On one of her two long visits to Yugoslavia in the mid-1930s, the English writer Rebecca West and her husband were dinner guests at an Eastern Orthodox monastery in Matka, Macedonia.  Between the “admirable” cold lamb and the “curious and admirable mixture of trout and chicken,” an old priest told them how he got his dog, a good wolf-hunter.  It is the kind of story that tells you almost everything you need to know about the region, the kind of story that makes an entire trip worthwhile.

I had this dog as a puppy from an old woman they called Aunt Persa in these parts, and he has something of her nature.  She was a comitadji, just like a man, and she had three husbands, and all she killed because they were not politically sound. One would go with the Turks, and one would go with the Bulgars though he was a Serb because there were so many Bulgars in the village he felt safer so, and one would go with the Greeks.  She was a nurse in the Balkan wars, but she fought as much as she nursed, and she was wounded many times.  Then when she was too old to marry or to fight she became a nun and lived as a hermit in a monastery up in the mountains here, that is a thousand years old.  She made a very good nun. (670)1

Even if some exaggeration may have crept into the old priest’s account, the ethnic rivalries, comitadjis and Balkan wars were not mere memories.  The Yugoslavia of the 1930s was very different from the Western Europe of that time, and even more different than anywhere in today’s world.  West’s journey long ago to a country that no longer exists confirms that much has changed, but her insights in a time of rising fascism in Europe still resonate today.

Rebecca West in the 1920s

1.

Born Cecily Isabel Fairfield in 1892, West was hardly the “typical Englishwoman” whose perspective she strove to represent.  She adopted her professional name from Henrik Ibsen’s modernist play Rosmersholm, had a ten-year unmarried relationship and one son with the legendary science fiction writer H.G. Wells, wrote for The New Republic and other wide-circulation newspapers and journals, and published eight novels over a long career.   She was undoubtedly a feminist, as well as a woman of her time. She was a brilliant and sharply opinionated writer who wielded her scalpel whenever and wherever she deemed it necessary. 

West wrote what is probably her most famous work, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia, about her travels in the mid-1930s.  Despite its wonderful title, the book demands a fair bit of patience from readers. It first came out in two volumes, together weighing in at 1150 pages (plus index) in my 1994 Penguin single-volume paperback.  It’s a travel book with intricate descriptions of architecture, scenery and colorful characters, but not a single photograph, map or illustration. Finally, it’s much more than a travel book, with extensive set pieces about regional history, religion and national character, which form the basis for some of West’s most profound conclusions.  She takes her journey during the perplexing interwar period (how did they fall into a second world war?), in which we can sometimes make out the political parents and grandparents of some modern-day figures.

The new nation of Yugoslavia held special interest, because the region had been the epicenter for what was then called the Great War.  Two small wars had broken out in the region in the years before 1914, and the “great powers” (England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia) had only just managed to stay out.  Then a group of young and inexperienced ethnic Serbian radicals traveled to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, to attack the visiting Archduke Franz Ferdinand, successor to the throne of the unpopular governing power, Austria-Hungary.  As West explained, the conspirators botched almost everything, but in the end one of them, Gavrilo Princip, managed to shoot Franz Ferdinand and his wife dead on St. Vitus’ Day, June 28,1914.  Although the awful scope of the Great War was mostly due to the disproportionate reactions of the “powers,” especially Germany and Russia, the assassination at Sarajevo triggered of the initial breach between Austria-Hungary and then-independent Serbia.  In the war’s wake, the new country of Yugoslavia was formed in a shaky union of small nations – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Dalmatia, Bosnia/Herzegovina and Montenegro - - that had been provinces of the imploded Austro-Hungarian and/or Ottoman empires, losers of the Great War.  The success of the Yugoslavian experiment in state-building was a test for stability of the post-war settlements. West sympathized with her good friend and guide Constantine, a Serb, a poet and a Yugoslavian government official, in trying to make his new culturally, ethnically and religiously divided country work.

West traced her obsession with the region to its unabated history of political violence. As recently as 1934, two years before West’s first visit, King Alexander of Yugoslavia had been murdered in broad daylight during a state visit in Marseille.  West connected this event back to the 1898 murder of Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary by an Italian anarchist named Luccheni, who had said his aim was to kill the first royal person he could find.  Although this was a politically “meaningless act,” since the Emperor Franz Josef continued to rule, West, no fan of the empire, wrote that “Luccheni was not mad. Many people are unable to say what they mean only because they have not been given an adequate vocabulary by their environment . . .”  She wrote this not in sympathy but foreboding: 

[N]ow Luccheni is Mussolini, and the improvement in his circumstances can be measured by the increase in the magnitude of his crime. . .  His crime is that he made himself dictator without binding himself to any of the contractual obligations which civilized man has imposed on his rulers on all creditable periods of history and which give power a soul to be saved. (17-18)

This crime, that is, Fascism, had a corrosive effect even on the ordinary, apolitical German tourists whom West encountered on a train:

They were all of them falling to pieces under the emotional and intellectual strain laid on them by their Government, poor Laocoöns strangled by red tape. . . . [T]heir affairs, which were thoroughly typical, were in such an inextricable state of confusion that no sane party would now wish to take over the government, since it would certainly see nothing but failure ahead. (32)

Her pessimism was not confined to the criminality of fascism; she despaired of finding a solution based on either of the prevailing forms of government:

Many of us think that monarchy is more stable than a republican form of government, and that there is a certain whimsicality about modern democracies. We forget that stable monarchies are signs of genius of an order at least as rare in government as in literature or music, or of stable history. (49)

All this, before she even reached Yugoslavia.

2.

Unlike many liberals of the time, West was an unapologetic supporter of nationalism, especially for smaller nations like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Finland and Poland, which had been subjugated by the Austro-Hungarian, Russian or Ottoman empires.  “Let people, then, hold to their own language, their own customs, their own beliefs, even if this inconveniences the tourist.  There is not the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism . . .” (843) So she was a firm supporter of Yugoslavia’s experiment with a multi-ethnic state, in effect a defensive alliance after centuries of domination by the Ottomans and Austrians. She often heard complaints from the smaller ethnic groups within Yugoslavia, but she felt it more important that the new country should defend its independence from colonizing empires. An old man tired from cutting hay told them that he did not miss the time of the seemingly prosperous Ottomans, when “we did not know the harvest as a time of joy, half the crops went straight away to the Pasha, but then the tax collectors came back, and they came back . . .” (685)

But the Yugoslav alliance was fragile; everyone remembered where they came from. Upon her arrival with her husband in Zagreb, Croatia at the beginning of their journey, West immediately described the backgrounds of the delegation that greeted them:  “a Serb, that is to say a Slav member of the Orthodox Church, from Serbia,” “a Croat, that is to say a Slav member of the Roman Catholic Church, from Dalmatia,” and “a Croat from Croatia.” (41).  

She later witnessed the remarkable visit of the Turkish prime minister to Sarajevo. The local Serbs and Croats were very unhappy about this visit, remembering their mistreatment by the Ottomans and, surprisingly, the Austrians as well.  But it was the Moslem minority, turned out in their thousands wearing fezzes and veils, who would get a lesson in modern geopolitics.  Because the new Turkish republic, founded by Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal), was resolutely secular and had banned such religious attire, the Turkish ministers appeared in Western suits and ties and were nearly unrecognizable to the deflated crowd.  Worse, they sought good relations with the Yugoslavian government.

West often makes ethnic generalizations, which are sometimes uncomfortable for us to read today.  I believe that these remarks came from a position of sympathy - - as noted, she strongly supported the preservation of the different cultures in multi-ethnic Yugoslavia - - and that most of them were a sort of traveler’s shorthand, exaggerations not meant to be taken quite literally.  They were most often framed as the consequence of shared experiences of history, wars and religion, and she gives every group its strengths and weaknesses.  “The Hungarians are fierce and warlike romantics whereas the Croats are fierce and warlike intellectuals.” (41) And despite the Ottomans’ oppressive rule, “[t]he Turks and the Georgian English have known better than anyone how to build a place where civilized man can enjoy nature.” (683). We should also remember that eugenics, that pseudo-science of ethnic determinism, was still widely accepted by serious people. It would take the horrors of the Holocaust to break that spell.

To that point, West insistently criticizes almost everything German or Austrian.  Often these views are well-grounded; she condemns Austria’s use of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination as a pretext for its aggression against then-independent Serbia in 1914.  On the other hand, when she tells a German-speaking grad student that Goethe barely compares to a dozen French writers, she comes across as petty and overbearing. To her credit, she did not hesitate to condemn the Nazis’ most infamous policy, then in its early stages:

Because it is a vigorous act to throw the Jews out of Germany and because it causes pain and disorder, it is taken as a measure of virile statecraft, although its relevance to the troubles of the country could be imagined only by an imbecile. (321)

3.

Perhaps nothing has changed quite as much from West’s time as our understanding of gender, and West’s observations sometimes reflect the era’s embedded biases. West was a bit snide in criticizing men of the English governing class, too many of whom were either “overweight and puffy” or Foreign Service clerks who knew “a great deal but far from all there is to be known about French pictures.” (208)  She admired the more energetic men she saw as her party approached Korchula but jumped to a conclusion about their private lives that we might question today.

Standing on the quayside was a crowd which was more male in quantity and in quality than we are accustomed to in Western Europe.  There were very few women, and the men were very handsome with broad shoulders and long legs and straight hair, and an air of unashamed satisfaction with their looks which one finds only where there is very little homosexuality. (200)

The lives of women bore little resemblance to that of Aunt Persa, the comitadji.  Almost everyone she met, including the upper middle-class women of cities and towns, had been displaced or lost relatives in recent wars.  To the mildly scandalized the men in her group in Sarajevo, she also greeted a cabaret dancer she’d met on a prior trip.  The dancer was a Sephardic Jew from Salonica (today Thessaloniki), a cosmopolitan and multilingual woman - - and a widow with a ten-year-old son. West had sought her out for a lesson in the danse de ventre, but the dancer said West was a bit too slender:  “vous n’avez pas de quoi.”  But they talked, in French, simply taking “for granted” her “very disagreeable” occupation. (309) 

In some of the mountain regions, West seemed more fatalistic than angry about the narrow choices of married women.  On the Skopska Tserna Gora in the Macedonian mountains, she heard that “wives are so harshly treated by their husbands that if they are left widows nothing will induce them to remarry.” (674)  On Sarajevo’s market day, she admired the proud and colorful Christian men who descend from the surrounding mountains for Sarajevo’s market day, but was told that the women “have to wait on [their husbands] while they eat, must take sound beatings every now and again, work till they drop, even while child-bearing, and walk while their master rides.”  She saw much more in them than that:

I will eat my hat if these women were not free in spirit. They passed the chief tests that I knew.  First, they looked happy when they had lost their youth.   . . .  It was quite evident that as we watched them that these women had been able to gratify their essential desires.  I do not mean simply that they looked as if they had been well mated.  . . . Like all other material experiences, sex has no value other than what the spirit assesses; and the spirit is obstinately influenced in its calculation by its preference for freedom.  In some sense, these women had never been enslaved.  They had that mark of freedom, they had wit. (327-8)

Of course, few women today would accept this notion of “freedom.” At the time, West could probably do no more than devote attention and respect to the heavy burden of these women’s lives.  Witnessing a fertility ritual, she solemnly mused that “[t]he fertility for which women were asking the gods everywhere in the dark night over Macedonia was not as simple a gift as they supposed.  They were begging for the proper conduct of a period of nine months and chance to ripen its fruits; they would obtain the bloodstained eternity of human history.” (818-9)

The Image of Christ Not Made by Hands. A fresco from the Church of Saints Constantine and Helena in Ohrid, Macedonia. Dating from the late 14th to early 15th century.

4.

West engaged seriously with the religions of the region. What’s more, West was a sincere and liberal Christian, and her faith helped lead her to the book’s major turn. (Spoiler alert.)  Whereas liberals of today often discuss religion as though the best that can be hoped for is to forestall armed conflict, West dove right in to matters of doctrine and faith. In addition to the three main strands followed by the Balkan peoples - - Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam - - she explains the doctrine and history of lost or marginalized faiths such as Manichaeism, Mithraism and Zoroastrianism.

She adored the Eastern Orthodox mass, which “proclaims that certain elements in experience are supremely beautiful, and that we should grudge them nothing of our love and service.”  She went on to explain that because the Eastern Church had “preferred the visual arts to literature,” “it devoted all its forces to the achievement of the mass, the communal form of art which might enable man from time to time to apprehend why it is believed that there may be a God.”(505-6)  Later, she found herself sympathizing with an Eastern Orthodox monk who left the monastery on Lake Ladoga because Finnish authorities required them to adopt the Gregorian (Roman Catholic) calendar, which set the date forward by almost two weeks: “What is the good of it all if you start looking up and sending [the Mother of God] your thoughts on quite another day from that on which she had bent down to accept them?” (688)

She and her husband made many, many visits to churches and mosques for their art and architecture.  Unlike Western European images, Macedonian frescoes of the crucifixion emphasized the distinction between body and soul:  “[D]eath is shown working on the body that is bound to the spirit of Christ, wringing the breath out of the lungs as a laundress wrings water out of a shirt. . .” This she tied to Proust’s observation that “we think in our youth that our bodies are identical with ourselves . . . but discover later in life that they are heartless companions who have been accidentally yoked with us . . .” (664-5)  She extended her fatalism in remarking on the deeply ironic beauty of a field that had been the site of a bloody battle:  “In time we have to accept it that the ground does not care whether we break our noses on it, and that a moonlit forest glade is as often as not empty of anything but moonlight . . .” (838)

These observations lead her to the theme of the book’s title.  She begins with a fertility rite in Muslim Macedonia:

When the Moslem women in the Tekiya put out their arms to embrace the black stone and dropped their heads to kiss it, they made a gesture of the same nature, though not so absolute, as that which men and women make when they bend down to kiss the cloth which lies instead of Christ on the holy table at Easter. Such a gesture is an imitation by the body of the gesture made by the soul in loving.  It says, “I will pour myself out in devotion to you, I will empty myself without hoping for return, and I can do this serenely, for I know that as I empty myself I shall be filled again.”  (825)

The very next day, she abhorred the ritual slaughter of black lambs on a boulder at the top of a hill by the men of the same community, ostensibly for the same purpose, recognizing in it a perversity she recognized in western Christianity:

I knew this rock well. I had lived under the shadow of it all my life.  All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretense that pain is the proper price of any good thing. Here it could be seen how the meaning of the Crucifixion had been hidden from us, though it was written clear. A supremely good man was born on earth, a man who was without cruelty, who could have taught mankind to live in perpetual happiness, and because we are infatuated with this idea of sacrifice, of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages, we found nothing better to do with this passport to deliverance than to destroy him. (827)

While deploring the primitive view that violence and suffering are good in themselves, she also condemned the equally ancient fallacy of martyrdom, and the ineffectual resistance of well-meaning critics. She noticed it first in the Serbian national poem about a grey falcon, the embodiment of Saint Elijah, who carried a message to Tsar Lazar as he prepared to lead the Serbian army against far superior Ottoman forces in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. (When Slobodan Milosevich cited this ancient battle during his “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s, I thought it the sheerest pretext.  But in the 1930s, West’s Serbian companions knew this battle poem by heart.)

The falcon’s message forces the Tsar to wrestle with a false dichotomy:  

What kingdom shall I choose?
Shall I choose a heavenly kingdom?
Shall I choose an earthly kingdom?
If I choose an earthly kingdom,
An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time,
But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries (910)

Cutting to the chase, the Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom. While he did kill the Ottoman commander, Murad, in the end Lazar and his army were destroyed.  The good news, according to a prayer to Lazar embroidered by Princess Euphemia, widow of a Serbian prince killed in the battle, was that “You slew the snake and you won from God the martyr’s crown.  So do not forget your beloved children, who are left desolate by your death, while you are enjoying the everlasting delights of Heaven” (517)

West was not having it.  She came to see that honoring martyrdom was also a very modern problem of liberalism, as shown by her reaction to the sacrifice of the black lamb. 

[W]hen our intelligence told us that the man was performing a disgusting and meaningless act, our response was not to dismiss the idea as a nightmare, but to say, “Since it is wrong to be the priest and sacrifice the lamb, I will be the lamb and be sacrificed by the priest.”  We thereby set up a principle that doom was honorable for innocent things, and conceded that if we spoke of kindliness and recommended peace it was fitting that thereafter the knife should be passed across our throats. . .

And I had sinned in the same way, I and my kind, the liberals of Western Europe.  We had regarded ourselves as far holier than our tory opponents because we had exchanged the role of priest for the role of lamb, and therefore we forgot that we were not performing the chief moral obligation of humanity, which is to protect the works of love.  We had done nothing to save our people . . . (915)

This turn, while hardly exonerating the Tories, many of whom supported friendly relations with Hitler’s Germany, did lead West in an unexpected direction.  In 1940, as while she wrote the epilogue - a mere 75 pages - France fell to the Wehrmacht.  She described the French as being governed by the myth of Kosovo and the rock, for having spent vast sums on the ineffectual Maginot Line rather than on weapons with which to resist the Germans, and for having broadly accepted their fate under leaders who argued that France “was corrupt and must be regenerated by defeat.”  (1114) England might have gone down that same road under the “suicidal” Neville Chamberlain and had indeed stood by as Czechoslovakia and Poland were subsumed by the Third Reich.  But after the fall of France, “we had lost our desire to die without defending ourselves . . . Now we were led by Winston Churchill, who cannot be imagined as wanting to die, though he would die if a more liberal allowance of life would be released by his death, if it were the necessary price for the survival of his country.”  (1115)

In her conclusion, long before the Allies turned the war in their favor at Stalingrad and Midway, West wrote that Yugoslav resistance had slowed and changed the trajectory of the German offensives.  She found hope in this surprising place.  “For the news that Hitler had been defied by Yugoslavia travelled like sunshine over the countries which he had devoured and humiliated, promising spring.” (1149)

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The idea of Yugoslavia would survive the war.  Josef Broz Tito’s communist fighters survived bitter partisan fighting and eventually pulled the nation back together based on their resistance to German and Italian forces.  Having prevailed without Red Army support, Tito was later able to act somewhat independently of the Soviet “line,” to Stalin’s great frustration.  Only in the 1990s, after Tito’s death and the demise of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, would the region splinter along ethnic lines into the smaller nations we know today.

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Mark C. Jensen (www.markcjensen.com) is a Boston-area attorney and writer. He is the author of The Labyrinth We Walked: The Cold War Deconstructed (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2024).

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