Milan Dedinac (Kragujevac, Kingdom of Serbia, 27 September 1902 – Opatija, Yugoslavia, 26 September 1966) was a Serbian poet, the most expressive lyricist among the Surrealists. Similar to Crnjanski, although in a different way, he was a follower of the creator of the Serbian lyric song Branko Radičević. He didn't write much. Almost all of his poetic work is collected in the book Od nemila do nedraga (1957). He also dealt with theatre criticism. He was one of the thirteen who signed the Beogradski nadrealizam (Belgrade Surrealist manifesto) in the Almanac Nemogučeg-L'Impossible in 1930.
Biography
Milan Dedinac was born into a middle–class family in Serbia in 1902. As a high school student, he was evacuated with his older brother Dimitrije (born 1901) and other Serbian children to France after the Great Retreat from Serbia with the army. In 1916 he resumed his high school education in Villefranche and Cannes. After the war, he graduated from the Belgrade Gymnasium and then went back to Paris for a short period. With Marko Ristić and D. Timotijević he edited the journal Putevi (Trails). He published his poetry in the Hypnos magazine.
In 1924 and 1925 he was on the editorial board of Putevi (Trails) and Svedočanstvo (Testimonies) together with his friends, Rastko Petrović, Dušan Matić and Marko Ristić. He also published in 1926 his long poem Javna ptica (The Public Bird) with a series of photomontages. He graduated from the French Language Department of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade in French and comparative literature in 1927. From 1929 to 1930 he worked as a Paris correspondent for Politika. He supported the Surrealist manifesto published in the Almanac Nemoguče-L'Impossible, where his poems Plamen bez smisla (The Meaningless Flame) and Otvoreno pismo (An Open Letter) are published in 1930 and collectively with all the Surrealists a mission statement Pozicija nadrealizma in 1931.
From the next decade (1931–1941) he was employed as an editor and later editor-in-chief of Politika, the Belgrade daily. His book of poems Jedan covek na prozoru (A Man at the Window) was published in 1937. During World War II he was interned in a German POW camp. After the war (1947) he published his book of poetry titled Pesme iz dnevnika zarobljenika broj 60211 (Poems from the Diary of Prisoner No. 60211). The pre-war years became sensitive politically for all the Serbian writers and poets within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia who sought the best for their people but when the old monarchic order got usurped after the war by the Communist partisans, those who were loyal to "God, King and Country" suddenly found themselves enemies of the state.
From 1948 until 1953 he was Artistic Director of the Yugoslav Drama Theater. He was appointed culture attaché in the Yugoslav Embassy from 1953 to 1955, and from 1955 until 1965 he was the Director of the Yugoslav Drama Theater in Belgrade. In 1957 he published the book Od nemila do nedraga (From Pillar to Post).
Works
Pozorisne chronike (1950) Pesme iz Dnevnika Zarobljenika Broj 60211 (1964) Od nemila do nedraga (1957) Poziv na putovanje (1965) Sabrane pesme (1981) Noč duža od snova (1972)
Already after the first poems that Dedinac published, the critics pointed out lyricism, immediacy and musicality as its basic features. In his poetic development, he followed the opposite path from that of Crnjanski and other expressionists. The poet Stražilova, starting from very specific historical and erotic themes, strives for lyrical materialization (meaningless) of the subject. Dedinac, on the contrary, starts from fluid emotional states in order to later express quite specific existential and historical situations. His early poetic cycle Zar zora, već? - Zora! (Is It dawn, Yet? - Dawn! 1921-1922) and Zorilo i nočilo (Dawn and Night), 1922, etc. resemble non-figurative painting, in which there are no objects but only lines and colours, or, even more, music, which by its very nature is deprived of any concrete concreteness. The endpoint of that way of singing was reached in the antipoem Javna ptica (1926), considered to be one of the most important surrealist texts. The spontaneous lyricism of the first poems in it is suppressed by conscious searches and experimentation with expression and form.