Original scientific paper

Miroslav Krleža’s Statements on Ante Starčević

Davor Balić ; Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Croatia

Abstract

The opus of the polyhistor Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981) abounds in statements about the politician, philosopher and writer Ante Starčević
(1823–1896). Krleža expressed his knowledge of the contents of Starčević’s works and the characteristics of his political activity in essays,
diary entries, programmatic texts, speeches, lexicographical marginalia and conversations. Krleža most often addressed Starčević’s work Pisma Magjarolacah (The Letters of Hungarotirolians). In the “Tumač manje poznatih riječi, fraza i pojmova” (“Dictionary of Lesser-known Words, Phrases and Terms”) of the Balade Petrice Kerempuha (Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh) published in 1936, he emphasized that Starčević ironizes Strossmayer’s foundation of the Academy in that work, while in diary entries from 9th July 1942, he points out the peculiarity of Starčević’s stylistic expression
in that work, and around 1960, in lexicographical marginalia, he defines Starčević as a style combiner who also deals with fiction. In the essay published in 1947, titled “Prije trideset godina” (“Thirty Years Ago”), Krleža refers to Starčević’s work Na čemu smo (Where We Stand), recording that it contains far-reaching claims on Russian nihilists. Finally, in the speech on the characteristics of the Illyrian Movement he gave in 1966, Krleža
recalled the sentence from the beginning of Starčević’s work Nekolike uspomene (Some Reminiscences): „Reći da si Hervat, znamenova da si
Magjaron” (“To say you are a Croat, meant you were a Unionist”). When he contemplated Starčević, especially his political views and
their far-reaching nature, Krleža recorded his most impressive assessments in the “Predgovor Podravskim motivima Krste Hegedušića” (“Preface to the Podravina Motifs by Krsto Hegedušić”) published in 1933 and the Balade Petrice Kerempuha ( Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh) published
in 1936. In the “Predgovor Podravskim motivima Krste Hegedušića” (“Preface to the Podravina Motifs by Krsto Hegedušić”), he notes that
Starčević is “the most lucid of our minds” and that he is “the only temperament” that rose “to the prophetic power of linguistic expression”. In the Balade Petrice Kerempuha (Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh), he states that Starčević “never conformed with the conformists” and that he was
the „only light in a foggy night”. However, Krleža also made striking claims on Starčević during January 1934 in the draft of topics and contents for the issues of the Danas magazine, claiming that Starčević was “the conscience of his time”. Furthermore, in the programmatic text titled “Teze za jednu diskusiju iz godine 1935” (Theses for a Discussion from 1935”) published in 1953, one chapter was titled “Starčevićeve parole” (“Starčević’s Slogans”), while in the essay “Malograđanska historijska shema” (“The Historical Scheme of Petty Bourgeoisie”) from 1957, he claims that Starčević was the symbol of the „negation of Habsburg”. Therefore, there is no doubt that Krleža was well acquainted with Starčević’s literary and political opus. It can also be concluded that he understood and portrayed Starčević as an influential literary and speaker, as a political visionary and as the conscience of his time.

Keywords

Miroslav Krleža; Ante Starčević; literature; politics; philosophy of literature; philosophy of politics

Hrčak ID:

266365

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/266365

Publication date:

6.12.2021.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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