Rastko Petrović
Rastko Petrović (Belgrade, 3 March 1898 – Washington, D.C., 15 August 1949) was a Serbian poet, writer, diplomat, literary and art critic. He is the brother of well-known Serbian painter Nadežda Petrović. Rastko Petrović was a contemporary and friend of Guillaume Apollinaire, James Joyce, Saint-John Perse, Picasso, Max Ernst and others.
He was born on the 3rd of March 1898 in Belgrade, the ninth child of Dimitrije Petrović, art professor, and his wife Mileva Petrović (née Zorić), teacher. Rastko Petrović's godfather was writer Jaša Tomić. Petrović's house in Belgrade was a gathering place for leading Serbian intellectuals, writers, artists, and historians, and young Rastko had an opportunity to meet many of them, including playwright Ivo Vojnović, fiction writer Ivo Ćipiko, Petar Kočić, and others.
After serving in the Serbian Army in World War I, he went to college in Nice, studied law in Paris and after graduating in 1920 he returned to Serbia. There he joined the diplomatic corps in 1923 and served in Rome, Italy, and from the end of 1935 to the beginning of 1945 in the United States, Chicago and Washington, D.C. His nine years as a diplomat of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the United States are by far the most significant period of his career.
As a diplomat of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Rastko Petrović travelled extensively throughout Europe, the Levant, Turkey, Africa, Mexico, Cuba, and Canada. Although he left a travelogue after every journey, there is nothing about his understanding of Europe to be found in his letters from Spain and Italy. There is a letter from Rome, in which he writes about a dinner party during which the works of Marcel Proust are discussed. He wrote for a cosmopolitan folk who had their own memories of Toledo or the Vatican, whose members studied at European schools of higher learning, served in diplomatic corps of its major capitals, reported from Europe as foreign correspondents, or travelled there for their own personal intellectual enrichment. But not everyone, however, would have heard of Proust outside France in the early 1920s; it was something worth writing about from Rome while his novels were being translated. As with others of his generation, Petrović felt at home in Europe, somewhat conceited perhaps.
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