KNjIŽEVNOST I UMETNOST FIRENCE U STVARALAŠTVU MILOŠA CRNjANSKOG

Abstract

Miloš Crnjanski dedicated the chapter About Florentine Beatrice in his travelogue Love in Tuscany (Ljubav u Toskani) to Florence and Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nuova. The experience of Florence is progressively elaborated through interpretation and translation of prose and verses of the celebrated Italian writer and it is different from images of the other cities that Crnjanski created in his travelogue, because it is the only one completely deprived of physical descrip- tions or narration of the events from past or present. The surroundings of Florence appear in the poem Stražilovo, written before the travelogue Love in Tuscany and in the poem the poet offers us a few ethereal details of the landscape. In the novel At the Hyperboreans (Kod Hiper- borejaca), even though the plot is situated in Rome, Florence is often mentioned as a place that would be good to return to and Crnjanski is a little more generous in physical descriptions in those passages. Speaking of Michelangelo, in the novel At the Hyperboreans and in the Book of Michelangelo, Florence is one of the most wonderful sources of art, while Minchelangelo’s sonnets are indispensable reading for Crnjanski in all his efforts to understand the essence of the artist’s being. Crnjanski does not highlight exactly how important Florence is to him, but in his works it often represents the place of the writer’s intellectual and emotional immersions in the centuries of Italian literature and art. In this paper, by analyzing and interpreting pas- sages from the aforementioned works, we examine the role of Florence and its culture and how important it is in Crnjanski’s literature.