Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.31953/sz.47.1.5
LUCIFER’S/LUCIJA’S FEAR: ABOUT THE IMAGE OF GOD IN NOVAK'S NOVELPOSLJEDNJI STIPANČIĆI
Hrvoje Mesić
orcid.org/0000-0003-2252-2574
; The Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek
Abstract
Christian compassion, with which he defends the oppressed and humiliated, is the fundamental
feature of Vjenceslav Novak’s creativity. Namely, the then backwardness of Croatia, induced by
historical, economic, social and political circumstances, did not bypass the tragic destiny of the
young people. Novak’s native Senj felt this most of all, which the writer used by attempting to
present the life facts of his local environment as realistically and objectively as possible. Later,
KrešimirNemec points out, under the influence of schooling in Prague and life in Zagreb, Novak
turned to the urban experience, in other words, the problematizing of the dark sides of city life.
Therefore, Novak’s art is, according to Antun Barac, the greatest document of the heart, soul, of
compassion with a suffering humanity and all those layers that laboriously and hopelessly their
burden of life bears.
The then imagery of Senj, characterised by symbols of suffering, deception, poverty,
inhumanity, is an image of the state of women’s soul – Valpurga and LucijaStipančić – where
through the air tears only a scream and/or the bura wind, the sound of pain and the departure into
death, leaving a void and the rhetorical question: Did God leave them too?!
The motif of the face of mercy formed in Novak’s heroines of the novel Posljednji
Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs) is detected and thematised in the paper with an interdisciplinary,
primarily and most of all philosophical, approach. Like a mirror of the human heart and inner
self, the deepest identity and unique outline of a human being are reflected in the face. Novak,
who was raised as a Christian, depicted in his works the faces of the defeated and humiliated:
the poor, the beggars, the addicts, the destitute pupils and students and the homeless – seeing in
them the face of a hidden God who should be recognised.
Keywords
Vjenceslav Novak; Senj; Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs); the face of mercy; hidden God
Hrčak ID:
245892
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2020.
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