Mahabharata i kosovska epika

Abstract

Comparisons between the epic Mahabharata, the world's largest literary work, and the quantitatively modest corpus of epic poems referring to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, have drawn scholarly attention mainly focused on the larger and the better-known example of epic poetry. The lesser attention paid to the epic Kosovo poems prefers a genetic approach, i.e. identifying the common traits and tracing their variations back to their common Proto-Indo-European origin and, presumably, the common protomyth. The overlaps typically include the heroic characters, motifs and plot segments. The article highlights and analyses similarities that do not necessarily share the same historical and geographical background but still include expressive, stylistic and aesthetic parallelisms and elements that rather point towards common archetypal origins in the human imagination generally. The differences between the corpora are then easily interpreted as simply as many adaptations and autonomous expressions of separate cultures. This paper bypasses the shared characteristics that are typical of epic poetry as such, and focuses on the various stylistic devices like the hyperbole, descriptions of nature, lyrical sections and motifs. A factor crucial for adequately understanding the two epic corpora, and their relationship, is the fact that they stand at two poles of the history of the epic: while the discourse of the Mahabharata is fascinating in its primitiveness, the Kosovo poems show a high degree of aesthetic self-awareness.