Prosaic as Poetic: Stylistic Characteristics of Matko Peić’s Travelogues

Preliminary communication

Abstract

Matko Peić presented his travels through Egypt, Israel, China, India, Japan, the Philippines, most of Europe and the whole of Croatia in several travelogues
– Skitnje (Strolls, 1965), Jesen u Poljskoj (Autumn in Poland, 1969), Crno zlato (Black Gold, 1974), Ljubav na putu. Od Drave do Jadrana (Love on the Road. From Drava to the Adriatic, 1984) and Evropske skitnje (European Strolls, 1985) – which earned him the status of one of the best Croatian stylists. Peić’s travelogue style is characterised by a refined synthesis of empiricism, emotion and expression, with which he layers the seemingly prosaic reality of life. In the poetic approach to the latter, three dominant stylistic features can be identified: a) the so-called masculine style of writing, presented by the use of augmentatives, the recording of brutal actions, the vigour and eroticism of style, sexualised metaphors, the parallelism of instinctive impulses of the animal world and intense erotic human pleasures, and a blend of aggressiveness, irony, directness of expression and undisputed tone; b) poetics of the descriptive, which is expressed through concise picturesqueness and picturesque lapidary of expression, synesthetic evocations, musical and painterly weft of texts and baroque-rococo characteristics of writing; c) perceptive focus, i.e., the ability to present in a naturalistically faithful manner a certain reality of life revealed in characteristic details and at the same time to perceive it in its totality, as well as to discover in everything observed a possible deeper, potentially symbolic meaning of objects, beings, animals and phenomena.