Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
Prophet in the Ruins
By Michael Ignatieff
Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism's Self-Destruction
by Milovan Djilas, edited by Vasilije Kalezic, Translated from the Serbo-Croatian by John Loud
Knopf, 383 pp., $30.00
In the middle of the Bosnian war, I went to see Milovan Djilas at his apartment in Palmoticeva in Belgrade. Years before, my parents had passed a copy of The New Class to some Yugoslav friends during a summer holiday in Dalmatia. Djilas's book gave me my first encounter with the public power of words: here was a book so dangerous that my parents and their Yugoslav friends could not even discuss it in private. So when I showed up at his door thirty years later, there must have been some awe still in my expression.[*] He opened the door himself, a compact old man with a distracted and melancholy air, wearing faded corduroys, the jet black hair he once had in his Partisan days now turned white, his once-erect bearing now stooped, his pace shuffling. His wife, Stefica, had died recently, and he was alone in the dark apartment with his books and his memories. He offered me vodka and when I declined, he recalled how he had turned down Stalin when offered vodka. 'What kind of people are you?' Stalin shouted. 'We were partisans,' said Djilas to me, with an ascetic smile.
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