Miroslav Krleza (Kirlezha), the formidable Croat who has dominated Yugoslavia's literary landscape for nearly half a century, remains virtually unknown in the West. His is not the only such case and again reflects at least in part the parochialism of Western publishers and their public; but the ambiguities of Krleza's themes and politics have no doubt contributed to the neglect of a writer who, ironically, happens to be quintessentially Western—or more precisely Central European—in the scope and sources of his work.

Born in 1893 in the then Austrian city of Zagreb, raised in a Budapest military academy, Krleza came of age in the twilight gloom of the Hapsburg empire and shares unmistakable affinities with his German-language contemporaries of the Prague-Vienna literary renaissance, from Kafka to Kraus and from Schnitzler to Musil. What set him apart from the very beginning was an unfashionably undespairing commitment to radical humanism, that is, faith in radical politics tempered by a clear-eyed awareness of its limits in the affairs of men. Most of his lifelong troubles as a citizen and author stem from a stubborn refusal on his part to betray these principles or modify them in accordance with political expediency.

His first major work was a play born of his World War I experiences, a powerful protest in the manner of the early O'Casey whose timely relevance—a Croat officer going against his conscience and following orders by executing a peasant woman for some trivial offence—probably points up nothing more profound than the essential timelessness of inhumanity. The play was banned an hour before its scheduled opening, the rulers of newly independent Yugoslavia having quite accurately read its message as anti-murder rather than anti-Austrian and considered it subversive.

This dramatic debut in 1920 set a pattern. Krleza, with a versatility probably unique in contemporary letters, has since then created an immense body of work consisting of over fifty volumes of plays, novels, poetry, essays, political and literary journalism, all of it impressive and much of it outstanding. But up to 1948, through the successive eras of monarchy, military dictatorship, Nazi occupation, liberation and until Tito's break with Stalin, most of his output remained officially proscribed.

The ban, largely ineffectual at first, given the well-organized Communist-led underground of the twenties and thirties, served to project Krleza into the role of revolutionary idol. He accepted it gracefully enough, but when it came to the inevitable test, he proved quite unwilling to barter away his artistic integrity in the interest of party loyalty. His slashing attack on what he characterized as the nonsensical notion of Socialist realism not only cost him the adulation of the student rebels of his day but also, by depriving him of underground support, effectively condemned him to silence until Yugoslav communism itself deviated sufficiently to forgive one of its prodigal old men. By 1950 all his books were in print for the first time in his life; he himself has since than been heading the Yugoslav Lexicoggraphic Institute, but a panoramic four-volume novel published over the past five years bears witness to the fact that neither age nor a full eight-hour day in a major executive position can seriously interfere with his creative drive.

Such prolific vitality has its drawbacks, especially since none of Krleza's books represents more than a fragment of his genius. But The Return of Philip Latinovicz , the only one thus far available in English, is not a bad choice by way of introduction. This...