Croatian literature

Croatian literature refers to the body of written works produced in the Balkan nation of Croatia or by the Croat people. The earliest literature in what is today Croatia developed more than one thousand years ago but did not truly flourish until the late medieval period. Much of this literature was heavily influenced by religious thought. Religion continued to be a major theme in Croatian writing until the nineteenth century when a focus on the daily lives of the Croat people sparked a turn toward Realism. The greatest literary figure in Croatian history was Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981), a prolific writer who often used his pen to criticize the ruling class when Croatia was under Austrian-Hungarian or Yugoslav rule in the twentieth century.

Background

Prior to the nineteenth century, Croatian literature, a body of works attributed to the Slavic people of the northwestern Balkan Peninsula, could have been described as disjointed. This was in keeping with the country’s divided ruling powers at the time. The literary landscape has been defined by time and place with local variants of all the three main dialects of the Serbo-Croatian language used in writing.

Using Italian role models, a high-standard literary culture took shape in the sixteenth century in the Italian coastal Republic of Venice, with poetry, drama, and prose represented. A clear literary regional divide appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1797, Venice was forced to hand over its territory in Croatia to Austria, but in 1809, Napoleon transformed the territory into a new but short-lived state called the Illyrian Provinces. After Napoleon was defeated in 1815, the old order returned. Austria took all the territory once belonging to Venice, including the city of Dubrovnik.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Croatian nationalism grew, and Croatian culture and literature flourished. But only with the revivalist Illyrian movement in the 1830s and 1840s did Croatia gain a unified literary language. The Illyrian movement was significant and seismic. Press, theater, and other cultural institutions arose, and the foundation was laid for modern literature based on European models.

Illyrianism suffered a harsh defeat at the end of the 1848, and, under the rule of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, Croatian literature suffered from paralysis.

A new start first emerged in the 1870s when the groundwork was laid for the socially engaged, realistic prose that dominated the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The period from the end of the nineteenth century to World War I (1939–1945) is called the “modern” period. Social criticism was prominent between wars, and post-World War II, Croatian prose was transformed into complex, internationally renowned works, some of which remain prominent in the present day.

Overview

Written literature in Croatia, often influenced by word-of-mouth stories, developed about the eighth century. but began to blossom in the sixteenth century. Croatian medieval literature was produced in three languages (Latin, Old Slavonic, and the vernacular) and three scripts (Roman, Glagolitic, and Cyrillic). It was developed from the eighth to the sixteenth century in the form of poetry, verse dialogue, and representations of prized literary works. It was based largely on liturgical and religious themes.

Near the end of the fifteenth century, new poetic standards, themes, forms, and types developed that mirrored those of Renaissance literature. During the first decades of the sixteenth century, Croatian literature was tied closely to Renaissance European trends, and several creative circles formed, especially in Dalmatia.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance waned, and Protestantism tried to make a dent in the Roman Catholic control of the literary world. Protestantism’s impact was slight, but Croatia produced one of the most eminent Protestant writers of the day, Matija Vlačić Ilirik (1520-1575), whose Clavis Scripturae Sacrae (Key to Holy Scripture) (1567) was among the most famous biblical lexicons of the time.

Baroque literature of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought the writings of Ivan Gundulić (1589-1638), whose work is replete with religious fervor and contains central characteristics of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. His esteemed epic poem Osman, written in the 1620s, takes as its theme a Polish victory against the Ottoman Empire in 1621 and a rebellion against the young sultan Osman in 1622. His religious poem, Suze Sina Razmetnoga (Tears of the Prodigal Son), (1622), also was prominent among his works.

Active in the Kajkavian-speaking area of Croatia at the turn of the nineteenth century was comedy writer Tituš Brezovački (Matthias the Wizard) (1757-1805). In the mid-nineteenth century, religious writer Ignjat Kristijanović was a strident advocate for Kajkavian as the literary language.

The Illyrian movement, headed by Croatian linguist, politician, and journalist Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872) in the first half of the nineteenth century, powerfully affected political and cultural life. The most important factor for Croatian literature at the time was the creation of a uniform Croatian language, laying the foundations for creative continuity.

The transition from Romanticism to Realism was reflected most clearly in the multiple works of August Šenoa (1838-1881), which influenced cultural life to the extent that the 1865–1881 period is called the Age of Šenoa. Several of Šenoa’s books are considered must-reads, including the forbidden-love tale Zlatarovo zlato (The Goldsmith’s Treasure; 1871) and Seljačka buna (The Peasant Revolt; 1877).

The Realist period shaped Croatian literature in a definitive manner, as writers and themes from all Croatian regions were represented and criticism as a literary genre was established. This was also the golden age of the novel.

The Modern era also contributed valuable dramatic pieces to Croatian literature, primarily the works of Ivo Vojnović (The Dubrovnik Trilogy) and Josip Kosor (The Fire of Passion), while Modernism was expressed mostly in poetry and prose, particularly in the essays of Matoš and the work of Miroslav Krleža, Antun Branko Šimić, Tin Ujević, and others in the 1920s. It prevailed until the turn of the 1960s.

Miroslav Krleža is widely considered the greatest Croatian writer of the twentieth century. His works are notable across all literary genres, including poetry, theater, short stories, novels, and an intimate diary. His themes focused on bourgeois hypocrisy and conformism in Austria-Hungary, of which Croatia was a part until 1918, and Yugoslavia, which absorbed Croatia from 1918 to 1991. His style combines visionary poetic language with sarcasm. He dominated the cultural life of Croatia and Yugoslavia for half a century.

Krleža’s most lauded novels were written in the first half of the twentieth century. The Croatian God Mars (1922) is a short-story collection that offers an overview of the poor living conditions of peasants and soldiers at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Return of Philip Latinovicz (1932) follows the story of an artist who returns home to Kaptol after years away and must readjust to life with his mother while navigating a new lover and friendships. On The Edge of Reason (1938) has as its protagonist a successful lawyer who blurts out an honest thought in the middle of an elite party and has his life turned upside down as a result. Krleža’s 1972 short-story collection The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall: And Other Stories also garnered literary acclaim.

Other notable Croatian writers have included Baroque poet, lawyer and judge Marko Marulić, regarded, along with Gundulić, as a national poet of Croatia. Marulić has been called the “the Father of Croatian literature.” He composed epic Christian poetry and humanist elegies as well as satirical and erotic epigrams. Although his works largely fell into oblivion, the passage of time revealed his broad sphere of influence. His writings were admired by St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis de Sales, St. Peter Canisius, and St. Charles Borromeo as well as by monarchs and statesmen such as King Henry VIII, Thomas More, and Emperor Carl V. More recently, Pope John Paul II quoted from a Marulić poem during his 1998 Apostolic visit to Croatia.

Marulić is believed to have finished the first-ever Croatian epic poem, Judith (also known as Judita), on April 22, 1501, leading to the celebration of Croatian Book Day in its honor each year on April 22. As it tells the biblical story of how the widow Judith seduced and murdered Assyrian general Holofernes to save the city of Bethulia. The poem draws parallels with the Croatia of the time, continually under attack by Ottoman soldiers.

After World War II, several prose writers gained repute as their works characterized the literature of the second half of the twentieth century. Some authors left their homeland amid political and ideological circumstances, but continued writing abroad for a genre known as émigré literature. In the last third of the twentieth century, in keeping with European trends, Croatian literature also was marked by multifaceted, post-modern poetic expressions.

Among the generation of Croatian prose writers who emerged in the 1990s, one of the most esteemed is Miljenko Jergović (Sarajevo Marlboro). The Croatian literary scene of the time was marked by a series of new writers, poets, playwrights, and authors and continued to thrive after the turn of the millennium.

Notable titles of the first post-millennial decade include Zagreb, Exit South by Edo Popović (2003). The book explores post-communism Zagreb and everyday life in the 1990s as it weaves wit and humor into the subjects of break-ups, alcoholism, and depression. Farewell, Cowboy by Olja Savičević Ivančević (2010) tells the story of a young woman who moves from the city to a small town in Croatia and deals with her family history, including her brother's suicide.

The second post-millennial decade brought Running Away to Home (2011) by Jennifer Wilson, an autobiographic book about a middle-class family from the Midwestern United States that moves to its ancestral home of Croatia; Wild Woman by Marina Šur Puhlovski (2018), which is set in 1970s Croatia and tells the story of a woman in an unhealthy marriage reclaiming her independence; and Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me by Catherine Kapphahn (2019), an autobiography in which Kapphahn explores her little-known heritage after the death of her Croatian mother. Julijana Matanović (b. 1959), a literature professor and critic, published several short stories, novels, essays, and other works in her native language. Among her most notable works are A Book of Men, Women, Cities and Goodbyes (Knjiga od žena, muškaraca, gradova i rastanaka; 2009) and the short story collection Children at a Distance (Djeca na daljinu, Lađa od vode; 2020). Other works by notable Croatian authors in the twenty-first century include Olja Savičević Ivančević’s (b. 1974) Farewell, Cowboy (Adio kauboju; 2015), Girl at War (2015) by Sara Nović (b. 1987), and Monika Herceg’s (b. 1990) Buried Miracles (Zakopana čuda; 2020).

Bibliography

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