Christian compassion, with which he defends the oppressed and humiliated, is the fundamental feature of Vjenceslav Novak’s creativity. Namely, the then backwardness of Croatia, induced by historical, ...economic, social and political circumstances, did not bypass the tragic destiny of the young people. Novak’s native Senj felt this most of all, which the writer used by attempting to present the life facts of his local environment as realistically and objectively as possible. Later, KrešimirNemec points out, under the influence of schooling in Prague and life in Zagreb, Novak turned to the urban experience, in other words, the problematizing of the dark sides of city life. // Therefore, Novak’s art is, according to Antun Barac, the greatest document of the heart, soul, of compassion with a suffering humanity and all those layers that laboriously and hopelessly their burden of life bears. // The then imagery of Senj, characterised by symbols of suffering, deception, poverty, inhumanity, is an image of the state of women’s soul – Valpurga and LucijaStipančić – where through the air tears only a scream and/or the bura wind, the sound of pain and the departure into death, leaving a void and the rhetorical question: Did God leave them too?! The motif of the face of mercy formed in Novak’s heroines of the novel Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs) is detected and thematised in the paper with an interdisciplinary, primarily and most of all philosophical, approach. Like a mirror of the human heart and inner self, the deepest identity and unique outline of a human being are reflected in the face. Novak, who was raised as a Christian, depicted in his works the faces of the defeated and humiliated: the poor, the beggars, the addicts, the destitute pupils and students and the homeless – seeing in them the face of a hidden God who should be recognised.
The aim of the paper, based on selected literature, is to offer a brief comprehensive overview of the development of Croatian musical art from the medieval period to the 20th century. Such an ...overview approach provides a clear insight into the basic development trends and influences of Croatian music, but also into the ways of its integration into the world heritage of musical values. It also highlights the historical and political circumstances that influenced musical development. Furthermore, the paper enables a comparison of the influence of historical circumstances on the development of Croatian musical art in various historical periods. The selection of literature generally guided the author in the preparation of this review and in the complex process of research on selected topics with the aim of creating a brief summary of the mentioned issues.
In this paper, János Sziveri’s poetry is studied from the perspective of associative plays based on matter-grouping and landscape visions. There was a productive correspondence, as the poet himself ...underlined it, between him and Vasko Popa’s works. The consonance between the book plans and the cycles of poems by Vasko Popa dedicated to the decom- position and recomposition of different matters and remains and the series of Sziveri’s texts are secured by the stock of biological limitations and tactile sensations. The processes of focusing on different bodies and moving from body to body and the excess of neuro- transmission as well as the desire for gratification are most efficiently distributed by the singular or plural first person. The Vasko Popa-esque radiation of life conditions extending beyond instrumentalized functioning and existence based on imitation echoes in Sziveri’s landscape descriptions by intensifying the creative potential of fixed stance and mobility. The antipoetics and the cyclical planning of the texts of the Serbian author with some Ro- manian ancestors in his family tree were properly cultivated and elevated by his Hungarian- speaking companion. Francis Ponge’s art can be considered as their literary precursor. Almost anything that can be told about water, fauna, flora, and the natural cycle, about the sea, shells, snails, pebbles, bones, and oranges, is told in Le parti pris des choses (1942), Ponge’s prose-poem cycle, which prevailed in the works of the well-informed Vasko Popa and, through Popa, in Sziveri’s texts as well. Sziveri’s criticism of targeting the patterns of social viability of South-Eastern Euro- pean repressive practices and collective false consciousness drowning in platitudes is ac- companied by topographic scenery and ethnic diversity which accumulated landscape sur- faces, fragments, and neighbourhoods framed by the Danube, Tisza, and Bega rivers as the scenes of geospecific identity. Comparing existential calculations, describing the shrinking of an ill body – these can be considered as a perceptual Pannonism of a subject observing and recording its direct impressions precisely and accurately. Clinging onto the love of life, self-defence supplied by background knowledge about the countryside – as if all these were representing the escapist way of hiding, disguise, and diversion. Being doomed to live as an outcast, as a result of the status quo of regional co- existence officially prescribing homogeneity and of institutionalized incitement of feud, seems to be a dead certain conditioning of life. His attitude against any kind of quailing, his manner of shrugging off or making fun of regional fixed ideas and minority melodramas, bodily and linguistic ‘Babylonization’ coalesce into a polyphonic credo of a poet standing in the shade of wrecking and falling apart.
The paper investigates how elements of magical realism are enacted through a Slavic mythical intertext in Dubravka Ugrešić’s novel Baba Jaga je snijela jaje (Baba Jaga Laid an Egg) (2008). It is a ...unique text in Croatian novelistic prose of the 2000s due to its inventive inclusion of mythlogical, ethnographical, ur-Slavonic and pre-Christian layers in a hybrid genre novelistic form, constructed through the author’s well known “patchwork” poetics. The characteristics of magical realism are here recognised as a narrative mode, which can be entirely incorporated into the genre hybrid, intertextual and interdiscursive multi-layered nature of the novel. These are: the irreducible elements of magic (the characters’ inexplicable powers and features, their influence on special and temporal relations as well as on the relationships of other characters, without any sense of bewilderment or disbelief); a detailed description of the world of phenomena (a mimetically represented reality of the life of elderly woman as well as the urban spaces of (South) Eastern Europe); the concordance of contradicting understandings of occurrences; the unification of different domains in the perception of reality (a lack of surety in the information received by the bodily senses) as well as a breach in the commonly received ideas on space, time and identity. In the entire novel an inherent sense of the marvellous is present underneath its mimetic framework, through which the transitional reality of post-communist countries (as a contrast between impoverished and decaying urban quarters with the decadent luxury in the highly stylised spaces of hotels and spas). The figurative nature of the characters of the elderly woman, founded on a mythic intertextuality, in this work it is interpreted as a figure of the voice of a suspended subject between two discursive systems: the transitional; the dominant and colonising, in which an elderly woman is a degraded object on the margins of society and a culturally submerged, mythic system in which an elderly woman is frighteningly powerful. According to S. Slemon and L. Hutcheon, the aim of magical realism is the creation of a liberating poetic for the suspended subject in the various contexts of marginalisation. However, it must be noted that due to the aforementioned mythological intertext on the witch Baba Yaga, upon which magical realism as a mode of narrative relies here, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg represents an innovative text within the corpus of Croatian novelistic prose on the theme of transition, so that due to the presence of its characteristic imaginarium we can place within this narrative model (despite some differences) which are represented in it.
In this paper the author describes the similarities in and differences among three Croatian travelogues written in the 19th century, from the time of the beginning of the Tanzimat reforms in the ...Ottoman Empire until 1879 when Austro-Hungary had already occupied Bosnia. Discussing issues regarding the genesis, form and substance in Pogled u Bosnu (Views on Bosnia) written by Matija Mažuranić (1842), in Putovanje po Bosni (Journeys through Bosnia) by Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski (1858) and in Putopisne crtice iz Bosne (Travel sketches from Bosnia) by Gjuro Pilar (1879), the author has striven to present the specific findings presented by the various authors to the Croatian public and emphasized, by using examples from these texts, the diversity of Croatian perspectives on Bosnia and its population. The author draws the conclusion that Mažuranić’s travel book has the most similarity with the common understanding of fictional narrative, that Kukuljević illustrates significant changes in the Croatian perception of Bosnian Muslims and that, from the documentary point of view, Pilar’s travel book can be considered the most reliable.
Molte e varie leggende di san Girolamo sono state conservate nella più antica tradizione letteraria croata e confermate in più alfabeti e lingue. Numerose e varie leggende medievali croate di san ...Girolamo testimoniano la diffusione e la popolarità del suo culto. San Girolamo fu venerato in particolar modo dai glagolitici croati che lo consideravano l’ideatore dell’alfabeto glagolitico, il fondatore della tradizione glagolitica e il traduttore della Bibbia in lingua croata. Di special interesse sono le Vite di san Girolamo, conservate nei vari breviari e miscellanee glagolitici. In questo studio la Traslazione di San Girolamo viene pubblicata nella translitterazione latina per la prima volta.
Since its beginnings and in its most audacious tendencies and phases, modern poetry has been defined as an adventure of the linguistic imagination, as constant crossing of boundaries where metaphors ...cease to teach us about understanding and start communicating intensity and transforming meaning into body. The extravagance and playfulness, but also seriousness and dedication of Dorta Jagić’s poetry is one such adventure, bringing us back to the beginning over and over, that is, to the word itself and its bodily “capsule”.
The paper argues that the starting point of Novak’s novel Outboard Log Book is a “twisted” world based on a paradox, which influences the main elements and strategies of narration. Due to this ...“twisted” feature of the novel, which is determined mostly politically and ideologically, the “disturbed perspective” prevails in the text. Since the basic strategy in the novel is the pun, i.e. world play, whose symbolism and meanings interconnect the plot, composition, narration, and the signifiers. The character of Magistar, transformed into a fool and an outcast in this upside-down world, can oppose the ideology and language as its main stronghold, only with “silence ideology” (known from previous Novak’s novels We Should Think Further, Southern Thoughts, and It Should Die Logically.), or he can try “to undermine it with the language itself”. When the world cannot be interpreted by language, almost all its functions are lost. What remains is the poetic function that becomes embedded in irony. The paradigmatic syntagm a shell that makes a noise embodies the individuality and further justifies literariness. However, it becomes obvious that even that “pledge” of art can be both disruptive and contradictory. The protagonist’s return to the island signals a circular structure of the key narrative strand, as well as his journey. Puns, playing with paradoxes, twists and replacements, as well as “the aspiration for logical dying” “are reconciled” at the end of the third part of the novel entitled Necropolis, which is visible in the “equalization of the opposing worlds”, and in finding a solution to the problem of temporality.
The article discusses the contribution that the journalist, lexicographer and publicist Josip Šentija gave to the affirmation of the Croatian literary language by supporting the Declaration on the ...Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language and by defending it against unitary linguistic and political attacks. It further discusses the suppression of the attempted Serbian language colonization of Radio Zagreb; the harvesting of the first post-declaration fruits manifested in the amended language articles in the 1974 constitutions of Yugoslav republics; the implementation of Art. 138 of the Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia about language in the third edition of the General Encyclopaedia of the Lexicographic Institute, and the cooperation with Miroslav Krleža and the central editorial board in building an encyclopaedic style and nurturing the Croatian language. Finally, the article analyses Šentija’s modern social democratic political orientation and his clear views of national components in the context of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and of the creation of an independent Croatian state, with an emphasis on Croatian-Serbian relations and on Greater Serbian expansionist programme that was partially founded on Karadžić’s motto “Serbs everywhere”, built around the non-scientific premise about the exclusive Serbianness of the Štokavian dialect.
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