Julije Benešić i njegovi kritičari. Prilog kritičkoj bibliografiji
Julije Benešić and His Critics: a Contribution to a Critical Bibliography

Author(s): Tea Rogić Musa
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Croatian Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Julije Benešić; Croatian literary criticism; interwar period; Croatian-Polish literary connections; literary reception
Summary/Abstract: Based on the extensive research of subject catalogs about people from the interwar period (in the Miroslav Krleža Lexicographic Institute and the National and University Library in Zagreb), this paper presents a selection from criticism of the works and public activities of Julije Benešić before the First World War and in the interwar period. A double contribution is expected from the work: primarily the reception of Benešić’s work in the native culture, which was fraught with controversies and contradictions in the interwar period, and a contribution to the analysis of Croatian interwar criticism, both literary and theatrical and directly ideological, as extremely heterogeneous and in later literary-historical treatment unevenly commented and evaluated corpus of texts. The methodological assumptions follow the principles established by Stanko Lasić in his approach to the analysis of the reception of Benešić’s companion, Miroslav Krleža − the analysis of critical reception differs from the analysis of a literary text in the narrower sense and has specific limitations, which, first of all, arise from the fact that a huge body of material must be examined and studied (by looking at the individual units, we decided that this analysis should be limited to selected contributions). First, the explication of the material implies an overview of the material and its conscientious description; secondly, Benešić’s biography is not the goal but the starting point of this work; thirdly, a valid approach, which implies a density of bibliographic units with a logical selection, requires a high level of information about the topic in order to approach the material critically; and finally, it is necessary to know the circumstances and protagonists of the interwar literary and public life in detail in order to contextualize the articles in the periodical. In a series of contributions that, from today’s point of view, give credible testimony about Benešić, all of them are nevertheless witnesses of time and convincing evidence that understanding temporality is an essential step in literary-historical work. Stepping into the theory of the history of literature, we start from the deduction that an explicative synthesis is preceded by a careful insight into the material, from which, however, it is necessary to keep a distance to finally offer a literary-historical conclusion. Since there already exists in recent times in Croatian and Polish culture a series of articles and debates that establish a solid diachrony of the reception of literature about Benešić (therefore not his works directly), a return to early criticism and echo in contemporary times when Benešić was in the middle of his most active years, we keep with a permanently relevant approach in the research of a personality that, with its public and literary biography, is a metonymy of the literary life not only of Croatia but also of the Central European interwar period.

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