LUCI(FEROV)JIN STRAH: O SLICI BOGA U NOVAKOVU ROMANU POSLJEDNJI STIPANČIĆI
LUCIFER’S / LUCIJA’S FEAR: ABOUT THE IMAGE OF GOD IN NOVAK'S NOVELPOSLJEDNJI STIPANČIĆI

Summary/Abstract: Christian compassion, with which he defends the oppressed and humiliated, is the fundamental feature of Vjenceslav Novak’s creativity. Namely, the then backwardness of Croatia, induced by historical, economic, social and political circumstances, did not bypass the tragic destiny of the young people. Novak’s native Senj felt this most of all, which the writer used by attempting to present the life facts of his local environment as realistically and objectively as possible. Later, KrešimirNemec points out, under the influence of schooling in Prague and life in Zagreb, Novak turned to the urban experience, in other words, the problematizing of the dark sides of city life. // Therefore, Novak’s art is, according to Antun Barac, the greatest document of the heart, soul, of compassion with a suffering humanity and all those layers that laboriously and hopelessly their burden of life bears. // The then imagery of Senj, characterised by symbols of suffering, deception, poverty, inhumanity, is an image of the state of women’s soul – Valpurga and LucijaStipančić – where through the air tears only a scream and/or the bura wind, the sound of pain and the departure into death, leaving a void and the rhetorical question: Did God leave them too?! The motif of the face of mercy formed in Novak’s heroines of the novel Posljednji Stipančići (The Last Stipančićs) is detected and thematised in the paper with an interdisciplinary, primarily and most of all philosophical, approach. Like a mirror of the human heart and inner self, the deepest identity and unique outline of a human being are reflected in the face. Novak, who was raised as a Christian, depicted in his works the faces of the defeated and humiliated: the poor, the beggars, the addicts, the destitute pupils and students and the homeless – seeing in them the face of a hidden God who should be recognised.

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