The Milovan Djilas collection contains the published and unpublished manuscripts and correspondence between Djilas and his publisher William B. Jovanovich in the United States. When he was jailed and later, since 1967, almost all of his books were published by the company Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Jovanovich played the key role in connecting Djilas to American publishers and journalists, while Drenka Willen and Prof. Michael B. Petrovich were in charge of translating Djilas' texts and books intended for the American market. The central topics of the collection deal with the communist system and dissident movements in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, the cult of Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito, and the world communist movement in the 20th century.
The collection also contains Djilas's private correspondence as well as various other materials related to his dissidence. Apart from manuscripts and texts in Serbian and Serbo-Croatian, the collection also contains his numerous articles and essays intended for the American and Western press. Box 1 of the collection also includes his original manuscript of one of his most famous works, The New Class, which he wrote in jail in the second half of the 1950s. Box 6 contains another manuscript by him, Crna Gora, in Serbo-Croatian, while box 7 contains its translation into English, Montenegro. Box 8 contains the manuscript of the book Wartime, which was published in English in 1977, and the German translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which was previously published in English in 1973. Box 13 contains the manuscript of Conversations with Stalin, which led to his imprisonment for the second time after it was published in the United States in 1962.
Box 1 of the collection contains the manuscript of the best known work by Djilas, which also brought him global fame: The New Class: An Analysis of the –Communist System, otherwise published in Great Britain in 1957, which was also the first critical attack from the inside since he was the Tito's closest associates in the highest echelon of power. The book had additional moral force because Djilas wrote it during his stay in prison. In this book, Djilas acknowledged his personal transformation when he decidedly stated that “by getting away from the reality of contemporary communism, I have come closer to the idea of a democratic socialism” (p. 2). He provided a definition of the new class at one point in the book as a disappointed revolutionary who has discarded any illusions that the revolution could lead to a perfect society: “It is not therefore only about bureaucratic self-destruction and parasitism, although the communist regimes abound even more than others, but about appropriating exclusively by the communists, the rights of governing and distributing the nation's property, which really makes them the core of a new class of owners and on which their totalitarianism is based” (p. 52). When it comes to the creation of a dissident climate in a Yugoslav society where all resources were managed by the “new class,” Djilas said that it was very difficult to develop dissident strategy, since “intellectuals are forced into self-censorship by their status and the realities of social relations. The self-censorship is in fact the main form of party ideological control in the communist system” (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 1).
Box 2 contains a handwritten manuscript titled “Thief's Fate,” in which Djilas described the German occupation of Serbia afterward 1941. The box also contains Djilas' texts about Belgrade lawyer Jovan Barović, a dissident who defended political prisoners and who was injured in 1979 on the Zagreb-Belgrade motorway under suspicious circumstances. Djilas suspected that he had been killed by the secret service, to whom he dedicated the text “Barović - fearlessness against lawlessness,” later published in the American media (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 2). The same box contains is a typewritten manuscript of the work “Conversations with Tito,” that was first published in Serbo-Croatian abroad in 1980. Djilas described Tito as a dictator who did not have a tradition in the sense of a monarch or an intellectual education, but rather as a mass dictator who impressed with a strong will to power, which led him to the top of the Yugoslav party. Based on his style and method of rule, Djilas saw no difference in comparison to other communist regimes, therefore he concluded that “Tito's Marxist Marxism does not differ from that of other communist countries in terms of function, worldview and basic power, but rather in terms of Yugoslavism and insistence on state autonomy and its specific models of socialism.” After the split between Belgrade and Moscow in 1948, Djilas confessed that Tito was only interested in his personal power, and that theoretical postulates about the new direction of Yugoslav socialism after that important turning point were articulated by himself and two Slovenian communists, Boris Kidrič and Edvard Kardelj. Djilas also described Tito's rule as a discourse between “liberalization” and “re-Stalinisation,” which re-emerged after Stalinism’s decline in the mid-1950s as another return by Tito to Stalinist methods, as happened after 1948. Djilas saw the second wave of “democratization” in Yugoslavia after his personal endeavours in “national communism” in Croatia (S. Tripalo, S. Dabčević-Kučar) and in the “democratic wing” of the Serbian communists (M. Nikezić, L. Perović), but when these movements began to move away from Tito's control they were quelled by intensified regime repression after 1971. Finally, Djilas provided a forecast of the overall Yugoslav situation after Tito left the scene, when it was very clear that “Tito’s legacy – post-Yugoslavia will be endangered in its most controversial foundation, the ideological and monopolistic one. This will inevitably be a great menace to the independence of Yugoslavia” (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 1).
Box 8 contains Djilas' critical objections to the “New Left” in the American media, in which he condemned it as leftist radicalism doomed to failure. Box 11 contains his correspondence with Vladimir Dedijer, also accused by the Yugoslav regime of supporting Djilas' controversial articles published from October 1953 to January 1954, who was Djilas' closest associate and friend after his fall in 1954. Also important are Djilas' diaries from the time of his political troubles at the end of 1953 and the beginning of 1954, which clearly show that Djilas sought an alternative socialism opposed to Stalinism and a return to the sources of Marx and Engels, who, he asserted, did not build a final system, but left their theoretical concepts open to future discussions. Here also are Djilas' speeches and documents from the trial of January 1955, at which he said on one occasion: “Most commonly, my perceptions and the prevailing ones are two opposite sides of one and the same socialist system,“ rejecting every possibility that he was attempting to rebuild the pre-war order and the old political multi-party system. This box also contains Djilas' letter to Tito in 1967 just after leaving prison, and other works such as “The Nordic Dream” in 1954 and “Omniscience Of Stupidity,” an unpublished manuscript (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 11).
Box 12 contains a manuscript entitled “Rebellious Youth” from 1955, in which Djilas described his earliest revolutionary days when he joined the communist movement as a young man. It recounted his youthful journey from the gymnasium at Berane to the university in Belgrade, when he joined a leftist student youth organization after he was jailed in the royal prison. Djilas’ memoirs are an important source for the history of the Montenegrin wing of the Yugoslav communist movement. Box 15 contains Djilas' personal translation John Milton’s Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian, which he did during his time in prison. Boxes 19 and 21 contain the study under the title ‘The Unperfect Society,’ which appeared in an English edition in 1969, and a study on the Montenegrin poet and prince Njegoš from 1966. Box 24 contains the manuscript of his book that was published in 1958, Land Without Justice. Among the published materials from the collection, boxes 5 and 44 contain one of his novels in English, “Worlds and Bridges,” as well as his Serbian original, which was posthumously published in Novi Sad in 1997. Apart from many manuscripts, the collection also encompasses photographs of Djilas' family and public life from 1931 to 1989, a total number of 378 digital photographs stored on a CD. Djilas' correspondence is very rich and scattered throughout the collection, mainly in boxes 17, 18, 27, 28, 42 and 43. Some of his most interesting correspondents were Desimir Tošić, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Jovan Barović, Vane Ivanović, Aleksa Djilas, William B. Jovanovich, Matija Bećković, Vladimir Dedijer, Drenka Willen, Bogdan Radica, Marver Bernstein and many others.
Box 20 consists of Djilas' manuscript about Njegoš, to whom he devoted his interest after his conflict with the Party and during his time in prison. This box also contains various reports, letters, lectures and articles during Djilas' visit to America in 1968 after being released from jail, where gained publicity in American leftist intellectual circles, but also among the American general public at the time. Particular attention was then accorded to his lecture at Princeton University, where he advocated “economic decentralization” and “greater political freedom,” which were the reasons for his conflict with Titoism in 1954.
Box 34 contains the manuscript of Memoir of a Revolutionary, a book published in a U.S. edition in 1973 by his publisher Wiliam B. Jovanovich. There is also the important correspondence between Jovanovich and Djilas from 1970 to 1975, from which it is clear that Jovanovich was the main promoter of Djilas' works on the American market. The text of Edward Kardelj’s interview with Radio Free Europe on 6 May 1974 held in box 36 should be highlighted, as in it he assessed the Djilas phenomenon. Kardelj spoke about Djilas as a man of extremes, as a Party leader who endangered the survival of the Partisan movement in Montenegro with his leftist radicalism at the beginning of the war. According to him, after the war he was a staunch Stalinist only to turn to the other extreme of social democracy during the 1950s, claiming to the Western public that he was never a communist or a Marxist. This box also contains an interview with Djilas conducted by John Morgan for the British television broadcaster Thames in 1973, in which he expressed his view that totalitarian communism was falling into decadence and that reform measures were necessary to open the process of democratization and liberalization. He claimed that Stalin's death in 1953 opened the way for thoughts on alternative directions for socialism, and that his sympathies were with the model of Western social democracy, which attempted to build socialist planning without revolution. Box 37 contains two manuscripts, “Prison Diary” and “Prison Notes,” which were recently published in Belgrade by his son, Aleksa Djilas, under the title Pisma iz zatvora (Letters from Prison) in 2016. These manuscripts testify to Djilas' interests and thoughts primarily concerning his intellectual work and his writing and reading during his stay in prison. They certainly demonstrate his turn from Marxism to more traditional themes related to Montenegrin history and Orthodox literature. A fruit of the influence of Njegoš's religious philosophy on him was the book about Montenegro in World War I published in English in 1963, in which Djilas composed a mixture of history and fiction (Milovan Djilas Papers, box 37).
