Introduction

The Best Years

The main subject of this issue of National Review is National Review. The hundredth issue, the third digit in the number, is one of the rare occasions we will use to publicly, with many readers and friends, take a quick look at our own image.
If you are making a daily or weekly magazine, a hundred issues are not a big thing. A bit more than two months or a bit less than two years. However, if you are making a bimonthly, it is a serious thing. Almost twenty years, the most productive ones in the lives of most people involved in this. The readers will tell if it was worth it. We just hope that it will not be like in Jov’s aphorism: ”It’s not the right stone, they told Sisyphus at the top.” May it be at least like in Vinaver’s ”Vow of Ča-Radisav”: ”We pulled it off, we made it, / We struggled, we surfaced, / We sorted it out, we carried it out, / Wherever we knew an old tzar / We made them proud / We gave our best, / Beads of sweat shining: / We drove away the bad, we warmed up / We shone like the sun; / We resisted, we lasted.”
In any case, you have before you the only magazine in the history of Serbian press, which had editions in five languages and was regularly issued in three (presently in two). Whatever is good in it is yours. Whatever is not, forgive us.