Dimitrije "Mita" Mitrinović was a Serbian philosopher, poet, revolutionary, mystic, theoretician of modern painting and traveler.
Biography
Mitrinović was born in 1887 into a family of Orthodox faith and Serbian culture at Donji Poplat, municipality Berkovići in Herzegovina during the Austro-Hungarian occupation. His father, Mihailo, was in the service of the Austro-Hungarian government and ran an experimental farm. Dimitrije was educated at Mostar Gymnasium. As a young student he was the formulator of the principal program of the political movementMlada Bosna, in his country's struggle for independence from Austria-Hungary and in the moves to create a united Yugoslavia. During this period Mitrinović edited the Sarajevo literary paper, Bosanska Vila, whose contributors included poets Risto Radulović and Vladimir "Vlado" Gaćinović. All three were born a few years apart in the late second half of the nineteenth century and all three have been members of secret political societies illegal in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of the three friends, only Mitrinović survived World War I. Having studied history of art in Munich, Mitrinović came to England in 1914 to work for the Serbian Legation in London and moved among influential cultural circles in this country. From late 1914 to early 1915, there was an exhibition of work by Ivan Meštrović at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which included a model of a monument he had designed to commemorate the Battle of Kosovo. A mysterious personality in Serbian and European cultural history, he began his work inthe field of art by translating Rig-Veda and the works of Virgil into Serbian. He studied philosophy and art history while staying in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Munich, and Tübingen. He was one of the first advocates of the avant-garde artistic group Der Blaue Reiter and gave a lecture on the art of Wassily Kandinsky. Being in favour of the building of a universal utopia, like many of the leading minds of his time, he wrote about the inevitable creation of the Pan-European community. Ten years before La rebellión de las masas by Ortega y Gasset, Mitrinović prophesied: "Being different from the other races, the population of Europe has always given birth to its contradictions and always with the chances of their solution in some ultimate synthesis." He was a regular contributor to the epoch-making periodical The New Age, alongside Ezra Pound, and according to Edwin Muir, Mitrinović "has erupted with wild and profound contemplations... not looking several ages ahead, like Shaw or Wells, but several millennia ahead." The Utopian and messianic ideas of Mitrinović were brought to the attention of the public not only in the periodical The New Age but also in the periodical The New Atlantis and The New Albion. Mitrinović founded the Adler's Society, but later he and Adler went different ways due, allegedly, to "politicizing of his scientific concepts". Mitrinović later founded the New Europe Group. Mitrinović advocated a metaphysical Utopia but was also politically pragmatic. He published an open letter to Adolf Hitler in 1933 in which he accused Hitler of "behaving and acting as an evil superman... possessed with some weird vision" which is "incomprehensible for the human mind and belief and quite certainly, and in all forms and essence, directed against the Orthodox soul." The works of Mitrinović have remained scattered in numerous European periodicals, Značaj Jungovog dela, Marks i Niče kao istorijska pozadina Adlera, Načela genija, Carstvo snova. Many of his works were published in Serbian periodicals, and one of his major works, Aesthetic Contemplations, was published in Bosanska Vila. In addition to the selected works of Dimitrije Mitrinović and the special study by Predrag Palavestra, Dogma i utopija, two books have been distributed by Columbia University Press, New York; the first of them was published in 1984 and the second one in 1987. The authors of these books are Andrew Rigby and H. C. Rutherford. In 1914, wishing to establish the movement "The Fundamentals of the Future", he maintained correspondence with the following potential associates: Giovanni Papini, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Upton Sinclair, Henri Bergson, H. G. Wells, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Leonid Andreyev, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Pablo Picasso, Filippo T. Marinetti, Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, and Knut Hamsun.
Library and archive
The Mitrinović Library contains a collection of over 4,500 volumes, based on Mitrinović's private collection. The Library thus reflects Mitrinović's very wide range of interests and command of languages. Particular areas of strength are philosophy, politics, society, religions and esoterica. The collection includes rare books on art history, literature, psychology, history, science, oriental studies, astrology, Freemasonry, theosophy, and more. Most material is from the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the main languages used are English and German, with also French and some Asian and Eastern European languages. Part of the library was bequeathed to the Belgrade University Library in 1956 and part of it donated to University of Bradford in 2003 and 2004. The archive that was donated to the University of Bradford by the Foundation New Atlantis in 2003 and 2004 includes published and unpublished writings of Mitrinović and documents and correspondence produced by members of Mitrinović's circle, of the New Europe Group, and of the New Atlantis Foundation.
