Memoir of a Revolutionary

"Now I felt that the world was so clear to me that I would be able to influence its destiny." That is the spirit of the 1930's, the period Milovan Djilas describes in "Memoir of a Revolutionary." He became a communist when the Communist movement in Yugoslavia was growing into the force that eventually gave form to modern Yugoslavia. Determined and heroically hardheaded, Djilas suffered brutalities at the hands of King Alexander's police. Undeterred, he continued to organize, write, publish, learn. For a while Djilas tried to combine his literary ambitions with his political ideals. But he soon realized that his "poetic passion" was in conflict with his revolutionary discipline. There is iron determination in this man who became, under Tito's leadership, a chief architect of the Communist revolution. The Yugoslav Communists built an organization strong enough to resist both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. A tightly knot group personally and politically, they enforced a personal morality that drove some dedicated men to despair. Djilas helped to mild minds; others organized cadres. With Tito, Djilas maintained a special "father-and-son relationship." With almost perfect recall, Djilas tells of these years of struggle and triumph, of the time spent in prison, which was, he says, "perhaps the most important school ... for our spiritual transformation." This book is a rare study of human commitment.