If Mihailo Markovic was not who his Western friends and collaborators had thought he was, who was he? Did he jettison his humanist beliefs to cozy up to a new regime? Or had he been a wolf in sheep’s clothing all along? The philosophers published their new journal in a Serbo-Croat Yugoslav edition and in a multilingual international edition. And its editorial collective adopted an agenda that was more unified than anything Pogledi had ever set forth: The Praxis group advocated freedom of speech and of the press, and they believed that Stalinist authoritarianism had to be redressed in practice and rooted out of Marxist theory itself. To this end, they prescribed a return to Marx’s romantic early writings, particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx’s more influential later work would emphasize the iron laws of historical determinism. But the 1844 Manuscripts waxed lyrical about the creative potential of human activity, through which man might realize his “species being.” Furthermore, whatever else the Praxists were, they were Marxists. In Croatia, to go on being a Marxist — or a Yugoslavist — placed one in opposition to the right-wing nationalist regime of Franjo Tudjman. And indeed, many of the Croatian Praxists have remained strong supporters of human rights: Zarko Puhovski, who is now vice-president of Croatia’s Helsinki Committee on Human Rights, has raised his voice courageously against the Croatian army’s ethnic-cleansing campaigns. And the economist Branko Horvat ran for president in 1992 on an antiwar, anti-authoritarian platform. So it was a surprise to many of the Belgrade Praxists’ admirers when three key members of the group — Markovic, Tadic, and Zagorka Golubovic — signed a 1986 petition in support of the Kosovo Serbs. Cosic also signed. It was not just that the petition painted a florid picture of Serbian suffering in the southern province. It was also that the signatories obliquely urged the government to revoke Kosovo’s autonomous status — something Serbian nationalists had been pushing the parliament to do. After all, the petitioners reasoned, with its “unselfish” aid to the impoverished province, Serbia had amply demonstrated that it took the Albanians’ interests to heart. Ominously, the petition’s authors intoned: “Genocide [against Kosovo’s Serbs] cannot be prevented by … [the] politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo … to Albania: the unsigned capitulation which leads to a politics of national treason.” Of the Zagreb Praxists, very few of the old-timers were enthusiastic about the Belgrade group's new publishing venture. Zagreb's elder statesmen, Rudi Supek and Gajo Petrovic, attended the first meeting. Supek was amenable to the new journal; but Petrovic felt strongly that the name Praxis should not be used. Praxis, Petrovic argued, connoted a joint Belgrade-Zagreb publication, whose international component came at the Yugoslavs' invitation. This new journal, however, was to be published in English and dominated by Belgraders and Americans. It was international before it was Yugoslav, and for this reason, he insisted, it should have a new name and a new identity. Perhaps Petrovic also sensed that his Belgrade colleagues had changed and that political consensus was a thing of the past. If he did, he did not say so.

The appearance of nationalist tensions within the Praxis group was a harbinger of tensions that would soon spread across the country. Years later, when war raged in Kosovo, American newspapers would plug 1989, the year Milosevic revoked Kosovo's autonomy, as the beginning of the end of Yugoslavia. But many Serbs would say the country's fate was sealed as early as 1974. That was the year a controversial revision of the Yugoslav constitution went into effect, devolving broader powers than ever before to the six republics and granting full autonomy to two provinces within the republic of Serbia: Kosovo and Vojvodina. Since the Serbs were scattered across the republics--more than a million lived in Bosnia and at least 500,000 in Croatia--these constitutional reforms were to feed a growing sense of grievance among the Serbs. The last noun in 'The Trial': 'shame.' Its last image: the faces of two strangers, close by his own face, almost touching it, watching K.'s most intimate state, his death throes. In that last noun, in Among Popov’s allies are members of another Praxis offshoot: the Belgrade Circle, a small nongovernmental organization. Its president, Obrad Savic, was one of the students the Praxists led in the protests of 1968. Savic has been unsparing in his criticism of Markovic and Tadic’s turn to nationalism; in return, Tadic has denounced him as the founder of “anti-Serb mondialism.”Some of the same people who were once drawn to Praxis and Praxis International — Habermas, Richard Rorty, Chomsky — today publish in the Belgrade Circle Journal, whose special issue on human rights will be published as a book this month by Verso. If 1974 marked the beginning of Yugoslavia’s national crisis, it also augured the end of the Praxis group’s legal existence. Tito purged the Belgrade 8 from the university the following year. The six-year-long struggle between the state and the professors had simply exhausted itself. Not only were the Belgrade 8 suspended from teaching, but the journal Praxis was also banned. This time, the protests of American academics (including Daniel Bell, Noam Chomsky, and Stanley Hoffman) fell on deaf ears. By this time, Mihailo Markovic was clearly the Yugoslav group’s leader, and he came to play a crucial role in the revived journal. A fluent English speaker, he was gregarious, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Both his anti-Stalinist and his antifascist credentials were impeccable: He had fought in Tito’s Partisan army during World War II and prided himself on extending aid to Yugoslav Jews. In his philosophical work, Markovic emphasized Marx’s commitment to human dignity, freedom, and self-realization.

Indeed, the chapter with the most virtuosity is "Part Three: Improvisation in Homage to Stravinsky." Here Mr. Kundera is at play in the field of esthetics, describing a feeling he "cannot shake" that both music and the novel in Europe This orientation was hardly a Yugoslav invention. If anything, the Praxists took their cue from neighboring Hungary, where Georg Lukacs had amassed a following of like-minded dissidents. Like Lukacs, the Praxists were captivated by the early Marx’s theory of alienation. In an ordinary capitalist or a Stalinist socialist society, man was alienated from himself by the commodification of his labor and by the overweening power of a small, privileged class and its institutions. A utopian Marxist society, the Praxists imagined, would overcome that alienation; it would unleash human creativity — or “praxis” — by doing away with the ruling class through self-management. The workers would directly control not only their workplaces but also social and cultural institutions — even local political parties and governing bodies. The state, given enough time, would of its own accord “wither away,” just as Marx had predicted. In subsequent years, Serbian nationalists would bitterly complain that Tito’s policy had been “A weak Serbia is a strong Yugoslavia.” But why shouldn’t it have been? Of the country’s six official nations, the Serbs were far and away the most populous, outnumbering the Croats two to one. If multinational Yugoslavia’s culture and politics were to be governed by majority rule, the country would not survive: The non-Serb populations had strongly developed national identities and long, distinct histories of their own. Not only that, but they occupied more compact territories than did the Serbs. If they felt overly dominated, they could be tempted to secede. So Tito restrained the potentially overweening influence of the Serbs by dividing Yugoslavia into territorial units and constantly readjusting the internal balance of power. I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But ifBy this time, Mihailo Markovic was clearly the Yugoslav group's leader, and he came to play a crucial role in the revived journal. A fluent English speaker, he was gregarious, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Both his anti-Stalinist and his antifascist credentials were impeccable: He had fought in Tito's Partisan army during World War II and prided himself on extending aid to Yugoslav Jews. In his philosophical work, Markovic emphasized Marx's commitment to human dignity, freedom, and self-realization. Virtually all of Praxis’s Western collaborators remember Stojanovic as the most ideologically flexible of the Belgrade group. While Markovic cleaved to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Stojanovic explored the possibility of a limited free market. He was the only Praxist seriously to investigate liberalism, and in a 1971 Praxis essay , he had dared to criticize Tito as a “charismatic leader.” Remembers Arato, “Stojanovic was more talented than Markovic, and Markovic was the boss.” to shorter forms. Best of all, his sallies lead to fresh readings of such diverse writers as Rabelais, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, Musil, Kafka and Salman Rushdie.