Original scientific paper
ECHOES OF THE 1918 ACT OF UNION IN DRAMATIC WORKS AND IN THE THEATRE
Ivan J. Bošković
Abstract
Literature also made a contribution to the act of union of the Yugoslav peoples into one state in 1918. Alongside a multitude of works celebrating the occasion, there was a large number of dramatic works and theatre performances based on them. The largest number of these was inspired by folk songs, especially those deriving from the Serbian national tradition and its mythology. In inheriting the tradition of the folk song many of the mentioned authors (Vojnović, Bartulović, Korolija, Dimović) saw a manner of creating a Yugoslav drama, according to the measure of the Yugoslav race and its (Vidovdan) po-et(h)ics. Alongside an emphatic unifying "Yugoslav nationalistic conception", which the author seeks to show in the article, the largest number of dramatic works are characterized by a pompous rhetoric, declaratoriness, pathos and a transparent tendency shrouded in an unconvincing symbolic guise. In the process the criteria of the theatre act and the possibilities of the stage were forgotten so that many of the plays that were then performed have disappeared. With the termination of ideological reasons which had put them on the stage in the first place the need for them had also disappeared so that todayt hey are mentioned only in rare surveys of dramatic literature and of the theatre, chiefly as facts in the private biographies of their authors. Today, with the exception of Vojnović who built his reputation as a significant dramatist on wholly different premises, they have been wholly forgotten.
Keywords
folk songs; ideological reasons; Piemontism; pompous rhetoric; pathos; transparent tendency; unifying passions; Yugoslav drama
Hrčak ID:
19240
URI
Publication date:
11.1.2008.
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