Košnice
Beehives

Author(s): Ružica Aščić
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature, Croatian Literature, Drama
Published by: Durieux
Keywords: melancholy; hopelessness; passivity; family play; inertness; empty lives;
Summary/Abstract: The dramatic trilogy Beehives by the award-winning author Ružica Aščić places in the centre of each play one family with their key problems. The protagonists want more from their life than just passively going with the flow, but their endeavours face the opposition of their community that pushes their desires in the area of unacceptable. Because of the circumstances the characters become apathetic, and too weak to change their situation. The atmosphere of emptiness and hopelessness, realised through apparently empty dialogues, emanates strongly from the texts, and wraps the reader like cobweb. The plays show a reverse gradation of the lack of willpower, and weakness, beginning with the first one, where the desire is clearly articulated but hits the wall repeatedly. In the second play, there is no desire anymore, just the sense of impossibility of realising any closeness. The third play is dominated by the general prohibition of love and humaneness. Ružica Aščić creates Antonioni-like atmosphere of desert where one has difficulty with finding a landmark, not to mention an oasis. Ružica Aščić was born in 1987. She published the short story collection The Good Days of Violence (2016). For the plays It Grows Inside of Me and Beehives she won the »Marin Držić« Award. She has published short stories in numerous Croatian magazines and one of them was included in the anthology Without Doors, Without Knocking: New Croatian Writers of Fiction.

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