Forgetting Strategies in (Re)structuring Collective Memory of Goranʼs Poem The Pit

Abstract

Since the (re) structuring collective memory always implies particular political processes, in the case of Ivan Goran Kovacic and his narrative poem The Pit (Jama), the fundamental text of the Partisan canon of Croatian literature, it may be divided into two periods with a transitional watershed of the 90s (or the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) as a historical turning point. Post-Yugoslav revisionist processes of the memory of World War II, which then started, inevitably had to influence the “myth about Goran”, up to that time in the conventional memory constructed around three key points. The first was his leaving Zagreb, together with Vladimir Nazor, to join the Partisans; the second was the revelation of Ustasha crimes in the epic poem The Pit and third his death by a “chetnikʼs knife”, which he prophetically hinted at in his poem “My Tomb”. Furthermore, the critical reception of The Pit from its first edition takes place on two plans of expression – artistic (fine arts) and literary. These “two lives” of one epic poem had different destinies and also attached to themselves different memories including forgetting strategies of (re)structuring collective memory.