One of the points that the Czech novelist Milan Kundera insists on most strenuously in his stimulating new nonfiction work, "Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts," is Nietzsche's injunction that 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 Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Marx's more influential later work would emphasize the iron laws of historical determinism. But the 1844 Manuscriptswaxed lyrical about the creative potential of human activity, through which man might realize his "species being."

So instead of summing up what Mr. Kundera has to say in "Testaments Betrayed," one should begin by emphasizing that it is improvisational criticism. It treats many of the same subjects the author took up in his earlier work of criticism, "The Yet Mr. Kundera's title also refers to the many diverse things that can betray art as a testament. He includes, for instance, the translators who have failed to respect Kafka's use of word repetition and who insist on showing off their skills Much has changed since Gerson Sher traveled to Yugoslavia to research his dissertation amid the political and intellectual ferment of the late 1960s. For one thing, the idiosyncratic country that captured his imagination no longer exists. Nor does Praxis, the group of Marxist humanist philosophers Sher studied. But this is not the only reason he responds warily to a request for an interview: "I am appalled," he says, "that you should be interested in Praxis at this time." 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.mentioned only certain of his writings. In Mr. Kundera's view, Brod betrayed Kafka further by creating the myth of the suffering saint whose novels describe, in Brod's words, "the horrible punishments in store for those You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Certain of his points may seem provocative. He defends the right of artists to explore the horrifying or profane, as Stravinsky does in "Le Sacre du Printemps" or as Mr. Rushdie does in "The Satanic Verses." He calls a roll of those By 1993, Benhabib says, “we found that the situation had gotten too dirty, morally and politically.” The only way out was to stop publishing the journal and to cut ties with Stojanovic and Markovic. Praxis International published its last issue, “The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia: Stations of a European Tragedy,” in January 1994; it included Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian perspectives on Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Richard Bernstein’s friendship with Markovic was shattered by the Bosnian war. As for Benhabib, she has not kept in touch with Markovic or Stojanovic: Since the breakup, she says, “I have an aversion to following their careers.” 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

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. 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.” Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces were already on a collision course by the mid-1980s, but even the most astute Western observers did not perceive what lay ahead. The most visible sign of trouble was in Kosovo, where martial law had only stoked the flames of ethnic strife. The Serb minority clamored for Belgrade’s attention: In 1985 Kosovo’s Serbs sent a petition to the central government, claiming that Serbs had been raped, murdered, and driven from their homes by the province’s ethnic Albanians. Couldn’t Belgrade do something? that last image, is concentrated the entire novel's fundamental situation. . . . This transformation of a man from subject to object is experienced as shame." Despite the general intolerance for opposition, some philosophical currents called for a radicalization of Yugoslavia’s socialist democracy and a more humanist vision of social change. Prominent among these was the Praxis group, which from 1964 to 1974 produced among the most innovative Marxist journals internationally, also bound to the experience of a socialist state. Such was Praxis’s prestige, its yearly summer school attracted figures from Herbert Marcuse to Erich Fromm. At the end of the 1980s, the balance among Yugoslavia’s nationalities began to collapse, and many Praxis leaders joined the wave of ethnic chauvinism. There was little trace of the humanism the group had long preached.

Today, some critics blame the constitution of 1974 for the growth of nationalist movements in Croatia and Slovenia. More likely, it was a response to the nationalist movements that were already stirring. In any case, the most scathing criticism was leveled by the Serb nationalists: The new constitution rested on a double standard. If Yugoslavia's units of political participation were its ethnic groups, or "constituent nations," then the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, who were represented by Muslim and Croatian leadership, respectively, went unrepresented. But if the units were territorial, then why was Serbia the only republic whose territory included autonomous provinces over which it had little control? Other contributors were equally impassioned. Danko Grlic, a Croat, vividly evoked the irrationality of nationalism. Once unleashed, he warned, it would be impervious to logic: "You do not reason or theorize about the nation; for the nation you only struggle and die; you love the nation as the flesh of your flesh, as the essence of your being, drinking it with your mother's milk; it is body and blood...." Although he had been permitted to return to the University of Belgrade in 1987, Zivotic was no longer happy there by 1994. He told the New York Times,“I could not stand to go to work. I had to listen to professors and students voice support and solidarity for these Bosnian fascists, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, in the so-called Republic of Srpska. It is now worse than it was under Communism. The intellectual corruption is more pervasive and profound.” A friend remembers that Zivotic “was physically destroyed by the time and the evil amid which he lived.”