Tri zrnca – Iz mozaika Jovana Radulovića o udesu kulturnog identiteta dalmatinskih Srba

Abstract

The paper deals with national-oriented works of Jovan Radulović from the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, based on his book dedicated to the life of Dalmatian Serbs. The first part of the paper refers to Radulović’s biographical-anthropo- logical essays on three Serbian writers from Dalmatia, as well as to his documentary prose; the analysis of Radulović’s critical views on the actual life of Serbian people in Croatia is based on a series of his interviews and polemics. The following section of the paper deals with the last part of Radulović’s book, enti- tled “The Grains (1984‒1989)”, consisting of about fifteen public speeches and newspaper articles related to the cultural assimilation of the Serbs in Croatia. Special attention is paid to the three grains, i.e. two public speeches and one newspaper article. In the first speech, Radulović documents national and cultural discrimination against Serbs in the communist Croatia, whose position is much worse than in Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the XX century. In the second speech, Radulović optimistically presents a short version of the history of defence of spiritual and national identity of the Serbs in Dalmatia. Finally, the third grain is the article in which Radulović expresses his fears about the fate of the Serbian Autonomous Province of Krayina, whose political status was determined far away from it and from the broken Yugoslavia, and he pleads for the absolute unity of the Serbian people and the leadership of the newly formed autonomous province in Croatia. On the basis of Radulović’s political views, it can be concluded that in spite of the defeat and the mass exodus, Serbs from Croatia should not give up the idea of returning to their homeland.