CROATIAN LITERATURE

the literature of the Croats, a South Slavic people of the Balkans, speaking the Serbo-Croatian language. Extant ecclesiastical works survive from the 11th century, and by the second half of the 15th century there was a Croatian literature of biblical stories, legends, folklore, and popular stories. In the 15th and 16th centuries the outstanding Old Croatian writers were Marko Marulic, author of the epic Judita (1501), a plea for the national struggle against the Turks; Hanibal Lucic, author of Robinja (The Slave Girl), the first South Slav secular play; and Marin Drzic, who wrote pastoral dramas and comedies portraying Renaissance Dubrovnik (his comedy Dundo Maroje, written about 1551, was performed throughout western Europe). In the 17th and 18th centuries, the leading voice belonged to Ivan Gundulic, author of a stirring epic, Osman, describing the Polish victory over the Turks in 1621. Romanticism in Croatian literature evolved out of the Illyrian political movement (183548), which aimed at a union of all South Slavs within the Habsburg federation. Ljudevit Gaj introduced the tokavski dialect and ijekavski speech as the literary language of Croatia and also a unified orthography. Personal, patriotic, and reflective lyrics were popular and were best represented by the sensitive, moving poems of Stanko Vraz and Ivan Mazuranic, the patriotic songs and poetic drama of Petar Preradovic, and the dramatic works of Dimitrije Demeter. Another major figure, in the late 19th century, was August enoa, poet, dramatist, critic, journalist, and creator of the Croat historical novel of realism. Conditions among the lower classes became a concern of many Croat writers of the period, including Evgenij Kumicic, Ksaver andor Gjalski, and Silvije Strahimir Kranjcevic. In the opening years of the 20th century, poetry was the dominant genre, much of it influenced by the Aestheticism movement and concerned with the inner struggles of modern man with his world and the search for meaning in individual existence. These themes are found particularly in the work of Vladimir Vidric and Vladimir Nazor. The leading figure of the early Modernist phase until World War I was Antun Gustav Mato. He edited the anthology Mlada hrvatska lirika (1914; The Young Croatian Lyric), which marked the zenith of such verse. Between the wars, avant-garde poetry continued to be expressed in the verse of such poets as Augustin Ujevic, while Ivan Goran Kovacic in Jama (1943; The Pit), a long poem evoking the horror of war, retained a classical elegance in his verse. The short story was represented by the work of Slavko Kolar, who humorously depicted the life of the peasant in a changing world. The dominant prose writers of the interwar period were August Cesarec and Miroslav Krleza (Povratak Filipa Latinovicza [1932; The Return of Philip Latinovicz]; and the collection of English translations The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall and Other Stories ). Both presented contemporary social problems as the result of class exploitation and deeply explored the psychology of their characters. Krleza is known not only for his imaginative writing, which spanned the century to his death in 1981, but also as an editor of literary periodicals, as an essayist, and as a critic who dominated Croatian cultural life for much of the century. In the less restrictive atmosphere that followed Yugoslavia's break with the Stalinist Soviet Union in 1948, new prose writers included Ranko Marinkovic and Vjekoslav Kaleb (Divota praine [1954; Glorious Dust]), who wrote on the war and contemporary society in Croatia. The younger prose writer Antun oljan took more cosmopolitan themes for his work, as did the poet Ivan Slamnig of the same generation. Later Croatian literature became even more cosmopolitan and Western in the choice of themes, as in the feminist writing of Dubravka Ugreic.