Наратив о Сави Шумановићу у роману „Лагум” Светлане Велмар-Јанковић
THE NARRATIVE OF SAVA ŠUMANOVIĆ IN LAGUM BY SVETLANA VELMAR-JANKOVIĆ

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the narrative of Sava Šumanović in by Svetlana Velmar-Janković’s novel Lagum, presenting it as one of the three principal narrative-essayistic currents through which the protagonist’s searches for lost time. Alongside the essayistic narratives concerning the emergence and disappearance of language, as well as those dedicated to the streets, architecture, and the past of Belgrade, this third narrative strand is linked to art, aesthetics, and the cultural ethos of pre-war civil society, whose cultural horizon is, among other things, reflected in refined sensibilities, including a cultivated appreciation for objects such as furniture in the Chippendale style. Departing from the novel’s documentary foundation and its interweaving with subjective experience, the paper shows that the narrative of the painter Sava Šumanović is grounded in the unity of historical knowledge and individual memory. The figure of Sava Šumanović, who was killed in the Ustaše genocide of Serbs in 1942 in the former NDH (the Independent State of Croatia – Nezavisna Država Hrvatska), is constructed as a mediating point between the artistic, psychological, and historical, within which his painting becomes a medium of inner recognition and self-understanding for the protagonist Milica Pavlović. Particular attention is devoted to the poetics of light and colour as a shared denominator of both painterly and literary expression, as well as to the motif of the painting At the Bathing Place (Na kupanju), which in the novel acquires the status of an internalised “flash” and a permanent psychic imprint, continuing to operate across multiple temporal layers of the protagonist’s experience. The analysis further addresses the exhibition scene of 1939 (from the chapter “Exhibition”) as a site of intersection between art, society, and ideology, within which the conflict between Sava Šumanović and Pavle Zec emerges as symptomatic of a broader historical collapse of the value system. The motifs analysed separately include Bathers (Kupačice) and Harvesters (Beračice). The latter, belonging to the painting cycle of Sava Šumanović, is, unlike Bathers, more implicitly present as an echo in the mind of the educated reader than in the narrative of the novel, pointing to its symbolic and religious potential, as well as to the possibility of interpretation in terms of sacrifice, light, and transformation. Finally, the concluding section shows that art in the novel does not persist as a material object, but rather as an internalised experience and a form of spiritual memory: the image endures insofar as it has become an integral part of the subject. In this sense, the figure of Sava Šumanović assumes the role of a paradigm of suffering and spiritual continuance, while the narrative itself becomes embedded within a broader “grand narrative” concerning the disappearance of a cultural world and the survival of its values.

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