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Is Marko Ristić the Serbian Breton?






This question invites us to draw a clear line of analogy regarding the influences and inspirations that intersected and propelled various members of Surrealist groups. We're looking at their shared inclination to subvert the rules of normative bourgeois reality and states of consciousness, as well as their engagement in publishing almanacs, journals, and manifestos. Both figures proclaimed their fervent belief in the power of inversion, in subverting the usual arrangement of meaning in language, particularly through an obsession with automatism and associations that stimulate unconscious realms. Their writings celebrated formal freedoms in poetry, suggesting a kind of synchronized practice where connections align to open up a field into the super-real, channeled by a rich use of inherent writing and linguistic techniques, always in a state of becoming. This occurred despite a general difference that confronts the homogeneity of their origins (the unconscious) and the fervent universality of psychological latency (psychoanalysis) into an inextricable knot.

The Genesis of Surrealist Thought: Paris and Belgrade


Initially, the Surrealist eureka connects seemingly impossible juxtapositions: Isidore Ducasse's "Songs of Maldoror," French decadent symbolists, and the erotic eruption in de Sade's works. This merged with Breton's experiences in psychiatric service, his contact with war patients, and Freud's psychoanalysis, revealing the darkened, unconscious parts of the afflicted mind. Under immense repressive pressures, these minds fractured, releasing hidden contents through cracks and trickles. This gave rise to the idea of an earlier strategy: liberation through a new vision and power of action, playing with the boundaries of reception. From the Dada experience, from which certain individuals and figures continued, tirelessly working on expressing the state of society's "underbelly," paving a path woven like a spider's web of unpredictable activities that cover an inexpressible mental scene.

To highlight the differences and analogies in these parallel streams of creating a possible culture, through texts, writing, and their hybridization into pseudo- or simulated records, visual experimentations, and the illustration of cross-syntheses by text or what performs synthesis within such avant-garde (unframed) contexts "here and now" in the text, let's list some facts behind the question of identifying their representatives.

A.B.
M.R.


Breton established the manifesto-driven engine of the Surrealist stance, initiating the influential spread of its automatism. Imaginary triggers became the primary means around which poetic definitions were solidified and experiences initiated. These often point us to the individual, their role, and ultimately the question of morality and the concept of freedom, within which self-identification also occurs. In his text "The Theatrical Subject," Marko Ristić asks: "Will I have enough strength to throw away the weapon of personality, self-love, and consciousness?"1

For Ristić, Breton would long possess "a magnetic attractive power, a special fascination [...] like some fluorescence."2 But not only for Ristić; in the preface to three Surrealist manifestos, Dušan Matić sentimentally reflects on his acquaintance with Breton and his personality: "he was one of those who stood a whole head above our epoch." He imagines Breton, now dead, sitting beside Lautréamont, etc. He also quotes from the "Introduction to a Discourse on Little Reality" the sentence: "I find myself in the antechamber of the castle, with a dimmed lamp in my hand, illuminating brilliant weapons one by one."

This "weapon" as a recurring motif is mirrored in the suicidal act of Jacques Vaché, which helped Breton formulate his definition of Surrealism ('Vaché is the Surrealist in me,' Breton). It reappears in the manifesto with its proclaimed point of appearing on stage with a revolver. The motif wanders and is paraphrased by Belgrade Surrealist Aleksandar Vučo, who describes his purchase of a rifle with which he would observe passers-by through its scope, his finger unconsciously on the trigger.

Parallel Developments and Shared Practices


Parallel to the publication of the first manifesto, in Belgrade, the development of the journal Putevi (Paths) and Ristić's engagement with Surrealism in poetry in the newspaper Svedočanstva (Testimonies) are noted. At that time, there were encounters and familiarizations with parallel international movements. In the Belgrade case, these ended up focused on "the intertextual permeation of avant-garde formal techniques of quotation, collage, and montage with the narrative-symbolic discourse of psychoanalysis and later Marxism."3

In the brochure Anti-Wall, Vane Bor and Marko Ristić provide a chronological overview with the aim of offering better insight and understanding of Surrealism. It summarizes the relationship between Belgrade and French Surrealism up to that point and highlights a significant moment of collaboration: the multi-faceted survey "Jaws of Dialectics" and the section "Alarm Clock" dedicated to humor. In the article "By the Way," Marko Ristić states: "The agreed-upon action of the Parisian and Belgrade groups was already marked in the publication Nemoguće (Impossible) by the collective collaboration of French Surrealists. From that moment on, there was a tendency for these two actions [...] to merge into one broad common movement." French Surrealists or writers close to them sent their texts to Ristić, who published them in the journals Nadrealizam danas i ovde (Surrealism Today and Here) and the almanac Nemoguće, where they answered a survey about desire initiated by the Belgrade group. Sarane Alexandrian writes about this collaboration, citing Ristić as the founder of Belgrade Surrealism, and noting the coincidence of its emergence with the printing of the first manifesto in 1924. He mentions the journal Nadrealizam danas i ovde, which presented experiments similar to those advocated and applied by their Parisian friends. "For example, there was an essay in the simulation of paranoiac delirium in which six painters and poets separately gave their interpretation of an old wall. They also conducted a survey asking whether humor is a moral stance?"4

Censorship, Collections, and Poetic Parallels


Ristić's poem Turpitude, Paranoiac-Didactic Rhapsody (with the subtitle 1938), which connects elements of eroticism, war, and various dream visions, and was visually accompanied by drawings by Krsto Hegedušić, was censored and only reissued later in 1955 in the journal Delo. This parallels the forbidden works of Breton, such as Anthology of Black Humor and the poem Fata Morgana, both from 1940. Ristić's visit to Breton's apartment and studio influenced the creation of the "Surrealist Wall" through the mirroring of a collecting impulse. Inspired by Breton's collection: "Amidst those Picasso, Chirico, Max Ernst paintings, those oceanic masks and fetishes, those unusual objects that seemed to have materialized directly, suddenly, emerging from the dense depth of a dream..." he began his own collection of paintings by Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, André Masson... African masks, and of course, fetishes. Ristić's wall, completed in the 1960s, is also cited as the 'first installation in the twentieth century in Yugoslavia.' The allusiveness of the metaphor, or rather the image of the wall in Ristić's work, is often found in his poetry, diary entries, etc.: "Don't stare, I said or not, at that wall whose edge burns..."5

Marko Ristić seems to paraphrase Breton's statements from the first manifesto when he says: "There is no reason why man should not know what he is, what he can be, and what means are at his disposal, if there is even the slightest possibility for it."6

The technique of collage, for example, "Ristić's collages La vie mobile I-XIII (1926) and the collages of other members, were actually 'a narrative-allegorical use of collage as a discourse on the unconscious, on the fragmentary nature of visual representation and the discrepancy between visual and discursive language (sexuality, desire, fantasy).'"7

Core Concepts and Ideological Divergence


The main concepts that stand out in the intersections of textual chains are: Freedom, Love – concepts linked to the background of Surrealist ideals, derived from alchemical imaginarium and its postulates; Madness, Death, and Dream – concepts intertwined with Freud's psychoanalysis; and Morality, Humor – problematized in Serbia both in poetry and beyond, in theoretical essays and analyses, most often by Marko Ristić, especially the concept of Humor. They are unified by the concept of Desire, which occupies a significant place in their investigations and propositions, particularly as its emphasis foreshadows even greater importance in the future.

Surrealism could thus be seen as a hallucination of language that resists synthesis; as a gambling procedure – throwing pieces (dice) – a game of segments that do not close into a calm whole; or as a reflection of mental distortion and paradoxical expression, which points to another frequent motif, the motif of the mirror, which, besides its image in poetry, also appears as a semi-chimeric object, an obsessive object of the Surrealists.

This 'mirror-like' Surrealist object can be full of implications – about the object of transfer, immersion, preoccupation, delusion; about the very problematization of personality in a whirlwind. Through Surrealism, it anticipates later questions that would arise with post-avant-garde and its phenomena, identity complications. On the other hand, the paradoxical emergence of personality and its identifying psychoanalytic context – definitions – leads to the question of the classifying norm that adds the title "leader-father" of the movement to its spokespersons. In the fervor of Surrealist idealism, it is not surprising that the leader identifies with and acts through assuming a role and carrying out activities in the name of responsibility. Thus, in the eyes of Rade Drainac, Marko Ristić is magnified: "Today I believe in lyricism [...] I am amazed by the intersections, like spears through shadows, but I await for this dream of sirealism to become Marko Ristić's cruel reality, through which he sees greater oases than even Breton himself saw."8

The similarities they share can be primarily linked to the framework of Surrealism and the "agreement" of principles, most intensely in the first and second phases of Belgrade Surrealism. However, in the third phase, certain divergences emerge, and they become increasingly ideologically distant. In the text "Against Modernist Literature," Marko Ristić indicated "the essential premises for overcoming avant-garde modernism... In theoretical terms, this involves a movement from the avant-garde existential gesture to Freudianism, from Freudianism to Freudo-Marxism, and from Freudo-Marxism to Socialist Realism."9

The ideological implication of the line of identification: "Surrealists... during their development from Dadaism towards Socialist Realism and canonical Surrealism, produced a poetically, aesthetically, and politically postulated context/concept of the avant-garde, striving for Surrealist orthodoxy in relation to the Father-who-is-the-law: in France, it was Breton, and in Belgrade, certainly, Marko Ristić."10

In his critical review "Knights of the Subconscious," Stanislav Vinaver criticizes the harsh condemnation of the past – tradition – by the Surrealists: "The religious sect to which Mr. Ristić belongs is historical materialism, brought into a particular relationship with psychoanalysis. [...] The stance of Mr. Ristić's generation has something sharp and inevitable about it. Almost murderous. And something impersonal. Justice – in whose name they fight – is indeed impersonal. In that stance, we sense the relentless breath of the coming great impersonality. A terrible and fervent desert in which billions of grains of sand swirl, identical and fatal."11

Sartre, in his text "What is Literature?" (1947), interprets Surrealist rebellion as a specific characteristic of bourgeois literature, and as a manifestation of a youthful crisis and an attempt to liquidate the Oedipus complex through the rejection of parental authority.12 The cause of the split among members of the Belgrade group was precisely the disagreement on understanding the role of personality in Surrealist endeavors: "While on one hand, personality was placed at the center of all activity, on the other hand, it was the bearer and creator of its own negation. While on one hand there was a striving for the affirmation of personality through its mythologization and its indefinite extension, on the other hand, it was understood as a form of existence and its role reduced to the processes of human cognition." (Đ. Kostić, La Cle des Champs)

Conclusion


The dialectical comb combs the brain-hair, the linguistic pandemonium spins languages instead of flower petals. From different languages about Surrealism and its very corpus, through fragmented sequencing to point out the divergence of these parallel currents, and with a collage-quotation language to establish a whole as a result of the research question, it is presented as an answer—a collected (unsynthesized) group of listed citations. In this way, the paradox and transformability within the relationships of diverse synchronized currents are represented, and the key points – the intersections in the movements of Surrealism – are implicitly highlighted.

And in the question of the personality (of the leader) and its cultural aspect, the localization of identification (mimesis) remains presented and certainly a necessary categorizing determinant. In a broader sense, it also points to the fate of the avant-garde 'dead ends' and pre-Surrealism, which, despite their fundamental negation (of the institutional framework), become rounded off by museological-art historical discourses.



Darko Vukić, 2016.


  1. M. Ristić, Oko Nadrealizma I, Belgrade, Clio, 2003, p. 9.
  2. M. Ristić, Posle smrti Milana Dedinca i Andre Bretona, Svedok ili saučesnik (1961-1969), Belgrade, Nolit, 1970, p. 244.
  3. M. Šuvaković, Nadrealizam-Surrealism: slučajevi iz beogradskog i francuskog nadrealizma 20ih i 30ih godina XX veka, Belgrade, 2008, p. 1.
  4. S. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, p. 119.
  5. M. Ristić, Oko Nadrealizma I, Belgrade, Clio, 2003, p. 71.
  6. Vane Bor & Marko Ristić, Anti-zid, Nadrealistička izdanja, Belgrade, 1932, p. 54.
  7. M. Šuvaković, Nadrealizam-Surrealism: slučajevi iz beogradskog i francuskog nadrealizma 20ih i 30ih godina XX veka, Belgrade, 2008, p. 14.
  8. M. Ristić, Oko Nadrealizma I, Belgrade, Clio, 2003, p. 226.
  9. M. Šuvaković, Nadrealizam-Surrealism: slučajevi iz beogradskog i francuskog nadrealizma 20ih i 30ih godina XX veka, Belgrade, 2008, p. 16.
  10. Op. cit., p. 16.
  11. M. Ristić, Oko Nadrealizma I, Belgrade, Clio, 2003, pp. 461-462.
  12. Novaković, Jelena, Tipologija Nadrealizma, Belgrade, Narodna knjiga-Alfa, 2002, p. 70.