Ever since I almost miraculously ended up with a copy of “The Psyche of the Yugoslav Melancholy” I wanted to have it translated into English and have it popularized to the wider audience. It is an essay which cuts deeply and clearly into the heart of the matter – a rarity in the current field of social sciences and Humanities. That is doubly true in places like Serbia, where not only as Dvorniković himself concluded, there are almost no “homegrown” intellectuals, and the scene is beholden to what pays: which is politics.
I set myself a task to translate it by 2025 – a centenary since its initial publication – and maybe even find a publisher, however the events and my own (Dinaroid) laziness took over. The events and laziness did not subside by June, and I wanted to have it out by June 28 2025, Vidovdan, which is not only an important for Serbs, but also the date Ceca, the best living interpreter of Yugoslav melancholy – attested by my friend and expert on the subject Ognjen Lopušina – had a concert in Niš (it was supposed to be in Belgrade, but events, again, interfered). On the eve of the concert I decided to have it out in chunks and hopefully done by the end of the year. Some of the excerpts will be free and some paywalled, as while we may subsist from song and indolence, there is still life to take care of, and there maybe we should accept the modern world. I hope you enjoy Dvorniković’s work and understand us Yugoslavs and Serbs as we are. Maybe it will find its way to a printer, or at least inspire a more capable, and less indolent, translator.
– Srđan Garčević, 30 June 2025
A non-melancholic introduction to the study of melancholy
In the darkest year of the great war, 1917, in exile in Bihać, where I gazed at those once angry people, our Krajišniks, dying without a sound like tame lambs from hunger and misery, I wrote the first sketch of this essay, which I am now bringing to you, in a convulsion for freedom. The essay was published in “Hrvatska Njiva” {Hrvatska njiva “Croatian field” was a political-cultural magazine which was published between 1917 and 1919 until it changed the name to Jugoslovenska njiva, which was published until 1926} and also printed separately. Out of all of my previous discussions and studies, this essay was the most noted; it was written about and discussed at length and often quoted. And my industrious publisher Mr. Vasić, who published my “Contemporary Philosophy”, would every once and a while mention this little composition of mine, until years later I decided to publish an elaboration on it, spurred by his suggestions.
However, the times are different and so is this book.
In those days,we all loved to feel sorry and cry over ourselves. We blamed everything and everyone around us, drugged ourselves with the “great genius of our people”, broke and writhed for an even higher expression of apotheosis to our centuries-old Suffering and ran-over Justice.
We caressed ourselves, lied to ourselves – but before we could raise our heads, she rushed up and stood between us – our Freedom! What now? What should we fuss about now, what should we dream about, who should we complain about – who should we hate? Well, each other! – now that our “millenial” enemy has been kicked out and is licking his wounds outside, we’re going to settle the score among ourselves! There are now evermore ideas written in ancient papers {from Kulin ban}, greater and lesser freedoms – something for everybody and to each their own! Too many ancient claims to cover – and everyone has the same “right”! Everyone is now scrambling, battling, rushing – freedom – shame –
And now it appears to me that we used to be more beautiful in slavery.
That’s how it seems to me, and, well, I can’t help myself; and it also seems to me that we are a bit of a cursed race. Everything is buzzing in my ear as if I’m hearing it, where the outside world is putting us in a sequence like this: Romanians, Albanians {Arnauts}, Greeks, Yugoslavs… It’s lucky that Europe itself has not the purest past, let alone the present. Her aficionados themselves gossip about her infamously, that she has “lived it out.”
However, we Yugoslavs are a young and healthy race, or so we still hear that often. The future is ours, etc. But who says it? This scum who rose up to the surface in these floods and storms, and are still keeping themselves afloat? Surely not! Maybe in a deeper layer, in the raw, untouched material of our people?
There, I scratched deeper below our filthy daily life, to find something.
And if I found anything, it is in this little book.
I. What most deeply characterizes the Yugoslav psyche?
Doesn’t this simple fact stand before any further discussion: that in all spontaneous immediate emanations of our so-called “national soul” there is a large residue of heavy melancholy? As you go east in Yugoslavia, this sediment becomes heavier and blacker, but to the west and north it becomes thinner and paler.
If I had to pick the one and most characteristic trait in the psyche of this nation, but from its roots, I wouldn’t know what other to bring out, beyond that unfortunate melancholy and nostalgia of ours. There is now so much connected with this feature, that an entire “psychology of the Yugoslav people” could be centred around it and that it could mark the entire psychological constitution of that element, but here we will mostly stay with that melancholy itself, so we manage and reckon with it.
The fact that entire races and entire nations have their special “temperaments”, and that one can speak of a certain typical mental constitution of a people, was known even before any scientifically organized inquiry. The old division of the well-known four temperaments still stands with certain modifications, especially in such a summary and broad characterization as the “psyche of a nation”. For example, it is trivial to experience the superficial sanguinity of the Italians, which is harsher among the Spaniards, while witty and nimble among the French — and I don’t know if more precise observation and “tabular registration” add much.
However, when it comes to “Yugoslav melancholy”, there is something else at stake, and not just some psychology of one temperament. We uttered the fatal word “sediment of melancholy” already above in the first lines. There is what oppresses us and what urges us to now “psychologize”. It is a sediment, a black sediment, that we are considering here, as the Greek word itself says in its etymology1. Melancholy is a special temperament, with a unique tendency to “deposit”, to thicken – a “sedimentary” temperament. In it there is a real ballast of weight, a certain tendency and inclination towards crystallization and visible embodiment. This is what that temperament “gives from itself” and the reason why it was often productive to a genius extent. But it also gains it “back into itself” and thus regressively strengthens itself. It gives a special colour to the whole spirituality and, above that, exudes that “colour” separately and purely as its most characteristic embodiment.
Here, we take the faded (izažetu!) color of Yugoslav melancholy for our analysis.
So not the melancholic mental structure in its immediate movement, in its incompleteness, but certain ready-made embodiments and products, as well as historical and ethnic expressions of that melancholic psyche — it is those that we take as the starting point of our observation.
Melancholy, longing and nostalgia hang like a heavy, base tone, over all those creations and spurts of the national soul that we really have to consider as the centuries-old, true results of that entire lived-in world in which our people “passed their sober days”. This heavy seriousness of life, which rises to the level of sharp pain and is expressed as pain in almost all traditional products of the national spirit, branded the foreheads of this people that many of its other characteristics are only understandable with it as a starting point. And the so-called “good qualities” and “flaws”, all quirks and idiosyncrasies, all differences and characteristics compared to our closer and more distant neighbours are rooted in it. .
Let’s not ask here, why exactly that fundamental and characteristic tone of the Yugoslav folk psyche — in itself, so pure and open — is so poorly noticed and so rarely highlighted. Here we would have to touch on the well-known “gap” between the “people” and the “intelligentsia” and already underline here that we still don’t have our own true, pure intelligentsia, one that is truly ours. Let this question unfold and resolve itself in this further consideration, with which we begin immediately.
2. “The Yugoslav pain”
What kind of pain is this that speaks from below the surface of the Yugoslav psyche? Where does that muffled buzzing come from and what does it keep telling us? What is racial-psychological, what is cultural and ethno-psychological, and finally what is historically deposited in that melancholic subconscious of ours?
Where did that basic, organic “movement of the national character” come from, which is all the more profound, and is as deep as its “unculturedness” is in the Western European sense?
After all, what was the closest, purest and most immediate manifestation of that deep psychic tone? Where is it most audible and where is it most isolated?
Certainly, nowhere as much as in our folk melos (SOUND?). This is not a scientific analysis, but an immediate and everyday experience.
In no manifestation of our national soul do we feel that underlying “diseased psyche” as in the folk song and its melody. And when I speak of the Yugoslav soul, I am thinking especially of those parts of the nation where that psyche has retained (or acquired?) its distinct racial character, where more cultured foreign additions and influences were the weakest, that is, in the middle and the southeast of the national body (corpus). Only in those part did this tendency develop unhindered and fully, and only there is the place to attempt an analysis of the Yugoslav pain.
Our song is its first, most immediate and most characteristic expression. But there are other documents, along with the clearest speech of those songs and melodies. There are also our folk lyrical and heroic epic poetry, folk tales and short stories, as well as products of our folk humour, irony and satire. There is also the “folk philosophy” of proverbs, aphorisms and sentences; in one word, the entire “national treasury” and traditional national “literature”. In addition, you can come upon the religious and traditional spiritual life, superstitions and “beliefs”.
Out of all these, our folk melos speaks to us the most openly. Song and music rise above all other branches of art with their most direct expression and communication. There is no art or artistic “expression” that would communicate to us directly someone’s soul so nakedly and without barriers, as music can do. It directly expresses feelings and causes feelings. The mediation of the mind, or any mediation, in general, is most insignificant in music; and at the ideal climax it is not felt at all. Feelings and emotions, deep and inexpressible, intimate and unconscious to the point of being completely incommunicable, can only be transmitted “from soul to soul” as integral full experiences. But with that depth comes the narrowness of music. It is magnificent, unique and alone until it begins to generalize what can also be communicated though other means, until it seeks to expand its narrowness — at the expense of its depth. This happens when it wants to convey such nuances that are already measured and separated by the intellect and which are deep, spontaneous and otherwise inexpressible emotions. Psychologically speaking, “real” music is only folk, non-artistic music. The criteria for greatness for music as art remain – basically – the same as those for folk music. And when Schopenhauer, in The Metaphysics of Music, separated that art from all other arts, “only in it did he find the immediate expression of the absolute that stands behind all the phenomena of this world – an expression, completely equal to that world itself as “appearance” – then only this could lead, upon psychological reflection, that the deep core of the human soul speaks most directly in the language of music, that metaphysical universal will, which for him is the essence, the being, the absolute of this world.
Music gives away personality in a way that cannot be translated into any other form. Through song, we get to know a person and the character of entire nations best. The soulful face of a nation (if it exists at all) peeks through its folk songs. The type of those songs reveals the soul type. Expressions and rawness of these songs reveal a distinct, simple and preserved soul type. With culture, the type also disappears; the internationalization of European culture and its uniform spread across the globe shows this most clearly. In our semi-civilization, we still haven’t lost that type, especially in the regions that we can consider the least cultured. This living type still shows through our national melos and is still one lively facet of this nation. That melos says only one thing, and basically always the same thing: pain.
3. Bosnian, Serbian and Macedonian song
The face that is revealed in that melos, the face of the entire nation, as one single collective soul, is the face of a sufferer.
Nowhere does that one soulful face of our people appear so clearly and is revealed before our eyes, and nowhere does our people speak in its own unique way as in their songs.
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