MILOŠ CRNJANSKI AND ENGLISH LITERATURE
MILOŠ CRNJANSKI AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: At first glance, profoundly subjective and devoid of any criterion, except for the author’s individual preference for certain writers, Miloš Crnjanski’s approach to English literature is, in fact, based primarily on his extremely broad knowledge of its history, main directions of development, and most prominent protagonists. In the essays dedicated to individual authors and their works, this is demonstrated more or less in passing, as something that goes without saying – especially in the texts written after the author had spent a quarter of a century in England. In these texts, Crnjanski experiences the assimilated British culture as his own, as something that belongs to him and to which he belongs. This change is quite commonplace among immigrant authors. For example, Vladimir Nabokov, despite being bilingual and open in a manner characteristic of involuntary cosmopolitans, spent over ten years in America, struggling to experience and perceive this world as his own, without success: when this finally did happen, he wrote Lolita, a novel which was (according to his own words) not only “the product of his love affair with the English language”,1 but also represented harsh criticism of the shallow and aesthetically exceedingly problematic American pop culture; a novel which could only have been written by a foreigner who had ceased to be one – someone who knows his new home is not his home, and that the other, the real home, will never be his again.

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