Pijana novembarska noć 1918. Miroslava Krleže: O raspadu Austro-Ugarske i nastanku Jugoslavije u književnosti
Miroslav Krleža’s A Drunken November Night 1918 (Pijana novembarska noć 1918) On the Disintegration of Austria-Hungary and the Emergence of Yugoslavia in the Literature

Summary/Abstract: In his autobiographical, slightly fictionalized writing A Drunken November Night 1918 (Pijana novembarska noć 1918, written in 1942, first published in 1952), Miroslav Krleža seeks to reconstruct a sensational scandal to whose outbreak he had made a significant contribution: In November 1918, in the interregnum from the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of October to the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the beginning of December, the young author considered himself compelled at a tea party held in Zagreb in honor of the Serbian officers to protest loudly against the speech of the former high Austrian-Hungarian officer Slavko Kvaternik. The public scandal in the immediate post-imperial era retrospectively confirmed Krleža’s conviction of the misery of the contemporary Croatian elite, a state whose reasons, in his opinion, lay not only in political opportunism and moral corruption, but also in an unreflective utopianism and an associated political naiveté. His hope that after the dissolution of the compromised k.u.k. regime the South Slavic peoples could advance to national, political and social emancipation is soon replaced by the sober insight that the large Habsburg Empire has been replaced by a small-scale post-imperial entity, likewise built on pronounced relations of dominance.

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