He also briefly held the post of president of the Yugoslav writers' union between 19. Krleža wrote about Tito that Tito was an illegitimate child of the Keglević who in another poem became, as a fictional character, the epitome of exploitation of the working class. The institute would be posthumously named after him, and is now called the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography.įrom 1950 on, Krleža led a life of the high-profile writer and intellectual, often closely connected to Tito. Supported by Tito, in 1950 Krleža founded the Yugoslav Institute for Lexicography, holding the position as its head until his death. Following a brief period of social stigmatization after 1945 - during which he nevertheless became a very influential vice-president of the Yugoslav Academy of Science and Arts in Zagreb, while Croatia's principal state publishing house, Nakladni zavod Hrvatske, published his collected works - Krleža was eventually rehabilitated. The Party commissar sent to mediate between Krleža and other leftist and party journals was Josip Broz Tito.Īfter the establishment of the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia under Ante Pavelić, Krleža refused to join the Partisans now headed by Tito. He was a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from 1918, expelled in 1939 because of his unorthodox views on art, his defense of artistic freedom against Socialist realist doctrine, and his unwillingness to give open support to the Great Purge, after the long polemic now known as "the Conflict on the Literary Left", pursued by Krleža with virtually every important writer in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in the period between the two World Wars. Krleža was the driving force behind leftist literary and political reviews Plamen (The Flame) (1919), Književna republika (Literary Republic) (1923–1927), Danas (Today) (1934) and Pečat (Seal) (1939–1940). In the post-World War I period Krleža established himself both as a major Modernist writer and politically controversial figure in Yugoslavia, a newly created country which encompassed South Slavic lands of the former Habsburg Empire and the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. Upon his return to Croatia, he was demoted in the Austro-Hungarian army and sent as a common soldier to the Eastern front in World War I. He defected to Serbia but was dismissed as a suspected spy. Subsequently, he attended the Ludoviceum military academy at Budapest. At that time, Pécs and Zagreb were within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He enrolled in a preparatory military school in Pécs, modern-day Hungary.