Although it might seem as such at the first glance, Lovran was not an unimportant station for Krleža. That place was his important turning point before the journey to Galicia and new literary work. ...He spent time recovering in Lovran in 1916, during the World War I, thinking about life and death and, probably, about his creative work (he received cyanide for a battlefield and soon he burnt his manuscripts). He wrote about Lovran in discursive literary texts (Olden Days, Diary 1943, and Journey to Istria). This place is also mentioned in his well-known literary works (Three Guardsmen, The Return of Philip Latinowicz and Banners), not as main motive, but as one that is important to understand the characters. Lovran, just like the entire area of Kvarner, is worth exploring in the context of Krleža’s life and work. It seems like Lovran is offering a valuable insight about Krleža and some of his works.
By engaging the debates on feminist postclassical narratology and by approaching literary representations of girls as one of the sites of the production of girlhood, understoodas a category ...independent of concrete discursive articulations and not as a reflection ofa stable biological or social category, this paper focuses on the analysis of Josip Barković’s Alma and aims to contribute to discussions on the relationship between genderand narration. Specifically, it argues that gender must not be considered in isolationor, in other words, that ignoring the broader socio-cultural context while discussingnovels about Yugoslav girls would mean ignoring the significance of Yugoslav socialismand attributing a feminist impulse to Barković’s novel. A brief discussion of the theoretical and socio-cultural context allows for the analysis of Barković’s novel focused onthe narrative fashioning of girlhood and the figure of the girl in order to show that aconsideration of the context of the novel and its further existence in the cultural fieldprovides a twofold advantage. On the one hand, it broadens the understanding of theactual cultural representations of the figure of youth with their incredibly importantrole in the Yugoslav socialist society while taking into account the category of gender.On the other hand, it expands the understanding of the socio-cultural context in whichthat figure is produced.
The article focuses on the transnational aspect of Yugoslav Dadaism, which was already an integral part of its founding stage in Prague in 1920, when the main Yugoslav Dadaist, Dragan Aleksić, was a ...student there. Through an analysis of the already known (but rare) primary and secondary sources and a presentation of some newly found primary sources, the article presents the cooperation between Yugoslav and Czech artists and clarifies the circumstances of establishing this Yugoslav avant-garde movement. Furthermore, because Aleksić’s work was closely connected to Ljubomir Micić’s Zenitism and the activity of Branko Ve Poljanski in Prague, we compare their journals (Zenit, Dada-Jok, Dada Tank, Dada Jazz) and emphasize the points of conflict and competitiveness among them, which was a constructive part for the further development of Yugoslav Dadaism. Thus, the article contributes to both the local and international positioning of the Yugoslav Dada in the context of the Central European avant-garde.
The paper takes the descriptions of the urban noble families from the novel Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs) by Vjenceslav Novak as a starting point of its historiographical analysis. ...After a short historical framework is presented, which is supplemented by descriptions given by V. Novak, the paper also briefly looks at the issue of the struggle for the Croatian language, although it deals mostly with the analysis of the historical foundation of the characters and action using exact and precise quotations from actual historical reality. In the end, the Cadastral registers from the State Archives in Zagreb that are also compared with the statements cited in the work are presented.
Any serious discussion about Vjenceslav Novak’s prose takes into account the fact of the impossibility of its placement into a predetermined discursive framework as the norm. From Frangeš to Nemec, ...literary criticism and theory in Novak’s works will rightly notice elements that simultaneously confirm and quash the opinions of the epoch. This paper, upon the example of the ambivalent treatment of the character of LucijaStipančić in the novel Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs), will deal with the analysis of precisely these elements. There is no doubt that contradictory individual and social motives are broken through Lucia’s character. What attracts attention is the turning point: criticism becomes possible only at the moment when ist realisation is no longer possible. // Using the epistemological insights of Foucault, Bachelard and the opinions of performative feminist criticism (Butler), as well as Novak’s aesthetic preoccupations (Čemu se uči teorija glazbe - Why music theory is taught), the paper will try to answer the question of the extent to which it is possible to speak of an artistically conscious act of subverting epochal language, and to what extent it concerns merely the symptomatic ideological and discursive impulses inherently present in every linguistic utterance.
The anthropology of begging and eco-history of the collection Podgorske pripovijetke (Podgorje Stories) (1889) by Vjenceslav Novak, where the anthological Podgorska lutrijašica (Podgorje Lottery ...Seller) (Vijenac, 1889) stands out, in relation to the dyad of father/mother - daughter/son, documents a subaltern relationship from the position of the honour of begging in which parents considered children corrupt who were ashamed of begging. // In the second part of the article, Novak’s mentioned theme of the anthropology of begging and solidarity is placed in context with the social feuilletons of Miroslav Krleža. In the weekly publication Narodna zaštita (National Protection) intended, according to the attribution in the subtitle, for the wartime helpless and orphans, Krleža published a feuilleton on 8th November 1917, as his first article about the poor, How do poor people in Zagreb live? // Krleža’s second article about the poor, the feuilleton Narod koji gladuje (The hungry people), which he defines as a variant about the sorghum/Osyris alba which Herzegovinians"fed on like flatbread", is written on the theme of the shocking examples of the survival strategies of the Herzegovinians who were, in the area of the struggle of their own starving bodies, forced to eat sorghum.
The paper discusses the topic of religious motifs in six chapters of Vjenceslav Novak’s novel Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs). In the first chapter, the symbolism of religious objects in ...the Stipančićs’ house is discussed. The meaning of the cross is interpreted and the images of saints hanging on the walls of the said house are mentioned. The famous painting Majka Milosti (Mother of Mercy) (the original of which is today preserved at the shrine in Trsat) is described. In the Stipančićs’ house, objects belonging to the Christian cultural and civilizational complex and that reflect Christian symbolism (pain, suffering, temptations, as well as the faith and hope for a better world), which preserve legends and the past, tradition and memories, are in noticeable places.
In the history of Croatian literature, Vjenceslav Novak is presented as a realistic writer of the littoral environment, with an emphasis on his origins, work at school, material living conditions and ...the themes that he took mostly from the real world. Novak was an objective realistic narrator because he did not exalt or despise, yet at the same time, he was socially sensitive because he was the first one to bring his love for family and language into Croatian realism, with which he created a novel titled Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs). It is obvious that the beauty of the selected words contributed to the fact that throughout the narration of the family story about the Stipančićs, the safe strokes of the writer’s pen are felt, whether he talks about it chronologically or retrospectively. // The criticism of the realism had no understanding of Novak’s huge opus as a result of a distinctive artistic creative force. Modern Croatian literary criticism has shown the growth of Novak’s opus over four concentric circles. Since each literary work is a special correlation between the world that the writer depicts and the language in which he writes about that world, the logical connection is Novak’s social and linguistic sensitivity as he tells the life story of a family of his time. In contemporary literary criticism, the novel The Last Stipančićs was proclaimed as the best novel of Croatian realism, it was present in secondary school literature classes, and last school year and at the state matura.
TITO DORČIĆ AS A FORERUNNER OF THE IRONIC MODE Slavić, Dean
Senjski zbornik - prilozi za geografiju, etnologiju, gospodarstvo, povijest i kulturu,
2020, Letnik:
47, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
According to Northrop Frye, 20th-century literature is marked by characters whose intelligence and capabilities are lesser than those of the average human. Typical such figures are the protagonists ...of Kafka’s and Beckett’s works, who lack even the most basic information regarding their own position – due to which the reader has the sense of looking down on scenes of bondage, frustration or absurdity. Vjenceslav Novak’s Tito Dorčić, from the eponymous novel, is a forerunner of this type of character. He is trapped by his own predisposition and social environment and becomes unhappy in the "better life" imposed on him by his father. He is utterly unsuccessful in his career as well as in his family life. 20th-century interpreters found the cause of Tito’s state, or the source for such a character, in Darwinist theories supposedly praised by the novel’s author; a more recent critic emphasises the psychoanalytic motifs. Both theories unconsciously bear witness to the reduced power of the action of the protagonist. The novel’s final scene, in which Tito Dorčić’s left leg is stuck in a crevice whilst the upper part of his body immersed in the sea is a metaphor of his entire life. The scapegoat mechanism, as proposed by René Girard, also explains the events in Tito Dorčić’s life: the social crisis is seemingly only slightly present, yet Tito is depicted as a person holding a position in the judicial administration which, because of his low intelligence, immorality and lack of cultural refinement, he does not deserve. He commits mistakes in his prosecutor’s work and is punished because an innocent person has been hanged. Tito had previously been marked by the collapse of his marriage. Eventually, he loses his job, falls into madness, which might also be an act of selfpunishment, and at the end, he dies. The text, or the narrator, kills him, in the last step in the long procedure of attacking the protagonist.
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.
