„Break the chains that bind us! Crumble the suburbs of huge and diseased
Western-European cities! Crush the glass of the gilded palaces
- Tall towers – of National Stock Markets and Banks!
War profiteers escape into the fat bellies!
Hide your bought mistresses into your dirty pockets!
Do you have no shame?!
And you blind mothers and dumb fathers, who sell your virginal
Daughters!
And you underground black spiders, who are making nets around clean souls
- Free Masons!
Do you hane no shame, you drunken Lodges?
You lie the most – spiritual profiteers – of arts and culure!
Againt you – for the Man!
Close your gates Western – Northern – Central Europe –
Barbarians are coming!“
Ljubomir Micić, Zenitis Manifesto, 1921.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that educated and ambitious people of certain age, with no access to suitable jobs, end up in search of an ideology which seeks to overturn the staid system which they think oppresses them.
If you don’t spend enough (or rather too much) time on Twitter, the 2020 Alex Lee Moyer doc, “TFW no GF”, gave a glimpse into the world of “shitposters” and “frogs”, a virtual landscape inhabited by a range of people, from bored teens exchanging death threats, unorthodox podcasters and artists, to wannabe academics writing serious treatises on anything and everything from ancient philosophy to economics, which, despite some of them being of high quality, would not see mainstream acclaim as their authors are (self-)exiled from the increasingly creaking and unserious global academic and media ecosystem.
Moyer’s film touched only the tip of the iceberg, and the situation greatly worsened during the pandemic years as people had both more time on their hands and were less socialised, syphoning even more energy into alternative spaces. This, of course, was additionally helped by the turn of our daily life towards straight out bizarre: not only do the media and the “experts” expect us to follow them in their giant leaps in explaining what really is going on with COVID (masks: bad, then necessary; lockdowns: antidemocratic tool of despots, then a necessity for freethinking people), but the quality of increasingly regimented, perma-paranoid life with frequent riots and scandals has a distinct End Times feeling to it. The good indication of this shift, or “radicalisation” as the media likes to put it, is the fact that Moyer herself is making her next doc about Alex Jones of InfoWars.
Thankfully, rather than truly fatal, the feeling of “End Times” is one of the cyclical constants of humanity, and one of its expressions happened after a World War and another, much more serious, pandemic of the Spanish Flu.
Back then, a bit more than exactly a century ago, in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which was trying to be created from the ashes of Austro-Hungarian Empire and the blood it spilled in trying to destroy ultimately victorious Serbia, Ljubomir Micić, a Serb from Banija, believed that the old, Western order, was gone and needed to be replaced with a more vitalist world infused with revolutionary art and firmly non-Western, Balkan energy.
Thus in February 1921, during the heyday of avantgarde social-political movements in Europe, flirting with everything from the left (Sovient constructivisim), the right (Italian Futurism) and anything in between (Expressionsim, Dadaism), but creating something unique, Micić launched Zenit magazine in Zagreb.
Despite the stong Balkan flavour, Zenit, throughout its six year run and many events and exhibitions in Zagreb and Belgrade, was a truly international projects: it was multilingual, initially co edited by Ywan Goll, and included submissions from Marinetti, Lissitzky, Kandinsky, as well as local Yugoslav aritists such as Crnjanski and Vinaver.
Balkan nationalist anti-Western internationalism of Zenit seems like an odd combination (albeit repeted now by intenational coalitions of „based nationalists“), but was not unheared in the roaring 1920s in Europe. Zenitist wish to transcend borders was echoed, potentially even inspired, by this Zagreb publicaton, in Erenburg’s and Lissitzky’s Dešcy, Lionaise Manometre, as well T.S. Elliot’s The Criterion, which was first published in the same years as The Waste Land 1922.
While the politics of Zenitism was quite complicated it is much less studied then its art historical importance and innovation, despite the fact that the magazine was shut down by the Yugoslav authorities because of alleged „socialist“ views in 1926 and led to Micić’s move to Paris. Furthermore, one of the main reasons Zenitism criticised dada and other movements was their lack of politics and their strong aesthetic bend.
While Micić flirted with leftism, he was also a staunch beliver in the national and one of Zenitist ideals if that of the Barbaro-genije, a sort of Nietzchean Ubermensch, but from the Balkans, who breaks the chains of what he saw as dead and corrupt Western culture.
However, Zenitism was filled with contradictions and Micić’s throughts changed over time thus it is difficult to suss out what he truly stood for in those turbulent times.
Zenitism cannot be „understood“
Unless you feel it.
Electric charge which we don’t “understand”
But feel, might be the highest
Manifestation of spirit – Zenitism?
We are bare and clean.
Forget the hatred – dive into the naked depths of the Self!
Dive in and rise to your own heights!
ZEN1T
Rise above this knavish, fratricidal Today!
Bring the astral being in front of the visionary eyes of Super-life!
Hear the magic of our words: Listen to Yourself!
On the Šara mountain – on the Urals – stands
THE BARE MAN BARBARO-GENIUS (Barbaro-genij)!
Rise further above the Šara mountain, above the Urals – the Himalayas
Mont-Blanc – Popokatepetl – above Kilimanjaro!
We are floating already high high above the bodily spheres of the Globe.
Break chains that bind us! Crumble the suburbs of huge and diseased
Western-European cities! Crash the glass of the gilded palaces
- Tall towers – of National Stock Markest and Banks!
War profiteers escape into the fat bellies!
Hide your bought mistresses into your dirty pockets!
Do you have no shame?!
And you blind mothers and dumb fathers, who sell your virginal
Daughters!
And you underground black spiders, who are making nets around clean souls
- Free Masons!
Do you hane no shame, you drunken Lodges?
You lie the most – spiritual profiteers – of arts and culure!
Againt you – for the Man!
Close your gates Western – Northern – Central Europe –
Barbarians are coming!
Close, close, but
We will alas come in
We are the children of arson and fire – we carry the soul of the Man.
And our spirit is the life of cosmic unity bounded by Love.
Are are the childen of Barabar-ogeniuses of the Southeast.
They are coming…. They are coming…
ESCAPE CARS
The hoofs of full blooded horeses are click-clacking
In a fast leap and wild rythm.
Underground channels are clamouring,
Overpacked hostials and moaning.
City churches – streets and cathedrals
Are celebrating Ressurection
1921.
Moscow is bleeding
The far ascension bells and clamouring.
Closed yellow cars
Are cutting throygh sinful and colourful streets
Which have seen batallions of fratricides.
[…]
We who have discovered the Self – the Man – we are the Zenitists
And you should be too!
Our only thought is Zenit – the greatest incarantion of All-Being.
Our parth is only forward – above – through everything that has been.
Down with faint traditions, systems and borders! Borders are there for the limited!
We are going… going.
We travel from chaos to create the Work.
We are led by a mystcial half-god
Anarch
Join us, but woe to those who refuse and stay by the wayside.
We are not coming back.
[…]
The Earth if for the Man Brother not for the Murderer.
Zagreb on the Balkans, 12th june 1921
Goll’s manifest took the similar form, celebrating the non-Western vitalism, while Tokin’s was more explicit in stating that what separates Zenitsm from other movements is its celebration of barbarism.
“Being a barbarian means: beginning, possibility, creation (Nietzsche, Whitman, Dostoyevsky are barbarians, because they are the beginnings).
We Yugoslavs are barbarians.”
It is funny to read these manifesto from hundred years ago as I am writing this in 2022. Not only are there, many people who pine for the return of a sort of Bronze age collapse and RETVRN to a more wild state of things, but also the most famous and accomplished Balkan man, Novak Đoković, is being derided in the media for his head strong barbarism.
Who knows, maybe these impulses like Zenitism it will all fizzle out and its heroes will be forgotten. Micić, between his return to Yugoslavia just before WWII and death in 1971, lived mostly in poverty and obscurity, but never parting from his valuable art collection kept in his flat in Prote Mateje 9 in Belgrade.
Or maybe, Zenitism and Micić foresaw things that will come to pass a century later?
Anyhow, there is now an ok exhibition about Zenitisim at the National Museum in Belgrade that is worth checking out.
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