Dimitrije "Mita" Mitrinović (

Serbian Cyrillic The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (, ), also known as the Serbian script, (, ), is a standardized variation of the Cyrillic script used to write the Serbian language. It originated in medieval Serbia and was significantly reformed in the 19th cen ...

: Димитрије Мита Митриновић; 21 October 1887 – 28 August 1953) was a Serbian philosopher, poet, revolutionary, mystic, theoretician of modern painting and traveler.

Biography

Early life and radicalism

Mitrinović was born in 1887 into a family of Orthodox faith and Serbian culture at Donji Poplat, municipality

Berkovići Berkovići ( sr-cyr, Берковићи) is a village and municipality in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. As of 2013, it has a population of 2,114 inhabitants. Geography The municipality is located in the westernmost part of East Herze ...

Herzegovina Herzegovina ( or ; sh-Latn-Cyrl, Hercegovina, separator=" / ", Херцеговина, ) is the southern and smaller of two main geographical Regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the other being Bosnia (reg ...

during the Austro-Hungarian occupation. His father, Mihailo, was in the service of the Austro-Hungarian government and ran an experimental farm. Dimitrije was educated at Mostar Gymnasium. As a young student, he surrounded himself with a group that would later form the ''Mlada Bosna'' (

Young Bosnia Young Bosnia ( sr-Cyrl-Latn, Млада Босна, Mlada Bosna) refers to a loosely organised grouping of separatist and revolutionary cells active in the early 20th century, that sought to end the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovin ...

) movement, in his country's struggle for independence from

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe#Before World War I, Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military ...

and in the moves to create a united Yugoslavia. In 1907, he went to study Philosophy in

Zagreb Zagreb ( ) is the capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Croatia#List of cities and towns, largest city of Croatia. It is in the Northern Croatia, north of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the ...

before breaking up his studies in 1911 to join the sculptor

Ivan Meštrović Ivan Meštrović (; 15 August 1883 – 16 January 1962) was a Croatian and Yugoslav sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pa ...

in Rome where he spent some time promoting his works. Mitrinović was one of the leading ideologists of Young Bosnia. In the years leading up to the

First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

, he achieved prominence with his poetic writings along with his

literary criticism A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's ...

, initially dabbling in

expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

before shifting to

futurism Futurism ( ) was an Art movement, artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the ...

. During this period Mitrinović edited the Sarajevo literary paper, ''Bosanska Vila''. Its contributors included poets Risto Radulović and Vladimir "Vlado" Gaćinović. All three are alleged to have been members of secret political societies illegal in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; only Mitrinović survived World War I. In 1913, he went to

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

to study

art history Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history. Tradit ...

under

Heinrich Wölfflin Heinrich Wölfflin (; 21 June 1864 – 19 July 1945) was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles (" painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in ...

. There he was acquainted with intellectuals Eric Gutkind,

Wassily Kandinsky Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky ( – 13 December 1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstract art, abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in ...

and

Paul Klee Paul Klee (; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented wi ...

. Mitrinović came to England in 1914 to work for the Serbian Legation in London and moved among influential cultural circles in the country. From late 1914 to early 1915, he participated in exhibitions of Meštrović's work, which included a model of a monument he had designed to commemorate the

Battle of Kosovo The Battle of Kosovo took place on 15 June 1389 between an army led by the Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović and an invading army of the Ottoman Empire under the command of Sultan Murad I. It was one of the largest battles of the Late Middl ...

Career and thought

He began his work in the field of art by translating '' Rig-Veda'' and the works of

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; 15 October 70 BC21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Augustan period. He composed three of the most fa ...

into Serbian. He was one of the first advocates of the avant-garde artistic group

Der Blaue Reiter ''Der Blaue Reiter'' (''The Blue Rider'') was a group of artists and a designation by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc for their exhibition and publication activities, in which both artists acted as sole editors in the almanac of the same name ...

and organized exhibitions on the work of Kandinsky. Besides art history, he also studied Philosophy while staying in

Rome Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2, ...

Madrid Madrid ( ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in Spain, most populous municipality of Spain. It has almost 3.5 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 7 million. It i ...

, Paris,

, and

Tübingen Tübingen (; ) is a traditional college town, university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer (Neckar), Ammer rivers. about one in ...

. Being in favour of the building of a universal utopia, like many of the leading minds of his time, he wrote about the inevitable creation of the Pan-European community. Ten years before ''La rebelión de las masas'' by

Ortega y Gasset Ortega is a Spanish surname. A baptismal record in 1570 records a ''de Ortega'' "from the village of Ortega". There were several villages of this name in Spain. The toponym derives from Latin ''urtica'', meaning 'nettle'. Some of the Ortega spe ...

, Mitrinović prophesied: "Being different from the other races, the population of Europe has always given birth to its contradictions and always with the chances of their solution in some ultimate synthesis." He was a regular contributor to the epoch-making periodical ''

The New Age ''The New Age'' was a British weekly magazine (1894–1938),credited as a major influence on literature and the arts during its heyday from 1907 to 1922, when it was edited by Alfred Richard Orage. It published work by many of the chief politi ...

'' (the author of the column "World Affairs"), alongside

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

, and according to

Edwin Muir Edwin Muir CBE (15 May 1887 – 3 January 1959) was a Scottish poet, novelist and translator. Born on a farm in Deerness, a parish of Orkney, Scotland, he is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry written in plain language and wit ...

, Mitrinović "has erupted with wild and profound contemplations ... not looking several ages ahead, like Shaw or Wells, but several millennia ahead." The Utopian and messianic ideas of Mitrinović (influenced by philosophical concepts of

Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in ...

and Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, the esoteric doctrine of

G. I. Gurdjieff George Ivanovich Gurdjieff ( – 29 October 1949) was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer, and movements teacher. Born in the Russian Empire, he briefly became a citizen of the First Republic of Armenia after its formation in 19 ...

, and the psychoanalytical school of

Freud Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in t ...

Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist who founded the school of analytical psychology. A prolific author of over 20 books, illustrator, and correspondent, Jung was a c ...

and Adler) were brought to the attention of the public not only in the periodical ''The New Age'' but also in the periodical ''The New Atlantis'' (which Mitrinović edited) and ''The New Albion'' (which he co-edited with A. R. Orage). In 1927, Mitrinović was entrusted with the founding of the ''Adler's Society'' (the English Branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology). He and Adler later parted ways due, allegedly, to "politicizing of his itrinović'sscientific concepts". Mitrinović later founded ''the New Europe Group''. Mitrinović advocated a metaphysical Utopia (based on

Plotinus Plotinus (; , ''Plōtînos''; – 270 CE) was a Greek Platonist philosopher, born and raised in Roman Egypt. Plotinus is regarded by modern scholarship as the founder of Neoplatonism. His teacher was the self-taught philosopher Ammonius ...

Clement of Alexandria Titus Flavius Clemens, also known as Clement of Alexandria (; – ), was a Christian theology, Christian theologian and philosopher who taught at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. Among his pupils were Origen and Alexander of Jerusalem. A ...

Lao Tzu Laozi (), also romanized as Lao Tzu #Name, among other ways, was a semi-legendary Chinese philosophy, Chinese philosopher and author of the ''Tao Te Ching'' (''Laozi''), one of the foundational texts of Taoism alongside the ''Zhuangzi (book) ...

Jakob Böhme Jakob Böhme (; ; 24 April 1575 – 17 November 1624) was a German philosopher, Christian mysticism, Christian mystic, and Lutheran Protestant Theology, theologian. He was considered an original thinker by many of his contemporaries within the L ...

) but was also politically pragmatic. He published an open letter to

Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...

in 1933 in which he accused Hitler of "behaving and acting as an evil superman ... possessed with some weird vision" which is "incomprehensible for the human mind and belief and quite certainly, and in all forms and essence, directed against the Orthodox soul."

Writings

The works of Mitrinović have remained scattered in numerous European periodicals (like the provocative texts based on psychological and philosophical theories, such as: ''Frojd prema Adleru'' (''Freud versus Adler''), ''Značaj Jungovog dela'' (''The Importance of Jung's Work''), ''Marks i Niče kao istorijska pozadina Adlera'' (''

Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...

and

Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist, turning to philosophy early in his academic career. In 1869, aged 24, Nietzsche became the youngest pro ...

as the Historical Background of Adler''), ''Načela genija'' (''The Principles of Genius''), ''Carstvo snova'' (''The Realm of Dream''). Many of his works (including much of his poetry) were published in Serbian periodicals, and one of his major works, ''Aesthetic Contemplations'', was published in ''Bosanska Vila''. In addition to the selected works of Dimitrije Mitrinović (published in Serbian, a number of years after his death) and the special study by Predrag Palavestra, ''Dogma i utopija'' (''Dogma and Utopia'') published in Serbian in 1977), two books have been distributed by

Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's la ...

, New York; the first of them was published in 1984 and the second one in 1987. The authors of these books are Andrew Rigby (''Initiation and Initiative: An Exploration of the Life and Ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović'') and H. C. Rutherford (''Certainly Future: Selected Writings by Dimitrije Mitrinović'').

Library and archive

The Mitrinović Library contains a collection of over 4,500 volumes, based on Mitrinović's private collection. The Library thus reflects Mitrinović's very wide range of interests and command of languages. Particular areas of strength are

philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

politics Politics () is the set of activities that are associated with decision-making, making decisions in social group, groups, or other forms of power (social and political), power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of Social sta ...

society A society () is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. ...

religion Religion is a range of social system, social-cultural systems, including designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics in religion, ethics, or ...

s and esoterica. The collection includes rare books on

literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

, history,

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

oriental studies Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology. In recent years, the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studie ...

astrology Astrology is a range of Divination, divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that propose that information about human affairs and terrestrial events may be discerned by studying the apparent positions ...

Freemasonry Freemasonry (sometimes spelled Free-Masonry) consists of fraternal groups that trace their origins to the medieval guilds of stonemasons. Freemasonry is the oldest secular fraternity in the world and among the oldest still-existing organizati ...

theosophy Theosophy is a religious movement established in the United States in the late 19th century. Founded primarily by the Russian Helena Blavatsky and based largely on her writings, it draws heavily from both older European philosophies such as Neop ...

, and more. Most material is from the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the main languages used are English and German, with also French and some Asian and Eastern European languages. Part of the library was bequeathed to the

Belgrade University Library The University Library ''Svetozar Marković'' () is the main library in the University of Belgrade system, named after Svetozar Marković, a Serbian political activist in the 19th century. It is located on Bulevar kralja Aleksandra, King Alexande ...

in 1956 and part of it donated to

University of Bradford The University of Bradford is a public research university located in the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. A plate glass university, it received its royal charter in 1966, making it the 40th university to be created in Britain, but ...

in 2003 and 2004. The archive that was donated to the University of Bradford by the Foundation ''New Atlantis'' in 2003 and 2004 includes published and unpublished writings of Mitrinović and documents and correspondence produced by members of Mitrinović's circle, of the ''New Europe Group'', and of the ''New Atlantis Foundation''.

References

Sources

* *

External links

Dimitrije Mitrinovic, pesnik, vizionar, pokretač

Belgrade University Library Svetozar Markovic

Dimitrije Mitrinović and New Atlantis Foundation Library and Archive of the University of Bradford
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mitrinovic, Dimitrije 1887 births 1953 deaths 20th-century Serbian philosophers Burials at Highgate Cemetery Serbian writers Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina Young Bosnia