Tadijanovićeva poetizacija ratnoga djetinjstva
Tadijanović’s Poetisation of War Childhood

Summary/Abstract: The paper analyses the poems of the cycle The Days of Childhood by Dragutin Tadijanović, separately published in 1937. In the vivid evocation of childhood, the infant voice of the lyrical subject can be discerned, but also his adult voice, who dresses his existential cognitions into children’s language. The analysis of the paper follows the motives of peasant daily life, shaped from the children’s perspective, and then the boy’s awareness of the poverty of some peers and social inequality, already present from school age. The cycle ends with poems that mention wounded people, the departure of the boy’s father to war, and the boy’s letter to his father on the battlefield. Three main tones, most often intertwined, shape Tadijanović’s poems about childhood: idyllic-humorous, naive-religious, and social. People and natural phenomena are depicted in motion, and the situation to which a particular poem is dedicated is expressed in medias res. The lyrical subject speaks in the present tense, using many elliptical, interrogative and exclamatory sentences, so his memories seem to have been drawn to synchrony. The adult lyrical subject distances himself from the former self and explains his poetic return to childhood through opposing children’s serenity to war, killing and death.

• Details
• Contents