International Journal of Slavic Studies (Feb 2020)
Господар смрти као Свечовек: пројекције елитних филозофских токова у српском стрипу и популарној култури 1930–их
Abstract
Among many philosophically and artistically challenging themes of comics in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the late 1930s — popular entertainment exported from Belgrade into a dozen of European countries — one of the dominating was the new world war. It spontaneously took on various forms, from documentary and pseudorealistic, through technologically sophisticated and futurofantastic, to metaphysical and transcendental. A special place in the microgenre occupies the Belgrade superhero series „The Master of Death” (Gospodar smrti, November 1939 — May 1940), whose author was the then young comic artist George/Yuri Lobachev (Đorđe Lobačev), a Russian born and raised in Serbian culture, founder of some comic strip genres. Unlike openly militaristic spirit reflected in the contemporary popular culture of Europe and the United States, the images of the world conflict in the comics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a country not yet recovered from The Great War, were most often oriented towards the world peace and universal values. This attitude in the Serbian entertainment industry was a direct intellectual reflection of the fusion of the philosophy of life of Henri Bergson and other European thinkers with the ideas of the classical Serbian tradition and theology, which led to a new philosophical direction in the 1920s and 1930s — Svetosavlje („Saint Sava’s Way”) embodied in the works of Justin Popović, Nikolaj Velimirović, Miloš N. Đurić, and others, whose ambition was to achieve cosmopolitan values through autochthonous national forms. Belgrade comic book superheroes and antiheroes — so different from contemporary American models — through peacemaking attitude, science fiction, and mystic ethical fantasy were bringing a unique concept, in which Dostoyevsky’s All–Man (Serbian: Svečovek, Russian: Vsechelovek) shows himself as not so far away of Tesla’s Man — the Automaton of the Universe.
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