NIKOLA MILOŠEVIĆ AND MIGRATIONS OF MILOŠ CRNJANSKI

Abstract

In the work attention is paid to critical opinions about the novel Migrations from the pen of the critic and philosopher Nikola Milošević. Milošević is noted in the history of Serbian literary criticism as a scholar who paid special attention to the metaphysical dimension of the meaning of Crnjanski’s novel, especially regarding the novel The Second Book of Migrations. However, his reflections on Migrations, a novel from 1929, are extremely valuable as well. Milošević’s interpretation of this work goes through three main stages. In the first of them, the tendency to remove the possibility of viewing the Migrations as a historical novel is noticeable, which to some extent corresponds to the claims of the writer Crnjanski himself. By removing the purely historical dimension, a perspective of understanding is opened and it is of a purely philosophical (metaphysical) nature and focuses mostly on the characters of the work. The second phase of Milošević’s criticism establishes a dichotomy between the axiologically valuable and positive agent of „the world” in Migrations and the one that is opposite to it, that is, axiologically at the opposite pole. This means that Milošević solves the question of metaphysical meanings at the level of divergence: on one side there are factors that belong to the sublime, and on the other those that belong to a valuable lower ones. At the same time, this argued polarization, seemingly rooted, has its basis in the very discourse of the novel. Furthermore, it leads to the last and decisive critical judgment of Nikola Milošević. It leads down to equalizing the fates of the Isakovič brothers, Vuk – axiologically „valuable”, and Aranđel – axiologically inferior. In other words, based on Crnjanski’s novel, the critic concludes that man’s fate does not depend on his spiritual value and that the outcome of meaninglessness awaits both those who aspire to heaven and those who are purely pragmatic. Based on that, conclusions can be drawn about one of the aspects of Milošević’s nihilism. In this sense, the interpretation of Migrations joins some of the important philosophical attitudes of Nikola Milošević.