In an essay published in September 1962, poet Pavle Stefanovic announced that in the next census he would identify himself as a Yugoslav rather than a Serb. Writing down “Serb” on official forms, Stefanovic said, had always made the sweat break out on his forehead, plunging him into “the nightmarish vision of an individual identity imposed upon me rather than chosen by my own will, one which fills me with polar opposites: pride and shame … a feeling of innocence and of culpability.” Mixed with his pride in parts of his Serbian heritage, he explained, was horror at the atrocities committed in the name of Serbdom by the Chetniks, the Serbian monarchist forces of the Second World War. Stefanovic emphasized that he was not rejecting Serbian identity because he thought the Serbian past was worse than others. Rather, he wished to throw off the symbolic weight attached to all national pasts. By declaring himself a Yugoslav, he thought, he could show that he considered nationality merely “a sort of historic-genetic address, a fact about one's origin,” and not a primary or sacred identity. In his eyes, choosing the Yugoslav identity meant asserting his own free will against the unchosen national collective, expressing his commitment to internationalism, and separating the future from a nightmare-ridden past.