The Dalmatian Motifs of Miroslav Krleža: Space, Culture and Conflict in the Borderlands

Abstract

The aim of this article is to deal with the disputable role Dalmatia played in the Croatian-Italian-Serbian borderlands, referring to the foremost Croatian and Yugoslav writer Miroslav Krleža. Although he is mostly associated with the Croatian North, i.e., historical Croatia-Slavonia, called sometimes the Panonian cultural complex, his engagement in the discourse of Dalmatia after World War Two cannot be underestimated. In the period 1950-1951 Krleža prepared two exhibitions of medieval art (one staged in Paris as L’art médiéval Yougoslave and the other in Zagreb as Zlato i srebro Zadra) and wrote two introductions to their catalogues. In them, he builds a concept of a separate “South Slavic civilisation” that “negates” the bipolarism of Roman-Byzantine competing cultural models (Slavia Romana vs. Slavia Orthodoxa, according to Picchio). Referring to the spatial approach to literature, I attempt to situate the post-war Yugoslav discourse, radically confrontational and militaristic, within historical antagonistic discourses (Croatian-Italian-Serbian).