Miloš Crnjanski and the experience of the Mediterranean

Abstract

This study explores the poetic and intellectual development of Miloš Crnjanski, focusing on his engagement with Mediterranean cultural spaces and the legacy of classical antiquity. Crnjanski’s early experiences in the multicultural Adriatic city of Rijeka, combined with personal loss and his polyglot education, shaped a literary voice that challenged the nationalistic narratives of early 20th-century literature. His seminal poetry collection Lirika Itake (The Lyrics of Ithaca) reimagines the Odyssean return not as heroic triumph but as a traumatic reckoning with modernity, exile, and the collapse of traditional values. Deeply influenced by classical literature, European modernism, and Mediterranean history, Crnjanski developed Sumatraism, a poetic-philosophical vision grounded in cosmopolitanism and the transformation of suffering into aesthetic transcendence. Through works such as Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (The Diary about Čarnojević), Crnjanski destabilizes fixed identities, employing fragmented narrative structures and psychological complexity. His engagement with cultural plurality - linking Pannonia, the Adriatic, and the broader Mediterranean - positioned him as a cultural mediator between East and West, North and South. Crnjanski’s poetic geography, spanning from Galicia to Sumatra, blends memory, trauma, and myth to articulate the modern subject’s dislocation. His late reflections, including a 1967 speech in Italian, affirm his belief in poetic internationalism and the indestructibility of the cultural past. Misunderstood by many contemporaries, Crnjanski’s opus anticipates postmodern concerns with hybridity, exile, and the crisis of meaning.