Professor Miller responds: I thank Jelena Milojkovic-Djuric for her letter, which provides the readers of Slavic Review with the sort of biographical details of Mica Popovic's career that could not be included in my article. Her comments indicate that she feels that I fell short in two regards in my article: that I did not capture the depth of Serbian suffering in general after 1945, and that I avoided discussing the foibles of the other Yugoslavs as Yugoslavia collapsed. My only general answer is that I doubt I could ever satisfy her on either count, but in a thirtypage article it would have been foolhardy to try. Regarding specific points: I agree that my characterization of Popovic as having been "marginal" until the 1970s may have been overly harsh and/or too inclusive. But art critics, and the artist himself, were highly critical (even dismissive) of his work between his 1950 exhibition and his abstract expressionist period, which began in 1963 (no matter how many exhibitions he had already had in Paris, London, or even Fresno and Milwaukee). If my conclusion concerning the rise of nationalism in the 1980s indicates to Professor Milojkovic-Djuric that I am not aware that the discussion of national identity began in the 1950s, then it is the fault of a necessarily circumscribed forum. For the record, the fact that my article is about two Serbs does not mean that I am an unqualified advocate of the claims of any other peoples of former Yugoslavia. Regarding the "transition from socialism to nationalism," which Professor Milojkovic-Djuric contends did not exist because there was no real socialism in Yugoslavia, I would ask her to reexamine my own assertion, which is that the subjects of my research began as adherents of the left (and Cosic was of course explicitly communist), only to have become nationalists in the 1980s. One can argue that the Tito regime was not socialist, but Popovic and Cosic are both on the record as (at least) embracing generically socialist ideals by the end of World War II. They later became nationalists. Thus my description of their transition from socialism to nationalism. Professor Milojkovic-Djuric apparently missed my point. I do compare fascism in Europe in the 1930s and the present situation in Serbia, but I did not have Germany in mind. In any case, I do not claim that my subjects were fascists themselves. In fact, I explicitly state that I believe otherwise. I do propose that Cosic, Popovic, and others provided many of the words and images that were used by those who arguably are fascist in Serbia, and that is quite a different thing. Adolph Hitler, Germany, and Nazism never appear in my article. One comparison implied in Professor Milojkovic-Djuric's letter does command our attention, however: whereas Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and others left Germany in protest against the Hitler regime and all it represented, Cosic was an early supporter of Slobodan Milosevic, and neither he nor Popovic ever repudiated the nationalism that made Milosevic possible. Her Germa...
