Central Europe as a place of culture/destiny (on the example of Chakavian poetry of Drago Gervais)
Central Europe as a place of culture/destiny (on the example of Chakavian poetry of Drago Gervais)

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the life and creative work of the Croatian writer Drago Gervais (Opatija 1904 – Sežana 1957) from the aspect of a complex relationship between writing history and writing literature in Central Europe. This is the area comprising Istria and the Croatian Littoral which, being an area of unstable geopolitical entity, faced numerous colonisations. Such colonial dynamics wrote its history, neglecting the voices of those who lived there. Experiencing all the horrors of the exile, Gervais articulated its entire complexity in a literary and artistic way. The author created a poetics which served him to thematise his own exile offering itself as a specific traumatic experience expressed in great nostalgia and then in melancholia. By creating his authentic poetic expression, he became a (Chakavian) anthological poet and an unrepeatable witness of the trauma of exile as one of the most complex conditions of a human being.

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