IVANA BRLIĆ-MAŽURANIĆ, PRIČE IZ DAVNINE: NEW CONSTRUCTION OF THE SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

Abstract

Based on new archive research that resulted in finding the author’s script titled These notes are taken out of Afanasjev, «Vozzrenija drevnih Slavjan» and Tkany «Mithologie der alten Teutschen und Slaven». Those crossed out I used in some of the stories, the paper revises and completes earlier notions and forms new ones about the sources of mythological motives in the work of I. Brlić-Mažuranić, primarily those used in Priče iz davnine. In the said script, the author explicitly specified the sources of mythological and oral literature she had studied, she noted down characters and motives and sometimes she analysed or taxonomised them with occasional references to the full title of the source and page number. The next note, which, apart from Afanasjev, who has been considered until recently as the main and practically the only source of her mythological themes), also points to the works and studies of A. Tkany, P. J. Šafařik, I. Kukuljević Sakcinski and M. K. Valjavec, attempts to confirm the source of a particular motif in said texts but also to reconstruct the potential course of taking over and/or transformation. So, the discovered script may be interpreted as a sort of a code for the reconstruction of the genesis of Priče iz davnine and some other author's texts. This not only widens, but also changes the theses that have been presented so far about the depth and intensity of relations between the literary work by this author and Slavic mythology, pointing to a series of new sources that the author knew and used, but also sheds a completely new light on her, especially in terms of her research and scholarly orientation. So, her widely known literary profile is accompanied by another, analogue, research and scholarly profile based both on meticulous study of literature on mythology and oral literature, and on the collecting and research work in collaboration with her father Vladimir Mažuranić preparing his Legal and Historical Dictionary.