Josip Matasović (1892.-1962.) – pravaški uskrisitelj ranonovovjekovne hrvatske kulture
JOSIP MATASOVIĆ (1892-1962) – A PARTY OF RIGHT RESURRECTOR OF EARLY MODERN CROATIAN CULTURE

Summary/Abstract: The publication of cultural historian Josip Matasović’s, Iz galantnog stoljeća (“From the Gallant Century”), in 1921 signified a turning point in Croatian historiography because the life of the early modern Croatian upper nobility was considered from the point of view of cultural, rather than political history. Matasović called on “the history of the small and detailed,” still referred to at the time as the “history of the everyday,” the purpose of which was the reconstruction of the private life and practice of people in the past. The book’s text first appeared under the same title in a series of eight feuilletons in 1920 in the weekly Novi ilustrovani Dom i svijet, it was then expanded and published a year later, on the 250 anniversary of the execution of Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan in Wiener Neustadt. The author believes that the book Iz galantnog stoljeća was only part of a larger synthetic project conceived by Matasović which was to be entitled Kultura XVIII stoljeća u Hrvatskoj (“The Culture of the 18th Century in Croatia”), the concept of which was discovered in the personal papers of Josip Matasović housed in the Croatian State Archive in Zagreb. Unlike other titles up to that time which had divided the historical periods according to political events, Matasović used the term “gallant period” in histitle to refer to the cultural concept of "gallantry" to signify "civilized social encounter" which characterized the epoch stretching from the second half of the 17th to the mid 18th century. According to Matasoviæ, the "hyper-cultural" Zrinski and Frankopan families, who nourished close contact with the French culture of the time, played a key role in the cultural transfer of "gallant" social patterns. Since Matasović's interpretation is teeming with the vocabulary of the political and social discourse of his day (e.g. anticlericalism, feminism, monarchism, absolutism, Germanization), the author considered it appropriate to analyze the cultivation of a "cult of Zrinski and Frankopan" in the period after the First World War, which was characterized by the pompous removal of the remains of the Croatian "martyrs" and other symbols from Wiener Neustadt to a crypt in the Zagreb Cathedral in 1919. The Rightist historical view, that is, Starčević's idea of an "ominous" Austria bent on transforming the Croat people into a rough implement in the hands of the Habsburgs, was clearly visible in the former Young Croat Matasović's writings. Further on, an analysis follows of Matasović's concept of cultural history and culture which is defined as an "overcoming of nature;" that cultural development is measured by the degree of humanity's rule over nature. Culture consisted of the sum total of humanity's activity in economy and technology, science and art, social norms and practices - all the things which characterize a people as "cultural, and thus also "historical". Matasović's notion of "culture" sooner or later becomes

• Details
• Contents