Miloš Crnjanski

A poet of Serbian Modernism, an author and an diplomat. He was born in 1893 in Čongrad (a Hungarian part of Banat) and died in Belgrade in 1977. His novel The Migrations is considered the best literary description of the life of the Serbs in the Frontier lands.

Crnjanski grew up in Timisoara in a patriarchal social environment, where an important part of his education was about the Serbian national heritage. He survived all the horros of the First World War, leaving a strong imprint on his literary work. He wrote poems, short stories, novels, travels and plays on various subjects. After the war he worked as a journalist and a professo, and later on as a Yugoslav diplomat in Germany and Italy. After the WWII he lived as an emigrant in London, to return to Yugoslavia some years before he died.

ART

The best poetry works: Lyrics of IthacaStražilovoSerbiaLament over Belgrade. Novels: MigrationsThe Journal of ČarnojevićA Novel about LondonThe Second Book of Migrations. Plays: MasksDoss-houseMigrations was written in 1929. Later on Crnjanski wrote The Second Book of Migrations, as a new novel. It is about a hard life of the Serbs after the Migration into the Habsburg monarchy. Its hero, Vuk Isakovič, is a historical personage. The action takes place in 1744 and 1745. Describing the life of the Serbs in the frontier of that time, the author connects the historic situation of the Serbs with human and familial relationships of the Isakovič family. One story line follows the course of the Serbian people of Slavonia and the Danube region up to the Rhine river and back, while the other line depicts life in Zemun in peaceful times through a prism of relationships between lady Dafina, Vuk Isakovič’s wife, with his brother, Aranđel. The first book of the Migrations was turned into a film. The feature film was directed by Aleksandar Petrović in 1989 in the Yugoslav-French coproduction. The second book of the Migrationsdescribes the Serbian migration from Hungary to Russia.