion. Krillish was holding
up a mirror to the wealthy bourgeois audience
sitting in the theater, and he was showing them
that their entire civilization was a lie built
on crime and heading for collapse. It was a cultural
bomb. And he didn't just stick to plays. The
novels from this period are just as dense, just
as important. Let's talk about the return of
Filip Latinovic from 1932. Yes. This is often
called the first truly modern Croatian novel.
It's not an easy read, but it's a brilliant one.
It's about an artist, Filip, who returns to his
provincial hometown after spending years abroad
in the art capitals of Europe. So it's a classic
coming home story. It is, but it's a deeply disillusioned
one. He's coming home looking for his roots,
for connection, for some kind of authentic inspiration
to overcome his painter's block. But all he finds
is emptiness, hypocrisy, and spiritual decay.
It's a novel about the crisis of the modern artist,
about alienation, about the inability to truly
see or represent reality. It's very pristine,
very existential. A massive leap forward for
the novel as a form in that region. And then,
just to show he can do literally anything, a
few years later he writes The Banquet in Blitva.
Bank it, you blitvi. Yes, a total gear shift.
This isn't a psychological novel. It's a biting
political satire. The name is kind of funny.
Blitva means Swiss chard in Croatian. It does.
It's a deliberately ridiculous name for a country.
He's mocking the pompousness of these newly formed
nations. But the setting and the story are...
Deadly serious. It's set in an imaginary Baltic
country, but it's so clearly a stand in for the
rising dictatorships of the 1930s. He's looking
at what's happening in Germany, Italy, the Soviet
Union. Exactly. The novel is just saturated with
the atmosphere of all pervasive totalitarianism,
the paranoia, the secret police, the cult of
personality around the dictator, the way language
itself is twisted to serve power. He called it
a political poem. And it's this furious intellectual
scream of warning. He was looking at both Stalinism
and fascism and saying, look where this leads.
This is the death of the human spirit. And there's
another satire from around the same time, On
the Edge of Reason. Also from the late 30s, 1938,
another brutal attack on social hypocrisy, this
time about a respectable lawyer who one day at
a dinner party decides to just start telling
the absolute truth about everyone. And I assume
society does not react well to that. Society
declares him insane and tries to destroy him.
It's a classic Krolisha theme. The individual
with a conscience versus a corrupt and conformist
society. Okay, so he's produced all of this.
And then much later in the 60s, he drops what
many consider his magnum opus. The novel series,
The Banners. Exhaustive, yes. If you talk to
literary critics in the region, they will almost
always call this the Croatian war on peace. That's
a heavy comparison. It is, and it's earned. It
is massive. Five volumes, thousands of pages.
It's a huge panoramic view of Central European
society in the years just before, during, and
immediately after World War I. So it's covering
a lot of the same ground as his early life? It
is, but from the perspective of decades of reflection.
It's deeply autobiographical in spirit. But at
its core, it's a story about fathers and sons.
The central conflict is between an old, powerful
politician who was a loyalist to the Austro -Hungarian
Empire and his son. who becomes a revolutionary,
a nationalist, and eventually a leftist. It's
the prototypical theme of generational conflict.
The generation that built the old world versus
the generation that wants to tear it down. Precisely.
It's a novel about ideas, about politics, about
history, about love, about betrayal. It's everything.
It's his attempt to capture the totality of that
world -shattering experience. And it was recognized
as such. It won the prestigious NIN Award in
1962. Before we move to the politics, which is
a whole other saga, I want to pause on the poetry
because there is one work in particular, The
Ballads of Petrica Karempu, that seems to be
in a league of its own. Scholars just rave about
it. This is, for many, his absolute masterpiece,
his most unique, most untranslatable, most profound
work. But it's also, for an outsider, the hardest
to access. It was published in 1936. Why is it
so hard to access? What's the barrier? The language.
It comes down to the language he chose to write
it in. You see, standard Croatian is based on
the Štukavian dialect, but Kralješa wrote this
entire epic book of poetry in Štukavian. Okay,
explain that. What's the significance of Štukavian?
Štukavian is the dialect of northern Croatia,
of Zagreb, of the region where he grew up, and
importantly, it was seen as the dialect of the
peasantry. By the 20th century, it was considered...
rustic archaic almost dead as a serious literary
language it wasn't what you use for high art
so he deliberately dug it up he resurrected it
he did this incredible scholarly work he went
through old dictionaries legal chronicles from
in the 16th and 17th centuries folk songs and
he built this incredibly rich archaic, grotesque,
and beautiful language from the ground up. And
who is the main character? Petr Kukrampa. He's
a plebeian prophet. Think of him as a kind of
Croatian Till Eulenspiegel or a jester. He's
a trickster figure, a peasant clown who wanders
through Croatian history, always speaking truth
to power. So he's the guy mocking the kings and
the bishops. Exactly. The ballads cover more
than five centuries of Croatian history, but
told entirely from the bottom up. It's a history
of peasant rebellions, of hangings, of crushing
taxes, of endless wars fought for foreign masters.
It's incredibly dark, but it's also brutally
hilarious. It perfectly captures the gallows
humor and deep cynicism of the peasant who knows
that no matter who is in charge, the Turk, the
Austrian, the Hungarian lord, the peasant is
the one who's going to get beaten. The lords
change, the beating stays the same. That is the
absolute spirit of the book. And writing it in
that dialect was a profound political act. He
was saying this culture, this peasant culture
that you elites look down on has value. It has
a history. It is not just mud and superstition.
It's an act of cultural reclamation. OK, so we've
established beyond a doubt that he is a literary
giant on a world scale. But he wasn't just writing
in an ivory tower. He was a political animal
from day one. Which brings us to part three,
the communist of his own making. And this is
where the story gets really, really dangerous
for him. He joined the Communist Party very early
on. Very early. 1918, right after the war, right
after the Russian Revolution. He was a true believer
in the beginning. He saw it as the only real
answer to the imperialist carnage he'd witnessed
in the war. And he wasn't just a rank and file
member. Oh, no. He was the intellectual engine
of the left in the kingdom of Yugoslavia. He
was the driving force behind all the most important
leftist reviews and journals. Play him in the
flame. He was a bad communist, at least according
to the official line from Moscow. He was a terrible
Stalinist. And you know, that is probably the
highest compliment I can pay him. What was the
problem? Where did he diverge? You have to understand
the context of the 1930s. The Communist International,
run from Moscow, was enforcing a very rigid doctrine
on all national parties. And in the arts, that
doctrine was called socialist realism. Right,
the girl meets tractor school of art. That's
a great way to put it. Basically, art was supposed
to be a tool. It had to be simple, didactic,
and relentlessly optimistic. It existed only
to serve the party's political goals. If you
wrote a poem, it better be about how great the
five -year plan is. If you painted a picture,
it had to be of heroic factory workers. And Kraljea,
who was writing these dark, complex, modernist
works about bad blood and existential crises,
he did not fit that mold. He hated it with a
passion. He thought it was an insult to intelligence,
an insult to art. He argued that a true socialist
society shouldn't produce dumb propaganda. It
should produce better art. more complex art,
more truthful art than capitalism ever could.
He absolutely refused to lower his aesthetic
standards. His position was essentially, I can
be a communist, but I will not write trash. And
it wasn't just about art, was it? It got much
more serious than that. It was about the purges.
That was the ultimate breaking point. He watched
from Zagreb as the great purge unfolded in the
Soviet Union in the late 30s. He saw his friends,
his comrades, loyal communists he knew personally
being arrested, sent to the gulag or simply shot
after show trials. And the official party line
was to applaud, to say, yes, they were all traitors
and spies. Kralasia refused. He could not and
would not do it. He saw it as a monstrous betrayal
of the revolution's ideals. This led to what's
known in Yugoslav history as the conflict on
the literary left. What was that exactly? It
was a brutal public intellectual civil war. Kreischer,
through his journal P -Chat, launched a long
and bitter polemic against the party dogmatists.
He wrote these incredibly powerful essays, shredding
their arguments, mocking their lack of talent,
and exposing their blind, unthinking obedience
to Stalin. He was taking on the entire party
apparatus. Virtually every important writer on
the left. And so in 1939, the inevitable happens.
He's expelled. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia
kicks out its most famous and brilliant intellectual.
He's declared a revisionist, a Trotskyite, an
enemy. He is completely isolated. But there is
a fascinating twist here, a very important historical
cameo. Who was the party commissar sent to try
and mediate this whole conflict before the final
expulsion? Joseph Braz Tito. The future leader
of Yugoslavia, the marshal himself. The very
same. At the time, Tito was a high -ranking party
functionary tasked with enforcing discipline.
He was sent to Zagreb to talk some sense into
Kurelisha to get him back in line. They had these
long, intense conversations. And what happened?
Well, ultimately, Tito couldn't save him from
expulsion. Kurelisha was just too stubborn, too
principled on the question of artistic freedom.
But during those talks, they clearly formed a
bond. They recognized a mutual intelligence,
a pragmatism, and a certain toughness in each
other. Tito saw that Krelis wasn't just some
coffeehouse intellectual. And Krelis saw that
Tito wasn't just a mindless apparatchik. And
that bond becomes a literal lifeline just a couple
of years later, because in 1941, the whole world
collapses. The Nazis invade Yugoslavia. The kingdom
of Yugoslavia is destroyed in a matter of days.
And in Croatia, a fascist puppet regime is established,
the so -called Independent State of Croatia,
run by the Ustase. This must have been a uniquely
terrifying time for Kralj. He's a known, prominent
leftist. He's on every list imaginable. It was
an absolute nightmare. He was living in Zagreb,
the capital of this new fascist state. The regime
actually tried to woo him at first. They were
nationalists. And they wanted the great Croatian
writer to endorse their state, to give them legitimacy.
And he refused. He refused completely. He went
silent. He shut himself away in his villa. But
he also didn't run. Tito and the communist partisans
were in the mountains fighting a guerrilla war.
Kralj stayed in Zagreb. Why? It's that fundamental
insider -outsider problem again, but with life
-or -death stakes. On the one hand, he feared
the Ustash would arrest and kill him any day.
But on the other hand, he also feared the partisans.
Why would he fear his own side? Remember, he
had just been expelled from the party in disgrace.
He thought that if he went to the mountains,
the hardline Stalinists surrounding Tito, the
very people he'd been publicly fighting with,
might just decide to put a bullet in his head
for being a revisionist heretic. There was no
love lost there. So he was trapped between two
enemies. Completely trapped. He spent four years
in constant fear, waiting for the knock on the
door that could come from either side. He wrote
nothing for publication. He just kept his head
down and survived. The war ends in 1945. The
communists win. Tito is the undisputed master
of a new socialist Yugoslavia. Klezha survives.
But he's in a very weird, very awkward spot.
He didn't fight. There was a lot of resentment.
The fighters, the generals, the partisans who
had spent four years in the mountains, they looked
at him with disdain. They called him a salon
communist, a coward who sat out the war in the
comfort of his villa while they were bleeding
for the cause. He was socially stigmatized for
a brief period. But Tito intervened. That earlier
connection paid off. Tito was, above all else,
a pragmatist. He knew that a new state needed
more than just guns and secret police. It needed
a soul. It needed culture. It needed legitimacy.
And Miroslav Korolev was the only intellectual
figure in the entire country with the stature
and gravity to provide that. So Tito personally
rehabilitated him. Which brings us to the astonishing
second act of his life, Part 4, The Intellectual
Statesman. And it is a fascinating and deeply
complex pivot. Because in 1948, the unimaginable
happens. Tito breaks with Stalin. The Tito -Stalin
split. It's a seismic event in the Cold War.
It's huge. Yugoslavia is kicked out of the Soviet
bloc and becomes a non -aligned, independent
socialist state. And suddenly, Miroslav Karloja
looks like a prophet. Of course. All those arguments
he made in the 30s, that we shouldn't just blindly
copy Russia, that art needs to be free from dogma,
that Stalinism is a perversion. Suddenly, that
becomes the new official state policy. Exactly.
The party now needs to prove that Yugoslav socialism
is fundamentally different from and better than
Soviet socialism. It needs a cultural identity.
So Khrushchev becomes the architect of that difference.
He does. In 1952, at the Congress of Yugoslav
Writers in Ljubljana, he gives a speech that
changes everything. It's a landmark address where
he basically tells the assembled writers of the
nation, you are free. He officially kills socialist
realism in Yugoslavia. He argues for artistic
freedom, for modernism, for experimentation.
That is a massive legacy. Because of that speech
and his influence, Yugoslav art in the 60s and
70s was light years ahead of what was happening
in Poland or Hungary or East Germany. You had
abstract art, avant -garde theater, experimental
film, and eventually a huge punk rock scene.
And it was largely because Kraljewska next to
Tito and said, let them create, let them play.
Our system is strong enough to handle it. He
became a man of institutions. He was made vice
president of the Academy of Science and Arts.
And then, in 1950, he founded the Yugoslav Institute
for Lexicography. Ah, the lexicographer. It sounds
a bit dry, a bit boring. But for him, this was
a project of immense passion and national importance.
He wanted to create an encyclopedia. Why does
an encyclopedia matter so much to a poet and
a novelist? Because an encyclopedia is a definition
of the world. It's an ordering of knowledge.
Until then, if you were a student in Zagreb or
Belgrade and you wanted to know about history
or science or art, you probably looked at a German
encyclopedia or a Russian one. The world was
defined for you by the great powers. And Creusot
wanted a South Slavic perspective. He wanted
to catalog the knowledge of the region for the
region. He wanted to prove that these small nations
had a rich history worth preserving, that they
had contributed to world culture. It was an act
of intellectual self -assertion. And he ran that
institute, like his own personal kingdom, with
Tito's full backing until the day he died. And
his personal relationship with Tito. Our sources
say they were genuinely close. Very close. There
are many photographs of them together, walking
on Tito's private island of Brugini, drinking,
talking for hours. It was a deeply symbiotic
relationship. The dictator and the writer. Exactly.
Tito gave Croatia protection. power and resources.
And Colesia gave Tito's regime intellectual legitimacy
and a sophisticated cultural face to show the
world. It's a fascinating dynamic. Let's move
to the final chapter. Part five, he's now living
the life of a high -profile, state -sponsored
intellectual. He is the cultural patriarch. He's
living at Viligavoz in the beautiful Tukanak
Hills of Zagreb. It's a cultural court. He's
receiving international awards, the prestigious
Herder Prize in 1968, the Botev Prize in 1981.
He is the red monarch of Yugoslav culture. In
his personal life, we haven't touched on that
much. He was married to one person his entire
adult life, Leposava Kangurka. always known as
Bella. She was a famous and very respected theater
actress. They were together for over 60 years.
They were the ultimate power couple of Zagreb.
If you wanted something done in the cultural
world, if you wanted a book published or a play
staged, you went to Griveaux's to get their blessing.
But the end of his life, it feels so symbolic.
It feels like the curtain coming down on the
whole grand experiment of his life and his country.
It really does. The timing is uncanny. First,
Tito dies in May of 1980. And with his death,
the glue that held the multi -ethnic state of
Yugoslavia together is gone. You can feel the
ground starting to shift. He lost his protector.
He lost his protector and his partner in that
strange political dance. Then, less than a year
later, his wife Bella dies in April 1981. After
60 years together. 60 years. He is left completely
alone. He was already in ill health, but by all
accounts, he was heartbroken and deeply depressed.
And he dies just a few months later in December
of 1981 in that same villa. Wow. So within the
space of about 18 months, the three pillars of
his world are gone. Tito, Bella, and then himself.
And just a few years after that, the country
that they had all in their own ways built and
sustained began to unravel into a horrific civil
war. His death really marks the end of an era.
He was given a state funeral, I imagine. Oh,
a massive one. In Zagreb on January 4th, 1982.
It wasn't the funeral of a writer. It was the
funeral of a head of state, basically. The entire
political and cultural elite was there. So if
we were to go to Zagreb today, what's left of
his legacy? Can you still feel his presence?
You can. It's still very heavy. Viliwazd was
donated to the city of Zagreb, and you can visit
it. It's a museum kept almost exactly as he left
it, with his vast library of thousands of books.
It feels like he just stepped out for a walk.
And there's a monument. Yes, a beautiful bronze
monument was placed near his home in 2004. He's
sitting, looking pensive, heavy, almost like
a mountain himself. And of course, the institute
he founded is now named the Miroslav Kolejsa
Institute of Lexicography. It's still the premier
scholarly institution of its kind in Croatia.
Okay, so let's try to synthesize all of this.
We've gone from the military academy to the trenches,
through plays and novels, into party politics
and state building. What does it all mean? What's
the final takeaway? I think if you had to boil
it down to one thing, we are looking at a man
who fundamentally refused to simplify the world.
That is his core intellectual trait. He lived
in a century of brutal, simplistic ideologies
that demanded you pick a side and shut off your
brain. Empire. nationalism, Stalinism, fascism.
Krelish engaged with all of them. He fought them.
He worked within them. But he never, ever surrendered
his critical mind completely to any one of them.
Even when he was Tito's personal advisor, even
when he was at the heart of the establishment.
Even then, he was the communist of his own making.
He never stopped being a critic. He proved that
it was possible to be committed to a project
of social justice without sacrificing your artistic
standards or your intellectual integrity. He
carved out a space for complexity in an age of
dogma. And he gave a voice to a very specific
historical experience. That's the Crow -Iliad
idea. He took the experience of a small nation
on the periphery of great empires, a nation that
was always the soldier, never the general, and
he made it universal. His work constantly asks
the big questions. What is the point of all this
suffering? What is the meaning of history when
you're on the receiving end of it? You know,
I keep coming back to that tension we talked
about between the rebel and the statesman. We
have this romantic idea of the dissident writer
who dies in poverty, screaming the truth from
a garret. But Kralasia, he put on a suit. He
went into the palace. He drank with the dictator.
He did. And I think that's the provocative thought
we should probably end on. What is more effective?
Is it better to be the pure, uncompromising outsider,
throwing rocks at the walls of the palace and
ultimately changing nothing, or is it better
to be the compromised insider, the one who walks
into the palace and actually changes the policy?
Kolesia chose the palace. And because he did,
generations of artists, writers, and thinkers
in Yugoslavia had a degree of freedom that was
simply unimaginable anywhere else in the Eastern
Bloc. He compromised on his position, maybe,
but not on his principles. He rearranged the
furniture inside the rooms the next generation
had a place to sit. That is a perfect way to
put it. A perfectly Kreligian way to put it.
That's it for this deep dive into the colossal,
complicated life of Miroslav Kreligia. A true
titan of the 20th century. Thanks for listening.
We'll catch you on the next one.