Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17234/Croatica.69.7
PIJERKO BONA AS A REFLECTION OF HIS TIME
Antun Pavešković
; Zagreb
Abstract
The Dubrovnik writer Pijerko Bona Luković (1788–1846), a playwright who wrote around thirty dramas in Croatian, 27 of which have been preserved, two dramas in Italian, and some prose and poetic "fragments", is classified by Kombol among the last offshoots of old Dubrovnik, together with several other Dubrovnik writers of that era. His dramatic work is thematically and methodologically based on the 18th-century literature, yet it also contains many elements of Romanticism, proto-Realism, Biedermeier atmosphere, and only recently has it been recognized that he was also one of the founders of the didactic folk play in the Shtokavian dialect. He sought models in the works of Molière, Goldoni, and Maggio, and it is also possible that Kotzebue’s dramaturgy influenced him indirectly. Gaj even offered him a position in Zagreb, something like a dramaturge or intendant of a national theatre that was yet to be established, seeing in him a link between the Dubrovnik tradition and the newly emerging national centre, where Bona, as a prominent cultural figure, was expected to play a significant role. The Dubrovnik writer did not accept this invitation, planning instead to establish a traveling theatre troupe focused on decidedly Enlightenment-themed plays and, according to his vision, educational purposes. Gaj and Babukić adapted his Dubrovnik idiom to the contemporary standard of the Zagreb school. Finding himself amid the historically chaotic events in a geopolitically fragmented national space, Pijerko Bona reached the threshold of the revival modernization and integration – but ultimately remained in front of it.
Keywords
literature; drama; folk theatre; Enlightenment; proto-Realism; history; geopolitics; tradition; national integration; modernization; periphery
Hrčak ID:
341284
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2025.
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