Cultural crisis and impossilitiy of elevation in Miroslav Krleža's drama Kraljevo and Anton Strašimirov's novel Horo Cover Image

KULTURNA KRIZA I NEMOGUĆNOST ELEVACIJE U DRAMI KRALJEVO MIROSLAVA KRLEŽE I ROMANU KOLO ANTONA STRAŠIMIROVA
Cultural crisis and impossilitiy of elevation in Miroslav Krleža's drama Kraljevo and Anton Strašimirov's novel Horo

Author(s): Marijana Bijelić
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Институт за македонска литература
Keywords: cultural crisis; national crisis; Dionysian ecstasy; dance; elevation; femininity; Other; death

Summary/Abstract: In the work we deal with the problematic transposition of Nietzschean concepts of dance, elevation and historical memory in the works written by two authors from different national traditions: Kraljevo written by the Croatian author Miroslav Krleža, and Horo written by the Bulgarian author Anton Strašimirov. In both works the authors deal with problems of a specific cultural and national crisis. Horo is a grotesque representation of the historical events connected with the September Uprising which, as a civil war, represents a crisis of the stable national identity. The disintegration of the national unity results in the distortion of the linear temporal continuity incarnated in the image of a family genealogy, followed by the loss of the fundamental precondition for a stable ethical system - memory. Kraljevo also deals with a specific historical and national crisis in the middle of the World War I. In both works, the dance ends not with an elevation, but with a declination. Such scenes represent a symbolic return to the mother earth. In both works the sign of the women and femininity as a cultural Other is connected to the representation of the mortality of men and a false promise of its overcoming

  • Issue Year: 8/2010
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 1-11
  • Page Count: 11
  • Language: Croatian