It was in Paris in 1924 that André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto, a small volume containing the famous definition: “SURREALISM, n. (Masc.) Pure psychic automatism, by which we propose to express, verbally, in writing, or by any other means, the real process of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason and outside any aesthetic or moral preoccupations. ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association neglected heretofore, in the omnipotence of the dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to destroy definitively all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.”1

It was only much later, in 1961, that, faithfully and finely translated by Lela Matic, this definition was published in the Serbian language, but it should be borne in mind that even when it first appeared, it was repeatedly quoted in Serbian Surrealist publications, as the then generation of Belgrade’s young writers, philosophers, artists and students knew it well. “Breton and Surrealism, at least in terms of the most obvious, most conspicuous in them, were present here from the beginning, from 1924”2 says Dusan Matic in a text dedicated to the memory of André Breton, the controversial founder of the movement and leader of a large group of French Surrealists. Serbian Surrealists liked to compare dates in order to demonstrate an early interest in Breton’s ideas obtaining in the Serbian cultural milieu: the Surrealist Manifesto was published on 15 October 1924, and in his text Surrealism, in the magazine Svedocanstva (Testimonies) of 21 November of the same year3, Marko Ristic presented precisely this book. That is the moment when Surrealism, initially as a term, but shortly also as an avant–garde movement, engendered in France, started to emerge in a by far poorer cultural context, in Yugoslavia. Soon, it started to be written about outside Belgrade’s artistic circles as well, but with derision and derogation, which tone would be retained later also in a number of articles on Surrealism.4

In their study of Surrealism to date, numerous authors, needless to say primarily the members of the Belgrade group of Surrealists themselves, persistently stressed the obvious link between the French and Serbian movements. On the one hand, such a position inspired self–confidence, being to the credit of the domestic cultural milieu, used as it was to greatly lagging behind artistic trends, not only in the early 20th century, but also those in the more remote past. On the other hand, this link served as a solid shield against the numerous accusations leveled at the Surrealists for their excessive imitation of Western art, their snobbery, and even lack of creativity. Still, we should not forget that it was not only with the official advent of Surrealism that contacts were established between the Paris and Belgrade groups of artists. Namely, the enormous and precious library of Marko Ristic shows that its owner was a regular subscriber to the Paris magazine Littérature from the very first issue, from 1919, as well as to many other French reviews, among which particularly noteworthy were Les feuilles libres, Les marges, and Clarté from 1922.5 In fact, meticulous as he reputedly was, he himself recorded that he had read the name of André Breton for the first time at the age of sixteen “in the Geneva magazine L’Évental, in the 15 October 1918 issue of which Breton had published his essay Guillaume Apollinaire, and in the 15 February 1919 issue of which his more or less Mallarméan poem Décembre.”6 That name, which would have “for years and years, a magnetic attraction” for him, was also known to other young poets: Rastko Petrovic, the Dedinac brothers, Dusan Matic, Dusan Timotijevic, etc. Some of them were editors of Putevi (Roads), and, as of 1922, published translations of Breton’s poems, but also of other authors from Littérature7 in this magazine. All of them, being French students, enthusiastically read in those years the works of Apollinaire, Eluard, Reverdy, Tzara, Crevel, Rimbaud, Constant, de Gourmont and many other French authors.8 Dusan Matic wrote seriously and knowledgeably on Freud’s psychoanalysis as far back as 1923, and the following year his text Bitka oko zida (Battle about a Wall) came out, advancing his views which are close to the Surrealist program definition of the distinct significance of dreams. That is why, recalling the beginnings of Serbian Surrealism, in an extensive letter to Alain Jouffroy, Dusan Matic stressed that he had no intention of writing history, but that the fact should be borne in mind that they all “knew something already before Paris”, although “in Paris they had learned a lot”. 9

French culture was the conceptual framework for Serbian Surrealism which, as is common knowledge, did not spring from domestic Dada ideas. In fact, it exhibited an overt lack of understanding for the complex position of the magazine Zenit (Zenith) and its editor Ljubomir Micic. Radovan Vuckovic aptly noted that Serbian Surrealism could indeed not have sprung from Dadaism like the French did, because these two avant–garde movements had been formed upon foundations of different cultural influences altogether.10 While Micic, Aleksic, Poljanski and others had been in direct touch with German Dadaism and Russian Futurism, representatives of Surrealism had from their earliest youth been associated with French Dadaism and, especially, French literature, primarily through their education and, later, their prolonged stays in France. They espoused new avant–gardist ideas directly from French magazines and books, or indirectly, first by reading Rastko Petrovic’s poetry, and shortly thereafter, even before the Surrealist Manifesto was published, through the personal contacts established between Breton and Ristic. Somewhat later, other French and Serbian Surrealists personally met and established contacts, as attested to by their correspondence, and even more by the large number of magazines, books, leaflets, posters, invitations, etc. preserved in personal archives.11 Dusan Matic holds an eminently important place in the spreading of Surrealist ideas within the Serbian cultural context. Himself a French scholar, and a high school teacher of philosophy at the time, he enthusiastically initiated young poets in contemporary theoretical debates on psychoanalysis and Surrealism. Later, some of them officially became members of the Surrealist group, such as Djordje Kostic, Djordje Jovanovic and Oskar Davico. Dusan Matic, as he himself says, “revealed the importance of Surrealism and of the Surrealist revolution” to Monny de Boully in the early 1920æs. There were also other, less known poets, who gradually abandoned the Dada position in favor of Surrealism.12 And, only a couple of years after Matic had informally tutored him, Monny de Boully had occasion to meet with the French Surrealists, in particular with Eluard and with Max Ernst’s montages, which deeply impressed him, as, in fact they did Breton.13

Monny de Boully, a poet and the publisher of the almanac Crno na belo (In Black and White), and his “mentor” Dusan Matic, and not Marko Ristic, later the leader of the Serbian Surrealists, were the first ones to have the opportunity of participating in the exciting work of the Paris Centrale. “One day”, in 1925, “the Bohemian table in the ‘Moskva’ (Hotel) turned into a Surrealist table in the ‘Cyrano’ cafe in Paris”, Monny de Boully recalls.14 On that occasion, he presented the Belgrade avant–garde magazines to the French Surrealists, notably his almanac In Black and White from 1923, in which Breton’s early Surrealist position was quoted for the first time, as a motto: “Abandon all. Abandon Dada. Abandon your wife. Abandon your mistress. Abandon your hopes and your fears. Sow your children in the forest wilderness. Abandon the sparrow in your hand for the pigeon on the roof. Abandon, if need be, the comforts of life, that which is offered you as some future well–being. Hit the roads”. On the occasion of that first encounter, however, it was the “novel in drawings”, Vampir (The Vampire), published in Testimonies No. 6 in January 1925, that particularly aroused Breton’s interest. That issue, dedicated to the work of mentally ill people, constitutes one of the most important of a series of eight topic–specific features of Testimonies, primarily on account of its radically new anti–bourgeois and anti–artistic concept. Monny de Boully translated a text, signed by the initials F. N., The Mental Hospital in Belgrade, for which he also wrote a short introduction. Thus, The Vampire, the “novel in drawings” was published twice in one and the same year – first in the Belgrade Testimonies, and then in the Parisian La Révolution surréaliste. Monny de Boully’s article in this renowned review was punctuated by a Pablo Picasso drawing from 1925, published at the end of his Nadrealisticki tekst (Surrealist Text), which, together with Ristic’s Primer (The Example) from 1924, belongs to the earliest automatic texts in Serbian literature.15

As the summer of 1925 drew to a close, Monny de Boully and Dusan Matic were again together among the signatories of the declaration of the French Surrealists La révolution d’abord et tojours, alongside well–known names: Aragon, Breton, Soupault, Péret, Artaud, Ernst, Masson, etc.16 The declaration was an expression of Aragon’s and Breton’s position, according to which “real art is closely associated with revolutionary social activity: it, as the latter, aspires after destroying and annihilating capitalist society”. 17 Inspired by the turbulent goings–on among the French Surrealists, Monny de Boully tried to transplant, at least to some extent, that atmosphere of revolution and revolt to the Belgrade milieu, i.e., to achieve “Surrealism suited to his temperament”, as he later wrote. Under the title Eternity, and with his friend, also a poet, Risto Ratkovic, as editor, he started a modest paper, practically a leaflet, which was published from January to June 1926.18 While most of the young contributors to Eternity were only beginning to explore what “pure psychic automatism in expressing thoughts” actually could be, Monny de Boully’s contributions constituted valid examples of Surrealist texts in Serbian literature. His short texts, fables, must be particularly singled out, being definitely the most successful form of communicating a pure automatic stream of thought, and should certainly be included in the collection of his few published works. Radovan Vuckovic considers that “there are but three pure automatic texts in the legacy of Serbian Surrealism: Ristic’s The Example (1924), Djordje Kostic’s (1932) and Vane Zivadinovic Bor’s (1932) Automatski tekst (Automatic Text)19, but one should add to that the text »ari automatizma ili sedam minuta genijalnosti (The Magic of Automatism or Seven Minutes of Genius), a collective work by Marko Ristic, Dusan Matic, Slobodan Kusic, Djordje Jovanovic, Vane Zivadinovic Bor and Aleksandar Vuco (1930). With de Boully’s Surrealist Text (1925) and fables (1926), this, quite scant, Vuckovic’s inventory would be considerably enlarged and enriched. Ergo, Eternity from 1926 is the first Surrealist magazine in Serbia, not only because it transplants the ideology of French Surrealism into the domestic soil, but, primarily, because of the hallmark of Monny de Boully as an author. His “Surrealist ravings” brought a new freedom and a “deep faith in Surrealist revolutionary creation and through it a wholesale transformation of social life”. 20

Thanks to history or chance, which the Surrealists believed in, the magazine Eternity took the lead, slightly ahead of Javna ptica (The Public Bird), even though Milan Dedinac had worked on this Surrealist poem since 1922.21 When, having been repeatedly postponed, it finally came out in December 1926, The Public Bird belonged to a rare species, as it was published in a circulation of a mere two hundred copies, while Roads and Testimonies numbered a thousand copies.22 As the exchange of publications between the French and the Serbian group of Surrealists was already then quite intensive, right away, in January 1927 Dedinac sent several copies of his book “for Eluard, Breton and Aragon”, but also for Marko Ristic, who was in Paris at the time.23 This can partly account for the fact why Ristic’s review of Dedinac’s poem Objava poezije (The Proclamation of Poetry), published upon his return from Paris, assumed the form of a Surrealist program. Namely, in it, Ristic uses the tone of a manifesto, saying, among other things, that The Public Bird is “beyond literature”, and that “it is not subject to literary criticism”. Apart from that, he also stresses that The Public Bird brings “dark armies of dreams”, and that it should be seen as a “dialectic development of irrational thought” which threatens the hypocritical and pragmatic bourgeois society.24 It is very important to note in this context that, in his effusion of words glorifying the poem, Ristic did not miss the opportunity to draw attention to the special, typically Surrealist, relationship between text and picture. For, unlike all traditional poetry collections and anthologies, The Public Bird is not illustrated with vignettes and drawings by more or less renowned artists – it features for the first time, as Ristic also underlines, hallucinatory photomontages, three pictures by the same author, pictures created upon the same principles as the poetic images.

Breton compared Surrealist pictures with Baudelaire’s opium–induced images. One no longer seeks to conjure them up, but they “impose themselves on him, spontaneously, despotically. One cannot dispel them< for the will is sapped of strength and does not control one’s spiritual powers anymore.”25 Those are images which arise, just like dreams, from the deep layers of the unconscious, harbouring repressed hidden desires and instincts unacceptable in the framework of a bourgeois society. The mechanism creating the images of dreams was revealed already by Freud’s psychoanalysis at the outset of the 20th century, but the Surrealists accepted that interpretation in full and included it in their own exploration of the subconscious. “When the latent thoughts of a dream, uncovered by analysis are explored, one of them sharply stands out from among others which are graspable and well–known to the dreamer. These other ones are remnants of the waking life< however, in that one distinct thought a very often untoward desire is recognized, one that is alien to the waking life of the dreamer, and which, hence, he denies in wonderment or rage. That impulse is what in fact creates the dream, it generates the energy producing the dream, using the remnants of the day as its material< a thus produced dream satisfies the impulse, it is the fulfillment of desire, Freud believes.26

The secret of Surrealist creation could be so simple as to be accessible to all, just like a dream spontaneously materializing in a dreamer is, for example.27 Namely, “just like a spark extends when it sweeps through rarefied gases, so does the Surrealist atmosphere, created by mechanical writing,... readily lend itself to the creation of the most beautiful images. One could even say that the images appear in this reckless race as the only guides of spirit.”28 It is upon that principle that Milan Dedinac’s images in The Public Bird, both the poetic and the visual ones, also sprang. They are an expression of “the pure creation of spirit”, as Reverdy puts it, but materialized verbally in one instance, and visually in another.29 By the method of their creation, they meet the programmatic, and, it goes without saying, also the aesthetic criteria of Surrealist creation. For Surrealism, “the strongest image is the one which exhibits the highest degree of arbitrariness< the one which requires the most time to be translated into practical language.”30 Ergo, it would be improvident and useless to retell the content of Dedinac’s photocollages, because their function in the book is neither narrative nor illustrative. They do not refer to any specific part of the poem, nor to any group of verses, and could least of all be literally recognized in any one idea. They are there in order to convey, parallel with the text, and, in fact, aside from the poetic text, an experience of the marvelous, but also to confirm the Surrealist idea of convulsive beauty. One of Dedinac’s pictures, by a bold juxtaposition of two distant realities, uncovers unknown constellations of a universe in which the hand of a woman, like Adam’s hand on Michelangelo’s fresco, helplessly extends into space in search of a touch which is yet to inspire life into her.

The techniques of collage and montage offer the Surrealists vast freedom of choice in the game of associations, which, easier and simpler than drawings or oil paintings, can be visually concretized according to Lautréamont’s well–known juxtaposition formula. It is well–known that Surrealists often quoted his statement about the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella, recommending it to poets, writers and painters alike. As The Public Bird was printed on rough paper, today it is impossible to ascertain exactly what montage procedure Dedinac applied to obtain the picture of a young big–eyed girl with her face veiled. Still, the mysterious female image could be seen as a visual metaphor of a poetic work, as a public bird. Two different media – the picture and the word – express the same dreams and visions. Dedinac’s The Public Bird, with its verses and photocollages\montages does not illustrate known aspects of the visible world, because neither its poetic nor its pictorial world in fact refer to it. Its images have the same task as its text: they are to express “the interior model”, or a knowledge of superreality.

Let us in this context point to the considerable similarity between the French and Serbian groups of Surrealists, not only in terms of their respective program positions, which much has been written about, but also in terms of their perceptions of photography, which little is known about. Namely, in 1924, the first issue of the Parisian magazine La Révolution surréaliste carried six photographs by Man Ray, who was, as it were, from that moment considered the official photographer of Breton’s circle. His photographs did not illustrate the various texts in the magazine, but, as free visual associations in a fluid way corresponded with the ideas of the Surrealist publication. But, like the text, they primarily had to meet the automatism of thought requirement and then to unsettle family habits and customs, as was then in fact announced in the Parisian magazine.

A photograph of an almost naked girl, her body covered with tattooage, was published in February 1925 in the Belgrade magazine Testimonies.31 It is a visual shock to the observer, just like the image of the girl–phantom in The Public Bird or the double pair of breasts on Man Ray’s photograph. All of them, like many other photographs, clash with the habits and expectations of the cultural milieux of both Paris and Belgrade. In addition, they offend the bourgeois class good taste and sense of beauty, representing as they do a new model of photography, totally different from the conventional, representative pictures this kind of public had collected in their family albums. An avant–garde magazine, such as Testimonies was, offered photography, as new technical imagery, the opportunity to help address the radical requirements of art, given its autonomy relative to the world of real phenomena.

The photograph of the tattooed girl is unsettling even in the context of a magazine completely unconventional in terms of themes and entitled Pakao (Hell). Namely, it featured visual and literary works of socially marginalized groups, including convicts, mentally ill and retarded people. All these works were published as testimonies, as documents, and not as works to be evaluated on the basis of aesthetic categories. In the practice of earlier avant–garde groups, e.g., Futurism or The Blue Rider, works by ordinary people and children were displayed at official exhibitions alongside works by artists. In addition to numerous other stereotypes, the avant –garde also sought to destroy the existing hierarchy of meanings, valuations, genre divisions, etc., and pursued that consistently in all the media. Its efforts continued uninterrupted from one movement into the next at the beginning of the 20th century, to conclude with Surrealism. These positions were also reflected in the work of artistic groups assembled around the magazines Les feuilles libres or Testimonies, for example, whose work cannot be precisely classified under one specific movement, although they certainly hold a prominent place in the avant–garde realm. Seva Ristic Seva Ristic.

Namely, a bit before the Belgrade Testimonies, in 1924, the Paris magazine Les feuilles libres published works by lunatics, but also several drawings by Picasso, all this complemented by a text on music by Erik Satie.32 It is quite certain that it was this very magazine that was the model for the editors of Testimonies, because Ristic himself points to it that same year in his review of Breton’s Les Pas perdus.33 On returning to Belgrade, Rastko Petrovic, who was in close contact with the Dadaists while in Paris, “largely gave the inventive initiative and the documentation” for an entire series of eight issues of Testimonies to be published as a self–contained artistic project during 1924–25.34 Ergo, immediately before the Surrealist manifesto, there had existed a deep conceptual kinship between French and Serbian representatives of the avant –garde, which prompted domestic artists to tap new areas of exploration and to relax the conventional limits of both the literary magazine and the photograph, as well as of other communication media.35 A photograph, as is common knowledge, is produced by the action of light on a prepared medium. The impression that it is nature itself leaving a trace, has technically, from its very inception, earned photography enormous trust among the observers. Namely, photography is unreservedly believed to register real phenomena, but it is precisely in this respect that the editors of Testimonies laid a visual trap. Under the title Naselja prognanih iz raja (Abodes of the Expulsed from Eden), they published together three photographs of the Tattooage.36 Two of them show only parts of a male body, the chest and muscles, on which primitively stylized motifs of a mermaid, an efflorescent cross and a circus artiste on a ball are drawn, and the third, the most interesting one, depicts a young smiling girl, in the pose of an odalisque, but with her whole body covered in tattooage. With its size and positioning on the page of the magazine, this provocative photograph represents a distinct pictorial crescendo on the theme of tattooage. But, a closer look at the photograph, to the extent allowed by the quality of the paper and print, clearly shows that the drawings are false and that they have not been imprinted on the skin but on the clothes following the shape of the girl’s body. Despite the fact that this simulation, offering the observer “a pig in a poke”, was not altogether successful by contemporary digital image standards, this photograph holds an exceptional place in the context of Belgrade Surrealism, the more so as it was published in 1925, namely before the official publication of the program of the Belgrade group of Surrealists.

In contrast to the photographs of tattooed men, which are valuable as a visual document, registering as they do the existence of drawings on the body, this photograph is an expression of a deliberately conducted Surrealist experiment. It is “a forgery of the original”, because it cannot be a document on the strange and perverse phenomenon of tattoage. It should be noted that its false visual testimony was planted in the context of documentary material. In the topic–specific segment Pakao (Hell), the true function of this photograph is to betray perception stereotypes. Namely, the editorial staff chose precisely the photograph as proof, as the corpus delicti attesting to the existence of the marvelous, because of its markedly factual, i.e., documentary qualities. The photograph of the tattooed girl is constructed, and its successful inscenation blurs the boundaries between the real and the surreal, between the waking state and dreams.

Formally, it should have substantiated the scientific context of Testimonies, contributed with itsimage to an exact and documented view of the world. However, in the spirit of the Surrealist ideology, it concurrently calls it in question and problematizes its basic principles, as Caillois did somewhat later in his text devoted to the capacity of mimicry in nature, for instance.37 In the spirit of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the contrived photograph of the tattooed girl could be interpreted as an expression of male fantasies and hidden desires about woman. Just like the face of the girl–phantom from The Public Bird, it is at a certain point seen as an ideogram, one that we perceive and understand at the same time by an inner sense. Therefore, the viewer need not first read the text in either Testimonies or The Public Bird in order to grasp the message of these photographs. They affect him independently of the text: that is why Dedinac gives no explanation in the form of a caption, while in Testimonies the caption under the photograph is of a tautological nature, Tattooages, and refers to all the three photographs. Obviously, in effect, not only does that caption not correspond to the truth but it also calls in question both the documentary nature of the photograph and the validity of all other testimonies. In early magazines and books, Surrealism developed new mechanisms of the signification of photography, which in a quite unexpected way, but in the spirit of Surrealist techniques, or even better, similar to the mechanism of dreams, “eroticizes the female body forever and freezes it as the symbol of pleasure.”38

In some earlier research, Testimonies and Eternity have been said to belong to the “pre–Surrealist” period, while The Public Bird was categorized as Surrealist.39 This distinction is unnoticeable where visual arts, i.e., photography, are concerned. In Eternity, there are no visual contributions, while Testimonies and The Public Bird set the model upon which individuals, but also the entire group of Serbian Surrealists, would function. Needless to say, this model will be complemented and corrected, suffice it to compare the almanac The Impossible and the magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde (Surrealism Here and Now), in order to keep abreast of French Surrealism. The Serbian Surrealists were not alone in this regard, for Surrealism is an international movement which incorporated groups of Spanish, Belgian, Czech, English, Mexican and many other artists. Eternity, Testimonies and The Public Bird of Milan Dedinac, are sure proof that the Surrealist program was not only gradually espoused but indeed articulated in Serbia. In the period between 1924 and 1927, personal contacts were established with Breton and other French Surrealists, with an intensive exchange of publications and mutual cooperation starting to take place, which laid the foundations for further research, to be crowned with the key publication of the Serbian Surrealists, the almanac Nemoguce – L`impossible. It is, namely, a model avant–garde multimedia work which moves the set boundaries of not only belles–lettres but also of fine arts. It goes without saying that it dispenses with the traditional hierarchical relation between text and picture, in which the picture, i.e., photograph, always and only had to illustrate the text, but never vice–versa. With Surrealist works, the verbal and visual statements of the artists have been fully equalized in constituent and semantic terms. Both text and photograph are entities in their own right, each of which, in parallel and synchronously, reflects the program positions in its own way and in keeping with the laws of its own medium. Still, one should not forget that “the Surrealist imagination is above all visual”, as its earlier researchers warned.40