Two Worlds
The hero of Vjenceslav Novak’s Two Worlds (Dva svijeta, 1901), Amadej Zlatanić (the Croatian Mozart!), having been left early without parents, finds parental care and support in the local chaplain, Jan Jahoda (a Czech, of course). Jahoda discovers the boy’s remarkable musical talent and seeks a scholarship for him through the local authorities, so that Zlatanić can attend the Prague conservatory.
“Among the smaller peoples — and that means you, Croats — such natural talents are often lost both out of poverty and the lack of understanding by those who should be seeing to their education.” The local authorities turn down Jahoda’s request (“Pane Jahoda, our children are not made for such things. We leave this to you Czechs.”)
When Jahoda dies, Amadej sells his parental home for a pittance and goes to Prague, where he passes the entrance exam and enrolls at the conservatory. Amadej graduates from the conservatory with success, and his composition, entitled “Adelka” (the name of the girl waiting for him at home), is performed at the final student recital. With glowing reviews in the Prague papers and his diploma in his pocket, Amadej returns home full of hope and plans. He is given a modest salary as the local chaplain and marries Adelka. He sends his composition “Adelka” to Zagreb, but its performance receives bad reviews (“A homework assignment, in which the mostly familiar motifs have been reworked”). Amadej plunges into despair, his only solace being the appearance of Irma Leschetizky, the wife of a man involved in a future railway line (see, here are Austro-Hungarian railway lines and foreign women full of understanding!). Amadej spends more and more time with Irma. When Irma leaves, Adelka falls seriously ill. Amadej realizes he has been unfair to Adelka, the one person who is truly dedicated to him.
With the intention of relegating to “the shadows all arrogant talents” in town, the authorities introduce Rakovčić, a tambura player. Rakovčić’s tamburitza ensemble is far more draw for everyone than Amadej’s classical music.
“Mr. Z. played a Chopin piece on the piano which did not warm up the audience. Perhaps this does for the cold north, but in the warm south everything is more lush and heartfelt, even the music.”
Amadej loses his job, and it is given to Rakovčić the tambura player. Faced with poverty, Amadej gives private lessons. Irma Leschetizky speaks for Amadej in Berlin musical circles. Amadej is made an offer to sell his compositions to a Berlin publisher, but he must relinquish the copyright. Amadej refuses, but when Adelka’s health worsens, he sells his compositions to the Berlin publisher after all (“I go around the world, nameless, hence no one can see me.”) Adelka dies, Amadej loses his bearings, the local authorities lock him up in an asylum, and he soon dies.
Vjenceslav Novak develops a similar theme once more, but this time from the perspective of a theory, popular at the time, of heredity. In the novel Tito Dorčić (1906) he describes the sad fate of a fisherman’s son. Though all the people in Tito Dorčić’s family are fishermen, his father compels the boy to pursue a different path in life. He dispatches him to school in Vienna (again Vienna!), where Tito fritters away his days, utterly disinterested in his surroundings and the study of law. His father’s bribes propel him, somehow, through his studies, and he comes home and finds work as a local judge. The job does not interest him. His father’s efforts are finally undone when Tito, out of lack of ability and carelessness, condemns an innocent man to die. Dorčić goes mad and drowns in the sea, returning to where he belongs.
We can add here that the time of mass suicides in Europe came a decade or so later, inspired by the Great Depression and Rezső Seress’s hit “Szomoru Vasarnap.” As the story goes, Seress managed to infect not only Central Europeans but Americans with a Central European melancholy. Supposedly people threw themselves off of the Brooklyn Bridge after listening to Seress’s doleful hit in New York.
Another Suicide
Milutin Cihlar Nehajev’s novel Escape (Bijeg, 1909) is thought by Croatian critics to be the finest novel of Croatian Modernism. Đuro Andrijašević, the protagonist, throws away two years spent studying law in Vienna (Vienna again!); he returns to Zagreb, where he enrolls at the faculty and passes all the exams. All he has left to do is his doctoral dissertation. His uncle, who has been sending him monthly financial support, dies without leaving Đuro the anticipated inheritance. Andrijašević is engaged to Vera Hrabarova, but he fears he will lose her because of his unexpected financial woes. The history of Andrijašević’s fall begins the moment he finds a job as a teacher in a secondary school in Senj. Andrijašević finds everything in the small costal town boring and strange.
“It’s not that the people are bad, they are not repulsive. But they are empty, so horribly empty. And the same — one is like the next. They have nearly identical habits, they even drink the same number of glasses of beer.”
Andrijašević is not interested in the school and finds it difficult to write his dissertation. After waiting patiently for several years, Vera leaves him and becomes engaged to someone else. Andrijašević falls further and further into debt, spends all his time drinking and quarreling with a growing number of people, and is ultimately fired. In his last letter, which he sends to his one remaining friend, he hints at suicide.
“The only thing I feel is: I must put an end to this. I should escape altogether — flee from this life, so sickening, so disgraceful. . Surely you can see that I have always fled from life and people. I’ve never resisted — I have stepped aside. And when I came in contact with the life of our people, a life in poverty and straightened circumstances, I fled. I fled from myself, not wanting to see how I was plummeting; drinking, awaiting the end.”
Andrijašević, who “carries the tragedy of himself and others,” ends his life just as his literary predecessor Tito Dorčić did, drowning one night in the sea.
Upon hearing these brief statistics, a naïve reader might conclude that Croats in the late 19th and early twentieth century used the sea for nothing but drowning. Fortunately, tourism developed in the meanwhile, which has truly vindicated the deaths of these fictional victims and reversed the destructive opposition of metropolis — province, at least during the summer months, to the benefit of the provinces. This, of course, happened in reality, not in literature.
The novels The Return of Philip Latinowicz (Povratak Filipa Latinovicza, 1932) and On the Edge of Reason (Na rubu pameti, 1937) by Miroslav Krleža are the literary crown of the Croatian Kakanian literary dynasty. The central figure of Philip Latinowicz repeats the trajectory of his predecessors: he is a painter, forty years old, who returns to his native region, Pannonia, from Paris after having spent twenty-three years abroad. The hero of On the Edge of Reason describes how he is gradually being destroyed by Zagreb’s bourgeois environment, just as his literary predecessors were. Krleža’s novels can be read in all the Kakanian, and many other, languages, and this availability is the only reason why these lines about him amount to little more than a footnote. Miroslav Krleža de-provincialized Croatian literature, imposing exacting literary standards. These standards were rarely later attained by Krleža’s literary progeny, which is one of the answers to the question of why the canonical Krleža is still a despised writer in Croatia today. In an ideal literary republic, all other Croatian writers, including those mentioned above, would be nothing but a footnote — to Miroslav Krleža.