Croatian Writer Research Articles

Wspomnienia Julija Benešicia jako ważne źródło do dziejów wzajemnych chorwacko‑polskich kontaktów naukowo‑kulturalnych

The material substrate for the article are the reminiscences of that Croatian writer and philologist, published in book form in 1985. The article deals with the following aspects of activity of Julije Benešić during his stay in Warsaw from 1930 to 1938: teaching a Croatian language course at the University of Warsaw, contacts with Polish and Slavic scholars (mainly linguists), contacts with Polish writers and artists, the Yugoslavian Library and statements about translations and translators, Croatian grammar together with a Croatian‑Polish dictionary, popularisation of knowledge about the Panslavic activities of Juraj Križanić (1618–1683), statements about difficulties faced by Poles in learning and understanding Croatian and Serbian. The multi‑faceted activity of J. Benešić in Poland and his accompanying observations enrich our knowledge on the history of Slavic studies in the inter‑war period.

Value Determinants, Mentality and Identity of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Village at the Beginning of the 20th Century according to Ivan Softa’s Literary Works

Ivan Softa (Sopta) (1906–1945) was a Croatian writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his realistic novels Dani jada i glada (Days of Misery and Hunger) (1937) and Nemirni mir (Restless Peace) (1940), as well as in his other literary achievements, he describes the life of the Herzegovinian village at the time when the First World War was about to start. It was an ambience dominated by bare stone, hot sun, sharp north wind called bora, with somewhat scarce and sparse land that made an easy life impossible. These resources that abound in this Western Balkans region also shaped the specific (Dinaric) mentality of the people of that time: hard as the stone on which they grew up, aggressive and easily flammable like the sun that they were exposed to and unrestrained like the wind, the whipping of which they mercilessly suffered from. But it happened that even from that fiery temper some kind of an original mountaineering-like honesty and confidence, empathy and readiness for self-sacrifice had emerged. Personal martyrdom turning into self-destruction – something that seems to be completely inconceivable to modern man – is embodied in the female characters, whereas emotional rawness and hardness are more characteristic of the author’s male characters. The tragic circumstances of war and famine caused emigration to regions where there was bread. These tragic circumstances resulted in the tragic fate of the characters who left the Herzegovinian environment and, like many others, fell apart on the side roads of life.

“Mr Hitler,” Greta Garbo and the Jew Hidden in the Grass. The Literary Representation of the Holocaust in Ruth Tannenbaum by Miljenko Jergović

This article is an attempt to provide an insight into the fate of the Jewish diaspora in Zagreb, a city marked by the spectre of the Second World War. The events in the diegetic world are based on the fictionalised, tragic life of a young Jewish actress Lea Deutsch (1927-1943), who was acclaimed a prodigy of the Zagreb theatre scene and was killed in Auschwitz. Miljenko Jergović undertook the difficult task of addressing Croatian antisemitism, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), of which the darkest outcome was the Jasenovac concentration camp. The analysis of the work is part of a wide-ranging discussion on the acceptable ways to depict the Holocaust (language and form). The Croatian writer's novel highlights the topos of the eternally wandering Jew; he also dispels the myth about small promised lands in the history of Jews, who were scattered across Europe and had to face local exclusion, antisemitism and ghettoisation.

"Idź córko do morza nieznanego, nie bierz nic ze sobą prócz wędki i cienkiej dwojnicy". Symboliczno-obrzędowa interpretacja baśni "Rybak Palunko i jego żona" Ivany Brlić-Mažuranić

The text analyzes the symbolic and ritual meaning of a fairy tale by the Croatian writer Ivana Brlić-Mazuranic entitled Palunko the fisherman and his wife. The title character wants to find a way to the seat of the Sea King to live there in carefree and wealthy. Neither the loss of his son nor his wife’s illness can stop him from achieving this goal. However, she is the one who, by performing a series of rituals, especially her own internal transformation, finds her husband and son, which leads to the recovery of the lost community. In the text, Brlić-Mazuranic uses symbolism related to the daily cycle (dawn, midnight), elements (water, fire, air), divine beings (Aurora), and above all Slavic beliefs, the remnants of which have been preserved only in fairy tales, especially about the island of Bujan, the Alatyr stone or the twigs.

UKRŠTENE STAZE MODERNISTIČKE POETIKE: PROZA IVANA FRANKA I ANTUNA GUSTAVA MATOŠA

The article examines the peculiarities of modernist poetics in the prose works of the classic Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko and the classic Croatian writer Antun Gustav Matoš. For the comparative analysis, the author of the paper has chosen Ivan Franko’s novel Fateful Cross- roads (1900) and Antun Gustav Matoš’s short story Camao (1900). These works, which have never been the subject of comparison, have many common motifs and typological parallels, the analysis of which can provide interesting material for studying the peculiarities of mod- ernism in Slavic pieces of literature. In the proposed article, we analyze these „crossing paths” in the works of Ukrainian and Croatian writers.

From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature by Tijana Matijević

Reviewed by: From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature by Tijana Matijević Alexandra Andrejevic From Post-Yugoslavia to the Female Continent: A Feminist Reading of Post-Yugoslav Literature. By Tijana Matijević. Bielefeld: Transcript. 2020. 274 pp. €70. ISBN 978-3-8376-5209-3. Tijana Matijević lectures on post-Yugoslav literature, culture, and languages at two European universities, and this monograph reflects her expertise while consolidating her previous research. The book attempts to examine contemporary literature from the regions of former Yugoslavia through the lens of feminist analysis and also in the light of its theorized connections with the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde. It expands and redefines existing concepts (such as the idea of post-Yugoslavia as a liminal socio-political space defined, in Bhabha's phrasing, as 'the time never completely beyond' (p. 8)) while introducing new notions (such as framing and understanding the literary landscapes of today's Yugoslavia as a 'female continent'). As such, this book represents a nuanced integration of literary and feminist analysis applied to several key texts, including the Serbian author Slobodan Tišman's Bernardijeva Saba (Bernardi's Room, 2011) and the Croatian writer Olja Savićević Ivančević's Adio, Kauboju (Adios Cowboy, 2010). It is carefully researched and meticulously argued, if a little densely worded at times. Matijević engages ambitiously with various theoretical fields, which underpin her close textual and interdisciplinary analysis of the primary sources examined in Chapters 2-6. While Western [End Page 155] scholars may not be familiar with all of the authors discussed here, as they are not widely known outside the Balkan region (with a few notable exceptions such as Dasa Drndić), Matijević's comparative approach makes her study relevant for non-specialists as well as regional experts. Matijević's main focus is on writing produced in the first half of the second decade of this century in three of the former Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina), all of which now exist as separate legal, political, and geographical entities. However, she argues for the existence of a non-physical entity which she terms 'post-Yugoslavia', where certain continuities can be identified with the literary conditions and preoccupations of the former state, particularly from a feminist standpoint and in terms of the marginalization offemale authors. It is these continuities that the author attempts to dissect and explore, with particular interest in how gender, sexuality, and body combine with themes of war and particularly with the narrativization of war by female characters. The author views the publication and mainstream status of war novels by female authors in this period as crucial to illustrate her point that, in post-Yugoslavia, 'non-phallic and non-masculine bodies and identities' (p. 10) begin to invade literary domains hitherto dominated by male authors. Another principal strand of her argument concerns the connection between the post-Yugoslav literary field and the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde, both of which endured, and continue to suffer, a certain elusiveness or even failure of integration into the literary mainstream, despite often relating to similar themes and discourses. Matijević makes a strong case for this link, illustrating it with specific examples through analysis of works by such seminal neo-avant-garde authors as Judita Šalgo and the aforementioned Slobodan Tišma. While any text referring to Yugoslavia has to acknowledge the lasting impact and damage of the wars fought during the 1990s, nevertheless Matijević ends on a hopeful note: that post-Yugoslav writing demands that we reconsider Yugoslavia's past in new ways-for example, by inventing improved alternative pasts and futures, even by allowing for the possibility of 'projecting' socialist utopia (p. 217). She calls this process "'choosing the optimal variant" in prevailing over reality' (p. 251). In summary, Matijević's book represents a salient contribution to an under-researched area, which will be of great interest and benefit to both students and established scholars in the field of European and literary studies. [End Page 156] Alexandra Andrejevic University of Gloucestershire Copyright © 2023 Modern Humanities Research Association

Žensko zdravlje i zarazna bolest u „Gričkoj vještici” Marije Jurić Zagorke

The paper analyzes the representations of women’s health and disease associated with the epidemic of smallpox in the Habsburg Monarchy during the reign of empress Maria Theresa, which is thematized in Croatian writer Marija Jurić Zagorka’s novel cycle Grička vještica (The Witch of Grič). Health and disease are considered as gendered experiences and, accordingly, gender coding strategies are investigated. The paper considers the role of discourses of infectious disease in establishing notions of female beauty, desirable and undesirable female bodies, controlling women’s lives, and establishing gender and intra-gender hierarchies. It also investigates the impact of the infectious disease on the creation of fears and taboos related to human health, disease and disability and the (re)production of negative attitudes and discriminatory practices related to notions of “normal” and “abnormal” human bodies. It analyzes how the impact of contagious disease on monarchical marriage policy is represented, in which women’s health and beauty function as erotic and political capital, and through it the impact of contagion on sociopolitical relations.

Value Determinants, Mentality and Identity of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Village at the Beginning of the 20th Century according to Ivan Softa’s Literary Works

Ivan Softa (Sopta) (1906–1945) was a Croatian writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his realistic novels Dani jada i glada (Days of Misery and Hunger) (1937) and Nemirni mir (Restless Peace) (1940), as well as in his other literary achievements, he describes the life of the Herzegovinian village at the time when the First World War was about to start. It was an ambience dominated by bare stone, hot sun, sharp north wind called bora, with somewhat scarce and sparse land that made an easy life impossible. These resources that abound in this Western Balkans region also shaped the specific (Dinaric) mentality of the people of that time: hard as the stone on which they grew up, aggressive and easily flammable like the sun that they were exposed to and unrestrained like the wind, the whipping of which they mercilessly suffered from. But it happened that even from that fiery temper some kind of an original mountaineering-like honesty and confidence, empathy and readiness for self-sacrifice had emerged. Personal martyrdom turning into self-destruction – something that seems to be completely inconceivable to modern man – is embodied in the female characters, whereas emotional rawness and hardness are more characteristic of the author’s male characters. The tragic circumstances of war and famine caused emigration to regions where there was bread. These tragic circumstances resulted in the tragic fate of the characters who left the Herzegovinian environment and, like many others, fell apart on the side roads of life.

Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić i jej Brlićevac

The article, based on the commemorative books of the Brlićevac summer house and the correspondence of the Croatian writer Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, attempts to show the influence that the family estate had on Brlić-Mažuranić and her work. Atthe estate in the immediate vicinityof Brod, where the spouses lived, the family spent the summer months for many consecutive years and Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić wrote most of her works. The close contact with nature, which this place provided to a nature-loving writer, became the dominant source of her inspiration, it also guaranteed great well-being, unattainable in other places she lived ( Brod,Zagreb ). The property played a huge role in the life of the famous Croatian who, in her time free from the work in the vineyard, willingly devoted herself to recreation typical of a summer resort, and each celebration of the moments spent together with the loved ones, led to a kind of sacralization of this space.

Imagining Borderlands and Remembering Multilingualism: The Adriatic Trilogy of Nedjeljko Fabrio

Summary The article analyses multilingual and multicultural diversity in the narrative prose of the Croatian writer Nedjeljko Fabrio. Set in the borderlands of Dalmatia and Kvarner, Fabrio’s novels evoke the lives of people belonging to different ethnic and speech communities – Croats, Italians, Austrians, Serbs, Yugoslavs, or as yet to be defined individuals – from the beginning of the 19th c. until today. Staging ‘weak protagonists’ rather than ‘strong heroes’ and inclining to sociolects and dialects rather than to standard language, his novels create a universe in which the characters’ individual experience counters Croatian national narratives. Fabrio’s narratives suggest that multilingual settings might either lead to conflicts between ethnic groups or to reconciliation between them. Ignoring social rules, individuals join other communities, moving up and down the class ladder. Such mésalliances result in complex genealogical trees out of which a hybrid culture emerges. Through allegorical transfer, the author signals the possibility of reconciliation between different conflicted communities.

A research on Turkisms by croatian writer Ivan Mažuranić in his work “The Death of Ismail Chengic Agha”

Osmanlı-Hırvat ilişkileri, XV. yüzyılın sonlarına doğru başlamış; Kanunî Sultan Süleyman’ın Orta Avrupa içlerine ilerlediği yıllarda bugünkü Hırvatistan topraklarının büyük kısmı fethedilmiştir. Fethedilen bu topraklar, II. Viyana Kuşatmasından sonra ve 1699 Karlofça Antlaşmasıyla Venedik Devleti’ne bırakılmıştır. Böylelikle Türkler bugünkü Hırvatistan topraklarından çekilmiştir. Hırvatistan’da XVI. yüzyılda başlayan ve XIV. yüzyılda biten Osmanlı hâkimiyeti, Hırvatları siyasi, askerî, kültürel ve edebiyat gibi alanlarda etkilemiştir. Bu etkinin görüldüğü eserlerden biri de ünlü Hırvat yazar ve siyasetçi İvan Mažuranić’in yazdığı İsmail Çengiç Ağa’nın Ölümü (Smrt Smail-Age Čengića) adlı eserdir. Hırvatistan’ın en önemli epik ve genel olarak en olgun eserlerinden biri sayılan eser, beş bölüm üzerine tanzim edilmiş ve toplam 1134 mısradan oluşmaktadır. Söz konusu eser, yapma destan özelliği taşımaktadır. Eserin konusunu Karadağ’ın meşhur Türk (Osmanlı) Hersek Paşası İsmail Çengiç Ağa ile Grahovo kasabası yakınlarındaki Karadağ halkı arasında geçen küçük çaplı muharebe oluşturmaktadır. Bu eser, Hırvatistan’da ortaöğretimde zorunlu olarak okutulmakta olduğu için neredeyse tüm Hırvatlar tarafından bilinmektedir. Doküman analizi tekniğinin kullanıldığı bir nitel araştırma olan bu çalışmada eserde geçen Türkçe kelimeler (Türkizmler) tespit edilmiş, Türkizmlerin semantik ve morfolojik analizleri yapılmıştır. Ayrıca bu Türkizmlerin Zagreb Üniversitesi Felsefe Fakültesi Türkoloji Bölümünde okuyan öğrencilerce bilinip bilinmediği araştırılmıştır. Türkizmlerin güncel Hırvatçadaaki varlığını inceleyen bu çalışmanın Balkanlarda Türkçenin etkisi üzerine yapılan çalışmalara katkı sunacağı değerlendirilmektedir.

Representation and positioning of post-socialist identities in Jurica Pavičić’s short stories

Abstract: The contemporary Croatian writer Jurica Pavičić deals with different aspects of the Croatian transitional society through the representation and positioning of post-socialist identities. Some of his characters experience a tragic fate because they are unable to fit into the post-socialist and post-war reality, some deliberately opt for the outcast position completely convinced of the rightness of their ways, whereas some accept the illusion of transitional prosperity. They are all connected by their deep-seated solitude and exposure to the anomalies of the transitional society while they attempt to self-actualise within a culturally specific Dalmatian region where they live. In this paper, we have focused on the presentation and positioning of post-socialist identities in Jurica Pavičić’s short stories The Buried Dog , The Guardian Angel and Two Tenors .

PARADOKSI KNjIŽEVNE NACIONALNOSTI: SLUČAJ BRAĆE DIZDAR

This paper defines the term of literary nationality and explains its function in Serbian literary history and bibliography. It presents challenges in its application on the examples of literary and journalistic works of Hamid and Mak Dizdar, born brothers, of whom the first one was known as Serbian and the second one as Croatian author. Our research has shown that Hamid Dizdar started his literary and journalistic career as an author of Serbian nationality: he wrote in Serbian language, worked in papers with strong pro-Serbian political orientation and even entered polemics due to such choices. However, during World War II, when Sarajevo became an important center of the Independent State of Croatia, he declared himself as Croatian writer of Muslim religion and took part in fascist propaganda. There are also a few testimonies of his cooperation with both partisans and chetniks. In communist Yugoslavia, he declared himself as Serbian once more and was entrusted important task of running the newly established Historical archive in Sarajevo. His archival works inclined to Bosnian integralism. In the case of Mak Dizdar, works from the last five years of his life, from the book of poetry Stone Sleeper to the controversial “Marginalia about and around the language“, have been singled out as crucial in defining his literary nationality. It has been shown that only after the essay of Muhamed Filipović “Bosnian spirit in literature, what is that?“, in which Stone Sleeper was attributed as a milestone in the awakening of “Bosnian consciousness“, political views of Mak Dizdar had been radicalized, but only in his public engagement, not in his literary works. The outcome of this research is awareness that the Yugoslav period can be adequately described in national literary histories and bibliographies only by applying the term of literary nationality.

MUSEUMFICATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: EVERYDAY LIFE AS A SPACE OF MEMORY OF A BYGONE AGE

The article is dedicated to the artistic and philosophical reflection on the everyday life of the communist era in the novel «The Museum of Unconditional Surrender» («Muzej bezuvjetne predaje», 1996) by Dubravka Ugrešić.The main attention is paid to the museumfication of elements of everyday life of the former Eastern bloc countries (SFRY, USSR in particular), i.e. transformation of material traces of the communist past into museum exhibits.After the fall of communist regimes in the Eastern bloc countries, and the disappearance of some of these states from the world map, entire layers of garbage and material remnants, including utilitarian objects accompanying the bygone everyday life, have remained. As long as the communist era has gone, the traces of its everyday life have acquired new meanings, associated with memory and nostalgia. These meanings define a new hypostasis of everyday objects: their hypostasis as museum exhibits.A world-famous Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić witnessed the formation and the breakup of Yugoslavia. In the novel«The Museum of Unconditional Surrender», written during her voluntary exile in Berlin, she depicts the museumfication of communist everyday life, revealing its new, metaphysical sense.The artistic world of the novel is organized within the metaphor of museum, which is emblematic for the postmodern philosophical and aethetical paradigm. The main action takes place in Berlin. Being a shelter for countless refugees and emigrants form the former socialist states, this city is seen as a total museum. Its dwellers repeatedly refer to themselves as to «walking museum exhibits». Thus, not only things, but also people get museumficated as remnants of a bygone era.The Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of the German Armed Forces, which gave the title to the novel, stands as a symbol of repressive mechanisms of the collective memory, promoting the coherent ideological metanarrative of the official history. Dubravka Ugrešić is aimed to deconstruct the museum as an ideological body, depicting some alternative storages of memory in the novel.First, it is the so-called «home museum» – a private collection of disordered photos and everyday things from the past. Besides, there are Berlin landfills and flea markets where things and people from the disappeared countries are found together. These alternative «museums» accumulate the uncoherent, subjective, heterogenic memory of the past. Such memory opposes the coherent metanarrative of a classic public museum.Looking through the different aspects of collective memory materialized in everyday objects, the article analyzes the relation between garbage and cultural memory, trivial objects and art, as well as the writer’s conception of museum.

Диалогът Гундрум – Вазов. Издателски (ре)конструкции

About Ivan Vazov everything seems to have been researched, written and published. Among the many literary criticisms devoted to his life and work, as well as documentary publications, the relationships with his translators and foreign publishers, to whom I believe we have a cultural and moral duty, are very rarely mentioned. However, the correspondence between him and the Croat Fran Gundrum-Oriovac stands out among all. No one else has translated as many of Vazov's works as this Croatian writer. Unfortunately, the acquaintance with Fran Gundrum's archive is indirect, but I would venture to focus on his translation practice, the regulation of relations between the two, their long-term cooperation and the reception of Vazov's work in Croatia. The proposed interpretation of the “File” does not claim to exhaust the relationship between the two. Our task is based on the personal correspondence published in Volume 10 of the Bulletin of the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1961 between Dr. Fran Gundrum and Ivan Vazov – to try to reconstruct the translation and publishing strategies of Fran Gundrum.

Prostorske strukture v avtobiografskih delih jugoslovanskih pisateljic 20. in 30. let 20. stoletja

In the focus of the comparative study are four autobiographical works of Yugoslav female writers. The book Moja pota [My Way, 1933] by Marija Kmet (1891–1974) is written in Slovenian; Ein Mensch wird [By Myself] by Alma Karlin (1889–1950) was created in 1931 in German and published only in 2010 in the Slovenian translation Sama. The autobiogra- phical novel Kamen na cesti [A Stone on the Road, 1937] by the Croatian writer Marija Jurić Zagorka (1873–1957) and the autobiographical novel Moja prijateljica [My Friend, 1920] by the Slovenian author Zofka Kveder (1878–1926) are also explored.The study of autobiographical texts inevitably turns to the so-called extratextual real- ity, to writers’ biographies. The lives of these four authors born in Austria–Hungary were different. The German-speaking Slovene Alma Karlin became a traveller around the world. The first female professional Slovenian writer Zofka Kveder worked as a magazine editor, lived in different cities, wrote in three languages (Slovenian, Croatian, and German). The Slovene Maria Kmet worked as a teacher all her life. Maria Jurić Zagorka was the most widely read writer of her time in the Croatian lands and became the first Croatian female journalist. At the same time, their autobiographical experience reflected in the texts reveals much in common. The writers often changed their place of residence. The subject of the research is the spatial structures of four texts.In autobiographical works, there are specific spatiotemporal relations: the history of the formation of personality (the biographical time) is often connected with the expansion of space. First, an autobiographical character perceives only the space of a room (for ex- ample, a nursery), then the whole house. He or she makes various trips; often in the auto- biographies the spaces of educational institutions are described. As the characters mature, spaces expand and multiply.The autobiographical mode of narration of the four works under consideration deter- mined the spatial structures of texts, in which an individual–collective dichotomy is pre- sent. With the uniqueness of each human biography, all life paths reveal similar stages, which were reflected in the category of space. On the one hand, in many autobiographies, there are the so-called locus communis (the space of one’s home, the school, places for children’s games and walks, and a workplace). On the other hand, the geography of move- ments across different spaces is always unique.The similarity of some spatial motifs in the texts by Kmet, Karlin, Kveder, and Za- gorka can be explained by genre topics and general historical events (World War I, the collapse of Austria–Hungary) as well as the gender specificity of the texts (a big city gives a woman at the beginning of the 20th century the possibilities of self-realization, expands her social sphere but at the same time it is a dangerous space for her, full of temptations).

COMRADE-ESS GIRL:1SUNČANA ŠKRINJARIĆ’S AUTOBIOGRAPHICALTRILOGY AS COMING OF AGE IN BETWEEN THE FEMINIST WAVES

This essay analysestheautobiographical trilogy authored by a Croatian writer mostly known for her children’s stories,Sunčana Škrinjarić (1931-2004). The trilogy consists of the novels Ulica predaka [The Ancestor’s Lane], Ispit zrelosti [The Matriculation Exam], and Bijele strijele[White Arrows],published between 1980 and 2004. I interpret them as feminist Bildungsroman, a genre present both in the West and in the East, trackingthe heroine’s venture from the private into public sphere,while downplaying the importance romance and marriage had in the classic, male-centric version ofthe form. Followinganarrative analysis, I discuss Škrinjarić’s portrayal of aesthetic norms and cultural production and outline possibilities of resistance through reading and writing. The third section of the essay engages with the history of Yugoslav feminism and situates Škrinjarić withinarecently revised timeline of women’s activism that emphasizes the continuity between thegovernment-supported project of women’s emancipation and second-wave feminism. By combining textual analysis with wider cultural context,I have found thatŠkrinjarić’s still widely obscure trilogy offers valuable insights intothe formation of female identities and possible plots in which we encounter said identities

The Arabic-Turkish Fragments of the Croatian Latinist Writer Bartul Đurđević in the Polish Anti-Tatar Book Alfurkan Tatarski by Piotr Czyżewski (Wilno, 1616/1617)

The article focuses on the small Oriental texts published in Piotr Czyżewski’s Polish anti-Muslim pamphlet Alfurkan tatarski (Wilno, 1616/1617) directed against the local Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. These texts consist of a small Arabic-Turkish prayer and the well-known Ottoman prophecy about “The Red Apple” and the expected victory of Christians over the Turks. The author argues that they go back to the Latin-language editions of the Croatian writer Bartul Đurđević/Bartolomej Georgijević (c. 1506 – c. 1566), who, after his return from a long Ottoman captivity, published several books on the Turkish subjects that were translated into many national European languages and disseminated in different editions throughout Western and Central Europe. These editions often contained samples of Ottoman texts accompanied by a parallel Latin translation and Latin-language interpretations of them, as well as small bilingual dictionaries, thus introducing Islam and the Turkish language to Europe. The article demonstrates the widespread prevalence of both Oriental texts (the Arabic-Turkish prayer and the Ottoman prophecy) in the European printed tradition and the presence of interest in them in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, evidenced by a manuscript copy of the Ottoman prophecy (late 17th century) and the Polish translation of both texts published in 1548 and 1615.

Żydzi z Šabaca. Reprezentacja literacka i praktyki pamięci

Srpski grad Šabac zauzima vrlo važno mesto u memorijalnom diskursu o Holokaustu. Taj grad je postao utočište srednjoevropskih Jevreja (oko 1 000 osoba) koji su uoči Drugog svetskog rata nelegalno krenuli preko Dunava prema Crnom moru, i dalje prema Palestini (takozvani transport Kladovo). Selo Zasavica, koje se nalazi nedaleko od Šapca, stratište je ovdašnjih i srednjoevropskih Jevreja koji su bili primorani da se zaustave u Jugoslaviji (krajem 1939.). U radu se analizira stradanje Jevreja u Šapcu i njihovo mesto u srpskom ali i širem (postjugoslovenskom) kulturnom pamćenju. U tom cilju se analizira fragment romana Belladonna hrvatske spisateljice Daše Drndić, kao i delatnost zvaničnih i nezvaničnih institucija koje stavljaju sebi zadatak da se povrati i potkrepi sećanje o sudbini Jevreja iz Šapca.

Alla ricerca del popolo perduto. Un tentativo di (de)costruzione del mito della Sacerdotessa della luna

In this paper will be analyzed a close relationship between Priestess of the Moon , a novel by Croatian writer Milena Benini (1966-2020), and the Platonic myth of Atlantis, in light of the power exercised by archaic civilization. This work, as well as the author’s entire production, belongs to the genre that in Slavic cultures is called fantastika , an all-encompassing formula for fantasy, science fiction and horror, although in this regard Benini prefers the label of “speculative fiction”. Benini wrote the first draft of this novel in the early 1990s, in English, and started publishing it on her blog. She published the English version in 2013 and the Croatian ( Svecenica mjeseca ) in 2014. The story, that takes place in an indefinite time and clearly draws on the classical age, is the first act of a trilogy dedicated to a strong-willed woman, the young priestess Kalaide Reolis Kharaonda, endowed with superhuman powers that allow her to communicate with the goddess Matrielen. Kalaide comes into contact with Enaor, whose figure reflects various sources of inspiration: the Illyrian world, the civilization of ancient Greece, the Slavic tradition. Benini is aware of the timelessness of the myth and avoids giving the story and the characters a precise chronological position; she laid the foundations for a wide range of possibilities, prefiguring an open and epic narration, with the evolutionary profile suggested in the foreground by time and space.