UBISTVO I SAMOUBISTVO U NAOPAKOJ BAJCI – „OLUJACI“ IVE ANDRIĆA

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the poetics of suicide in Ivo Andrić’s story „Olujaci”. As the most obvious example of Andrić’s prose where many of different genres and discourses could be recognized (folk literature, Patonistic philosophy and aesthetics, anthropological views on incest and incest taboo), this story shows the ways in which one specifically modern (poeti- cal) phenomenon like suicide, makes difference and reveals the insufficiency of all these dis- courses. Even if we accept suicide as a possibility for achieving metaphysical satisfaction in the poetics of early modernism, we cannot see it in Andrić’s story because suicide is already annihilated as transcendence and reduced to its instinctive and subconscious forms. Without any possibility to make suicide aesthetically justified or symbolically transferred, the hero’s possession reflex becomes extremely traumatic leading him to crime and violence, destruction and self-destruction, murder and suicide.