Serbian modernists and the experience of World War I

Abstract

This article seeks to briefly revisit the connection between World War I and Serbian literary modernism. The argument is that this connection is subtler, deeper and more enduring than it is usually presented. To illustrate it, the literary development of three key writers of Serbian modernism, Miloš Crnjanski, Ivo Andrić and Rastko Petrović, is taken as an example, and their attitudes regarding the literary representation of World War I compared to the actual representations of war in their poetry and fiction.