In his 1920 Objasnjenje Sumatre (The Explanation of Sumatra), Milos Crnjanski wrote about the attempt of the new, post–war generation of artists to break with tradition and to try and “express the changeable rhythm of mood”, i.e., capture “the exact image of thought”. 41 In the following ten years, Serbian avant–garde circles continued to ponder the subject, and the issue of the nature of thought, perhaps for that very reason, prompted an extensive survey in which ten of the thirteen members of the Surrealist group participated. The survey, :eljust dijalektike (The Jaws of Dialectics), consisted of thirty–one questions, it being no accident that two of its benchmarks referred, on the one hand to thought, and on the other to love. It is between these two poles that all the other questions and answers range: from the banal – what time is it by your watch, to the conventional – what do you expect from life. Just how important the survey The Jaws of Dialectics had been for the Belgrade group of Surrealists, can be concluded from the fact that a third of the almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible had been devoted to it. Going through all the questions and answers, one can make out the conceptual position of Surrealism in Serbia around 1930 and also the individual differences between the members of the group. Their individual positions and the interesting questions and answers shall not be discussed here42, for, we are primarily interested in the concept of the almanac as a collective and multimedia work of art.

We should say right away that an almanac is not a conventional publication of the kind a book, a magazine or a paper is. It is neither a miscellany nor a collection of works. Originally, it used to be a calendar (Greek), or a yearbook containing texts of different genres. The almanac Nemoguce–L’impossible is not exactly that either, although it does contain different contributions. It begins with a program signed by the thirteen members of the Surrealist group, i.e., a manifesto, immediately followed by the mentioned survey, and then by verse and prose, program and critical pamphlets, statements of artists, film scripts and a lot of other material. The textual contributions, only briefly listed here, are copiously complemented by visual matter, contributing to the heterogeneity of the resulting mix. On the other hand, the visual material is for its part also unconventionally selected, with reproductions of pictures by Ignjat Job, for example, appearing with drawings, watercolors, collages, photocollages, photographs, etc. The impression is gained that the almanac is structurally disarrayed if compared to the established order reigning between the various sections of dailies or art periodicals and mass publications. The almanac Nemoguce–L'Impossible does not recognize their rigid structure of sections classified according to importance, because, being a collective avant–garde product, it makes no distinction between nor evaluates on a hierarchical scale the values or respective importance of the published contributions. Thus, like in a light prism, it refracts works by Milan Dedinac, Aragon, Vane Zivadinovic Bor, Marko Ristic, Paul Eluard, Djordje Krstic, Nikola and Aleksandar Vuco, Benjamin Péret, Koca Popovic, André Thirion, Dusan Matic and many other members of the large and international Surrealist family.

The almanac being neither a classical book nor a paper, its size could range anywhere between these two forms. Its compilers, the Belgrade group of Surrealists, assembled around a joint art and life project, chose a format considerably larger than the one employed for literary reviews at the time and one better suited to science publications and official registers. Its page size is format A–4, the standard filing and keeping format, according to Karel Teige, namely the size of official documents which are filed for safekeeping. It is, namely Teige’s opinion that not only scientific but also avant–garde art publications have to observe such format standardization. 43 By it size, its simple paper binding, but also its other graphic and typographic qualities, Nemoguce–L’impossible, meets, thus, the basic requirement of Modernism, which, in Teige’s view, with the Russian revolution, opened up a wholly new chapter in the long history of printing. The almanac was not stiff–bound or adorned with elaborate color illustrations on fine paper, because it was in fact not meant for bibliophiles and rich readers, but for an artistic and alternative audience which it yet had to win over, i.e., the kind of public which required some “canvassing”, as Teige would say, for the promotion of Surrealist ideas. It was not enough only to collect contributions, establish an order and a hierarchy of values among them, and then publish them, as was usual in the practice of, primarily, literary reviews. The editor, Marko Ristic, had to be versed in typography and printing in order to shape the heterogeneous features comprising the almanac for it all to be in the service of Surrealism. The fact that he exactly understood the essence of the new approach to creating a book is demonstrated already by his antinovel Bez mere (Without Measure), published in 1928, which also departs from the format and make–up typical of classical literature. Still, it is particularly important to point out here Ristic’s observation about another Surrealist almanac – 50 u Evropi (50 in Europe), from 1929. “I have nothing against that magazine publishing reproductions of paintings which may be sensitive and “good”, which I may or may not “like”, but which are confined to the boundaries of artistic intentions (Marino Tartalja, Pavle Vasic)... The publication of the mentioned contributions (we are not talking about their value, but about their direction) shows adaptation... the acquiescence of these young men in a conventional literary and artistic standpoint,” says Marko Ristic at a time when he had already made much headway collecting material for and planning the design of the almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible.44

As avant–garde publications primarily target a readership from a substantially different, lower rung of the social ladder, as compared to subscribers to academic and art publications, the standard size, ordinary paper and the soft, paper binding of the almanac, were just right for that audience. But, on the other hand, many avant–garde heralds were published as luxury editions, because their contributors and editors did not want to leave out representatives of the bourgeois elite either, because many of them, as was also the case with the Serbian Surrealists, had been born into it. Thus the almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible was printed, as stated in the imprint, on “31 May 1930 in the Planeta Printing Art Studio in Belgrade, and, in addition to the standard edition, 160 copies were also printed on glossy art paper, 25 of which, numbered and signed, contained an original contribution each.”45

In view of the lively activity of both the French and the Belgrade Surrealists in the late 1920’s, as well as their close cooperation recorded on the pages of either the last issues of the magazine La Révolution surréaliste or the almanac, its bilingual title – Nemoguce–L'impossible is not at all unexpected. Work on collecting, organizing and ultimately publishing the material, started in mid–1929, when, at the initiative of Djordje Jovanovic, Oskar Davico and Djordje Kostic, the young editors of the paper Tragovi (Trails) (1928), a large group of Belgrade Surrealists assembled, among whom were Dusan Matic, Marko Ristic, Aleksandar Vuco and Mladen Dimitrijevic, which gradually expanded as work on the Nemoguce–L'impossible project progressed. 46 At a certain point, the entire undertaking could have looked like just another literary platform of the kind popular in Belgrade in the 1920’s, but luckily, this was not the case. The designation Surrealist Editions on the almanac’s covers, clearly indicated where it belonged in terms of concept. Even without this indication, the covers and the front page strikingly differed visually from the literary, art and other magazines of the time. The layout the Surrealists chose featured a dramatic pink and black contrast, garnished with different letter fonts, to make it all function not only as the cover of the almanac but also as a poster. The elaborate typography on the covers, the varied and asymmetrical make–up, the unexpected disposition of large and small drawings, photographs, collages, all these visibly disrupted the typecast model of printed books and magazines. The modern typography called for “new optical make–up composition”, meaning that picture and text had to blend into a new, first and foremost, functional, visual composite.

The marked abundance of photographs, photograms and photocollages in the almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible, never before seen in any Serbian or Yugoslav avant–garde publication, can be explained in at least two ways. On the one hand, given the chosen concept of modern typography and optical make–up composition, it was only natural for precisely photography to be preferred to the picture, the vignette or the drawing. On the other hand, sight must never be lost of the intention of the Belgrade Surrealists to emulate the model of French Surrealist magazines and books, primarily La Révolution surréaliste or Breton’s Nadja, which gave photography a quite new and up to then uncommonly important place. And last but not least, was also the influence of film, which should be seriously taken into consideration when analyzing avant–garde publications, especially those of a Dada or Surrealist orientation. “Film was also largely the training for modern vision, as it were, and the properties of good cinematography – tempo, condensation, expressivity, crosscuts, terseness, shortcuts and hints, in addition to maximum attention to detail – close–ups, direct form – should also be the properties of the modern book, a model for literature and book printing,” – Karel Teige recommended. 47

Marko Ristic exhibited a particular proclivity for experimentation when designing the almanac, as, in fact, did his collaborators. Some of the pages, like Misterija ljudske glave (The Mystery of the Human Head) and Ljuskari na prsima (Crustaceans on the Chest) were composed after the fashion of the silent movies, with the visual narration interrupted by blocks of text. Crustaceans on the Chest, was, in fact, the script for Aleksandar Vuco’s film by the same name, but also some sort of a shooting script patterned by Marko Ristic’s collages. The 1929 magazine La Revolution surréaliste, which published Salvador Dali’s and Luis Bunuel’s scenario for the film An Andalusian Dog, could have been the model for publishing the Crustaceans on the Chest in the almanac, for it was known in Belgrade. 48 The Belgrade Surrealists, like the French ones, particularly valued film as a new art, inter alia, perhaps because, as Marko Ristic said, their infancy generally coincided with the infancy of film, for all of them had been born at approximately the same time as film.49

All of the visual material featuring in the 1930 almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible, expresses the program planks of Surrealism, primarily those on the automatism of thought and the inexhaustible fount of the subconscious. As the textual contributions in the almanac belong to Surrealist literature, they shall be only touched upon in this book to the extent that points in common between text and picture exist. Even the present–day viewer, accustomed to richly illustrated reviews and books, when leafing through the almanac cannot but be impressed by its lavish visual luxury. Starting with the photograph Zadrzano bekstvo nadstvarnosti (The Arrested Flight of Surreality) on the cover page, there follows a string of drawings, le cadavre exquis, pictures, collages, photocollages, photographs and vignettes, making up a total of 59 “illustrations” on the almanac’s 136 pages. This established an entirely new ratio between text and picture, which was, indeed, in the spirit of a modernly produced publication that, in Teige’s opinion, “tends to become a picture book, an album.” Modern press, in his view, “breeds a new form of book which fuses picture and text into a single whole, from printed matterthe book becomes – a typophoto.”50 The image of Nemoguce–L'impossible corresponds to just such a type of publication – it is an album, or a “poetry picture book”, as the Surrealists themselves called it in order to avoid censorship at the time of King Aleksandar Karadjordjevic’s dictatorship in 1929.51

Apart from a verbal one, this Surrealist almanac also establishes, with more success than 50 in Europe, an optical communication with the reader, involving not only pictures but also letters of various faces, sizes and fonts. Thus, for instance, not only the almanac’s cover, but its individual pages as well, are designed as a poster, like the one featuring The Mystery of the Human Head, for instance. Its bilingual title is compositionally vertical\horizontal and visually positive\negative, and also typographically varied. As already said, Serbian Surrealism owes nothing in the conceptual sense to Dada, and the same goes for the layout of its books, as its models in that respect were also somewhat different. Still, the experience of Russian constructivist typography was decisive for both. But, while Dadaism directly took over constructivist solutions, Surrealism emulated them indirectly via the form of French magazines, where this influence combined with the tradition of posters. In that sense, the almanac’s content and graphic and typographic layout concept can be said to have been fashioned after, in fact directly modeled on, La Révolution surréaliste, published from 1924 to 1929 in Paris, and to which Belgrade Surrealists also contributed. Indeed, cooperation between the two groups of Surrealists was a two–way street, with Belgrade’s Surrealists participating in the surveys and experiments of the Paris group and vice versa. Breton, for example, first published his prose verse Poemes in the almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible.52 The exceptionally important cooperation should also be stressed of André Thirion, who then wrote about explorations of graffiti and captions in the magazine La Révolution surréaliste, as, together with Marko Ristic and other “junior” members of the group, he had participated in designing the layout of the almanac.53

The almanac Nemoguce–L'impossible, published in Belgrade in 1930, was, thus, the first joint publication which defined the platform of the thirteen Surrealists.54 It, however, remained an isolated experiment in the Serbian avant–garde circle, because the concept of multilingual and multimedia collective work was not continued later, not even within the framework of Surrealism. The almanac marked new boundaries and set the framework for other joint undertakings of the Surrealists, such as, primarily, the magazine Surrealism Here and Now, which was published in 1931 and 1932. If, apart from the content, which doubtlessly shifted the conventional boundaries of belles–lettres and the fine arts, the almanac is viewed as a work of art in its own right, it evidently introduces a new, modern, typographical picture book model. The structure of the almanac, given its format, make–up and layout with rhythmically alternating text and picture, partly draws on the herald of the French Surrealists, La Révolution surréaliste. However, one should know that La Révolution surréaliste did not look like an art magazine but like a science journal, for instance La Nature. Unlike these French magazines, the almanac does not have a set arrangement of sections, and no strict scientific hierarchy is observed in publishing the contributions – the important programmatic text Uzgred budi receno (By The Way), is thus at the end, and the survey The Jaws of Dialectics at the beginning, whereas the opposite would have been in order.55

Nemoguce–L'impossible carries, first and foremost, the manifesto of the Belgrade group of Surrealists, and then a survey as a new form of research, and only then follow a series of programmatic texts, the recorded results of the automatism of thoughts, descriptions of dreams and other experiments. Abundantly accompanied with visual contributions, it was shaped as a Surrealist textual and visual whole. Basically, the almanac can be said to have the complex structure of Teige’s “typophoto”, which requires of the user to equally be an attentive reader and an active spectator. Still, it should be primarily appreciated as the treasure trove of Serbian Surrealism, the more so as numerous artistic experiments: drawings, le cadavre exquis, pictures, collages, photographs and photograms which were published in it have today been lost, so that the almanac The Impossible is sole testimony to their existence.

Apart from that, the almanac also constitutes the artistically most valuable form of collective action by the Belgrade Surrealist group, which can, later, be followed also at the level of theoretical–philosophical texts published in the books Nacrt za jednu fenomenologiju iracionalnog (Outline for a Phenomenology of the Irrational) (1931) and Anti–zid (Anti–wall) (1932). Still, the magazine Surrealism Here and Now (1931–1932) was, after the almanac, the most important program platform from which the Surrealists responded to domestic criticism and pursued their international cooperation policy. Surrealism Here and Now (NDIO) continued to publish works by Breton, Péret, Eluard, Tzara, Dali, Miró, Ernst and Giacometti and to cooperate with other representatives of French Surrealism, with some of them also sending their replies to the Survey on Desire. Needless to say, Salvador Dali’s contribution is particularly interesting from the standpoint of program, and in it, he says, among other things: “No desire is blameworthy, the only fault lies in repressing them. All my desires, to use the current idiom, are dirty, foul, repulsive, etc... I attach great importance to will, driving its mechanism even up to a “paranoiac delirium” put in the service of the fulfillment of desires. Of so–called “lofty” desires I have none. The ones I consider the noblest are the ones I consider the most human, i.e., the most perverse.”56 The group of non–professional artists, which all the Belgrade Surrealists with the exception of Radojica Zivanovic Noe were, acted, from Eternity and The Public Bird up to The Impossible and Surrealism Here and Now, guided by the idea that painting and the traditional arts no longer enjoyed a privileged position and that, in fact, “the book constitutes the grandest art of the 20th century”.57