Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 6, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Njegoš Endowment for Serbian Language and Culture, the East Central European Center, and the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Branislav Jakovljević. Moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
If the Belgrade group, rarely discussed in international scholarly circles, can be said to represent the lost tribe of surrealism, it is because of its staunch commitment to the politics of what Georges Bataille called “essential surrealism.” Their passage from surrealist works to radical social action, exemplified most clearly in the anti-fascist struggle that several Belgrade surrealists joined during World War II, represents one of the key moments in the history of international surrealism. The case in point is Koča Popović, a founding member of the Belgrade surrealist group, who had a distinguished career as a military commander, first in the Spanish Civil War, and then in the guerilla struggle against the Nazi occupying forces in Yugoslavia, from which he emerged as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslav partisan army. This talk presents Popović’s war diaries as a unique realization of the ideal of the surrealist novel: without precursors or followers, leaving Literature behind, and aspiring toward other, non-scriptive, forms of writing.
Branislav Jakovljević is Sara Hart Kimball Professor of the Humanities, and he teaches in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His most recent book is “The Performance Apparatus: On Ideological Production of Behaviors” (2025, University of Michigan Press). He is the author of the award-winning book “Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia 1945–1991” (2016), and of a number of other books and articles published internationally.
