"U agoniji": zagrebačka građanska elita između održavanja tradicije i prihvaćanja novih obrazaca
"In Agony": Zagreb’s Civic Elite between Maintaining Tradition and Acceptance of New Forms

Author(s): Boris Senker
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Croatian Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Miroslav Krleža; Zagreb; Croatian drama; élite; Kingdom SHS
Summary/Abstract: Krleža’s prose-drama cycle, completed at the turn of the twenties and thirties of the last century, is a kind of “unfinished saga” in which the author, opening and only partially closing several narrative sequences, thematizes the changes in the personal and public life of members of the Croatian middle class, represented in the fictional world of the “agrammer patrician family” Glembay and people from their closest circle, caused by the collapse of the Central European Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and its traditional value system and the establishment of a South Slavic state, the Kingdom of SHS, with a different value system. In the central text of the cycle, the psychological drama In Agony, published and premiered in 1928 and expanded in 1958, which takes place in the first years of the interwar period, two male characters embody two possible existential choices: Baron and Colonel Lenbach, loyalty to the past and the defeated regime, persistence in tradition and, consequently, on maintaining the “form” that it prescribes, even at the cost of renouncing biological life, and the lawyer and politician Ivan Križovec who adapts to the present and the new regime, renounces the past and accepts changes and participates in the constitution of a new regime and a new system of values, even at the cost of renouncing one’s former identity and spiritual life. The central female character, Laura, Lenbach’s legal wife and general’s daughter, who is, at the same time, in a sentimental relationship with Križovec, proves the impossibility of “double loyalty” to the past and the present, the impossibility of continuing to live in a changed world while maintaining the system of values and identities shaped by tradition.

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