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Surrealism and the Effects of Literature: the »Somnambular« Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh
Marina Protrka Štimec
Sažetak
Krleža’s iconoclasm in relation to historical and political, particularly national, myths
is most frequently recognised as a fundamental effect and defining feature of his literary
work. In The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh (1936), this effect is further intensified through
the voice of the vagabond, adventurer, and trickster Petrica Kerempuh. This Eulenspiegellike hero of European literature embodies the Dionysian transformative force of life that resists historically contingent hegemonic restrictions and injustices. Critical reception has identified its political potential carried by this figure and the referential Rabelaisian and Brueghelian grotesque from which it emerges. Some scholars (e.g. Malić, Wierzbicky), however, situate the Ballads within the context of avant-garde transformations of artistic expression, particularly surrealism, expressionism, and the literary work of Bertolt Brecht. In this context, and bearing in mind the implications of recent debates on the avantgarde, this paper points to the political and social effect of the Ballads as arising primarily from the formal features of the text, and only secondarily from its content or thematic elaboration. Surreal juxtapositions, somnambular visions, and the fundamental reduction of linguistic means – exemplified in poems such as Somnambulists and The Cow on the Walnut Tree – direct the text towards the foundations of linguistic expression. Their political dimension thus manifests itself through an effort to articulate the very possibility of language, or, as Alain Badiou emphasises, language itself as that which is communal, »given to all without exception«.
Ključne riječi
Miroslav Krleža; The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh; surrealism; avantgarde; politics of literature
Hrčak ID:
347193
URI
Datum izdavanja:
6.5.2026.
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