Podgorje u pripovjednomu modelu Vjenceslava Novaka
Podgorje in the narrative model of Vjenceslav Novak

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the methods of literary articulation of Podgorje in the narrative prose of Vjenceslav Novak (Pavao Šegota, Pod Nehajem, Posljednji Stipančići, Tito Dorčić, Dva svijeta). Podgorje was not noted as an idealised home region on the edge of the Austrian Empire, but was transformed into a poetic tool of the questioning of the personal and collective identity of the participants of this region, whose marginal position is also considered as a consequence of the conflicting and non-existent parts of Croatian individuality. A move in the analysis of the place of the story from the centre to the edge, as well as the transitions between the semantic fields of the metropolis and the provinces, make up a narrative creation with which Novak enriches his realist poetics, depicting the dimensions of political and class transitions in the separated,tucked away Croatian place, a subject outside of central European literary production. With his fictional configuration of the area, Novak aligns the division at the centre and periphery resulting from the distribution of the political and economic powers of 19th century Europe, as well as a valuable dividing line. Doubts about the affiliation of the original landscape make up a narrative structure of a European realist novel at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. The narrative topography of Vjenceslav Novak extends the Croatian environment to the landscape of a smaller littoral town and the Podvelebit coast whose original extensibility and diversity add meanings developed from the tension in the interpretation of the relationship of a centre and a province. Novak’s narrative excursions about the features of Podgorje are interwoven with the common references of the geopolitical idea of a European province, which are distributed over this peripheral area.

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