Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

16 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Slavization of our culture against Germanization, Magyarization and Italianization.

(c) Fighting against attitudes of servility, sneaking and contemptibility and raising of national honour and pride.

(d) Expropriation of estates, liquidation of all prerogatives of aristocracy and all social privileges and the democratization of political consciousness and the political awakening of people.

2. Anational defence against alien spiritual and material forces; national offensive to reawaken the subjugated and half-lost parts of our people by spiritual and material means.?°

Through this society the ideas of the Young Bosnians and their commitment to a Yugoslavian federation spread to revolutionary youth groups throughout the different Slav provinces. Mitrinovic played a significant role in this process, travelling the country presenting his programme to various groups. In the spring of 1912 he was in Belgrade where he addressed the members of a group organised around the paper Preporod (Renaissance). One of their number later recalled how “All of us were profoundly taken by Mitrinovic’s intellectual brilliance, and we wholeheartedly accepted his ideas.’”?!

Mitrinovic had described himself as a Yugoslav federalist even when he was a student at Mostar. In an article he wrote for the journal Vikor in 1914 he left the reader in no doubt where he stood on the nationalist question, “For Yugoslavia”:

We wish for the strength, honour and integrity of the national struggle of the Serbo-Croats and Slovenes, a nationalism of sacrificial and creative action instead of a patriotism of lukewarm and—within legal limits—warm feelings . . . Life is finer than death, we believe: yes, but death is more honourable than shame! And for the nationalists of Serbo-Croatia and Slovenia, for the sons of the uncreated Yugoslavia, there is nothing more exalted than the struggle, and nothing sweeter than the great victory... . Hopes and beliefs, you nationalist youth! From the saving idea of Yugoslavia and from her unbreakable basis and the national union of the Serbs and Croats, let us set to work on the nationalist creation of ourselves, on strengthening, preparation, and perfection. Forward to our goal, to the Idea of the Nation of the Southern Slavs, and to Freedom! Through the National Union of Serbo-Croats and Slovenes let us step to their National Unification.”

The belief in the importance of working towards a moral and cultural revival of the South Slav peoples through the exemplary influence of morally strong persons led many Young Bosnians to a kind of revolutionary ascetism, even puritanism, in their private lives. Mitrinovic’s friend and contemporary from Mostar, Vladimir Ga¢inovié, gave some indication of this in a letter to Trotsky: “In our organisation there is a rule of obligatory abstinence