Dimitrije Mitrinović

• Birth Name — Dimitrije Mitrinović • Born — 21 October 1887 • Birthplace — Donji Poplat, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary • Died — 28 August 1953 • Place of death — Richmond, England • Era — 20th-century philosophy • Resting Place — Highgate Cemetery • Other Names — Mita Mitrinović • Region — Yugoslav philosophy Western philosophy • School Tradition — Critical theory • Main Interests — * Social theory • Futurology • Pan-Europeanism • Third Way • Education — Mostar Gymnasium • Alma Mater — Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Mitrinović was born in 1887 in a Serbian Orthodox family at Donji Poplat, municipality Berkovići in Herzegovina during the Austro-Hungarian occupation. His father, Mihailo, was in the service of the Austro-Hungarian government and ran an experimental farm. Dimitrije was educated at Mostar Gymnasium. As a young student, he surrounded himself with a group that would later form the Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) movement, in his country's struggle for independence from Austria-Hungary and in the moves to create a united Yugoslavia. In 1907, he went to study Philosophy in Zagreb before breaking up his studies in 1911 to join the sculptor Ivan Meštrović in Rome where he spent some time promoting his works. Mitrinović was one of the leading ideologists of Young Bosnia. In the years leading up to the First World War, he achieved prominence with his poetic writings along with his literary criticism, initially dabbling in expressionism before shifting to futurism. During this period Mitrinović edited the Sarajevo literary paper, Bosanska Vila. Its contributors included poets Risto Radulović and Vladimir "Vlado" Gaćinović. All three are alleged to have been members of secret political societies illegal in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; only Mitrinović survived World War I. In 1913, he went to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to study art history under Heinrich Wölfflin. There he was acquainted with intellectuals Eric Gutkind, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Mitrinović came to England in 1914 to work for the Serbian Legation in London and moved among influential cultural circles in the country. From late 1914 to early 1915, he participated in exhibitions of Meštrović's work, which included a model of a monument he had designed to commemorate the Battle of Kosovo.

He began his work in the field of art by translating Rig-Veda and the works of Virgil into Serbian. He was one of the first advocates of the avant-garde artistic group Der Blaue Reiter and organized exhibitions on the work of Kandinsky. Besides art history, he also studied Philosophy while staying in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Munich, and Tübingen. Being in favour of the building of a universal utopia, like many of the leading minds of his time, he wrote about the inevitable creation of the Pan-European community. Ten years before La rebelión de las masas by Ortega y Gasset, Mitrinović prophesied: "Being different from the other races, the population of Europe has always given birth to its contradictions and always with the chances of their solution in some ultimate synthesis." He was a regular contributor to the epoch-making periodical The New Age (the author of the column "World Affairs"), alongside Ezra Pound, and according to Edwin Muir, Mitrinović "has erupted with wild and profound contemplations... not looking several ages ahead, like Shaw or Wells, but several millennia ahead." The Utopian and messianic ideas of Mitrinović (influenced by philosophical concepts of Husserl and Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, the esoteric doctrine of G. I. Gurdjieff, and the psychoanalytical school of Freud, Jung and Adler) were brought to the attention of the public not only in the periodical The New Age but also in the periodical The New Atlantis (which Mitrinović edited) and The New Albion (which he co-edited with A. R. Orage). In 1927, Mitrinović was entrusted with the founding of the Adler's Society (the English Branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology). He and Adler later parted ways due, allegedly, to "politicizing of his [Mitrinović's] scientific concepts". Mitrinović later founded the New Europe Group. Mitrinović advocated a metaphysical Utopia (based on Plotinus, Clement of Alexandria, Lao Tzu, Jakob Böhme) but was also politically pragmatic. He published an open letter to Adolf Hitler in 1933 in which he accused Hitler of "behaving and acting as an evil superman... possessed with some weird vision" which is "incomprehensible for the human mind and belief and quite certainly, and in all forms and essence, directed against the Orthodox soul."