Literary work of Mavro Vetranovi? and his time

Abstract

Althouhg he was a Benedictine monk,Mavro Vetranovic (1482 − 1576) included all important segments of Dubrovnik’ life in the sixteenth century in his writings on the conceptual bacground of Christian Renaissance. Writing of the contemporary life in his town for over seventy years, he wanted to comply the life of his contemporaries with strict principles of Christian morals, which were not always respected by the citizens of Dubrovnik. These efforts are the reflect of Christian Renaissance, whose aim was to harmonize the aspirations toward secular culture and life pleasures to the spiritual needs, reminding people of soul salvation, because, during the epoch of Renaisaance, literature was connected to medieval conception of the world which in some works was uniting pious content with moral lesson and forms of new literature. Although Vetranovic’s poetic work has predominantly religious character, it maintained its relations to reality as a kind of testimony to the culture, life, histoical events and everyday and private life in Dubrovnik. Vetranovic’s secular works (poetry, three secular dramas and satirical and occasional poems and epistles), as well as those with religious themes (religious poems and translations of psalms, religious-philosophical epos Pelegrin and five pious dramas with the themes from Old and New Testaments) contain life realiae relating to the poet’s view of world, epoch and human being. The dissertation should show how the entire work of Mavro Vetranovic reflects the time in which the poet wrote, because it hasn’t yet been percieved the relations of his work to reality, and that is one of its most significant features. Detailed analysis of Vetranovic’s work in the light of Christian Renaissance poetics which differs from the normative poetics of Renaissance as a cultural revival, should show how from the template with a moral lesson poet acquires a literary work that becomes a testimony of that time life. The basic hypotheses are: – in the eclogues (with pastoral and antique themes) beyond the basic plot should reckognized the implications related to everyday life in Dubrovnik; − in the religious-meditative poems, which are at the most in poet’s creative work, there is much of sincere religiousness and personal feelings and thoughts about sin, death, repentance, injustice and the sence of life. These are the everyday dilemmas of that time man who faces substantial issues of life and death. Those possibilities of Vetranovic’s poetic expression can become apparent fully in these poems; – in social and political satirical poems he condemns drawbacks of life in Dubrovnik, not sparing anyone: judges, merchants, priests, women, as well as his opponents, and with indignation sings of enemies of the Republic of Dubrovnik, supporting its government policies in the preserving of freedom; − in the occasional poetry can be found valuable historical and literary facts on contemporary writers and their works; – in unfinished religious-meditative epos Pelegrin can be noticed different aspects of real world…