Room 7 – Miloš Crnjanski

Big bed

MILOŠ CRNJANSKI

Crnjanski was born on October 26, 1893, in Csongrád, Hungary into an impoverished family. His father Toma was a junior officer who was “banished” from Banat because of his temperamental advocacy of Serbian minority politics. His mother’s name was Marija Vujić and she was a native of Pančevo. Since 1896, Miloš Crnjanski has grown up in Timisoara, in a patriarchal-patriotic environment that instilled the love for Serbia and its past in his soul. Crnjanski completed elementary school in the Serbian religious school with his teacher Dušan Berić in Timisoara. He graduated from the Timisoara Grammar School with Catholic Piarist Friars. In 1913 he enrolled in medical studies in Vienna that he would never finish. Crnjanski published his first poem, “Destiny,” in the Sombor children’s newspaper “Pidgeon” in 1908, and in 1912 his poem “Initially Been Shining” was printed in Sarajevo’s “Bosnian Fairy”.

The news of the assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand found him in Vienna. At the very beginning of World War I, Crnjanski was mobilized into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Galician front to attack the Russians, where he was soon wounded. He spent most of his time in 1915 at the Vienna War Hospital. In 1916 he worked at the State Railways Directorate in Szeged. The following year he was returned to the army and transferred to Komárno and Esztergom. In 1918 he enrolled at the Imperial Export Academy. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Crnjanski went to Zagreb and then to Belgrade, where he stayed for a longer period. In 1919 he enrolled at the University of Belgrade where he studied literature and edited the “The Day” newspaper. In 1920, he meets Vida Ruzić, whom he will marry in 1921. In the same year, Crnjanski and Vida went to Paris and Brittany, and on his return travels all across Italy. In 1922 he was a teacher at the Pančevo High School, the same year he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade.

Between 1923 and 1926 he was a professor at the Belgrade Grammar School and an associate of the renowned “Politics” newspaper. At the same time, he publishes the “Chinese Lyric Anthology” and is a journalist for the “Time” newspaper. In 1927, the first installments of his novel “Migrations” were published in the “Serbian Literary Gazette.” From 1928 to 1929 he is a press attaché at the Embassy of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in Berlin. In 1930 he was awarded the Serbian Academy of Sciences Award for his novel “Migrations.” In the following years, he traveled by ship across the Mediterranean and reported from Spain. In 1934, he launched the newspaper “Ideas,” which the following year ceased to be published.

Between 1935 and 1941 he worked in the diplomatic service in Berlin and Rome. After the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated from Rome and left for Madrid and Lisbon in August 1941. After the establishment of second Yugoslavia as an opponent of Tito and communist ideology, he remained in London and lived in exile. He did various jobs there. He was an accountant at Hellstern shoe store on Bond Street and distributed books by the Hatches Company in London’s Piccadilly, while his wife sewed dolls and dresses for the Harrods department store. Crnjanski received a diploma from the University of London and obtained a degree in hotel management. From 1953 till 1965 he lived at Queens Court 155, London, where a memorial plaque was revealed in 2004 in his honor. In London, Miloš Crnjanski was a member of an international PEN club that assured him that his novels would be typed. In 1951, he got British citizenship. He returned to Yugoslavia in 1965. At first, he stayed at Belgrade’s Excelsior Hotel near the Yugoslav Parliament, and then received an apartment for use at 81 Maršala Tolbuhina Street (today Makenzijeva 81). After the death of the writer’s widow, Vida Crnjanski, the Belgrade municipality of Vračar took over the apartment.

He passed away in Belgrade on November 30, 1977.

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