Unorthodox Experience of Faith in Ivan V. Lalić’s and Miodrag Pavlović’s Poetry: A Comparative Study
Unorthodox Experience of Faith in Ivan V. Lalić’s and Miodrag Pavlović’s Poetry: A Comparative Study

Author(s): Magdalena Maszkiewicz
Subject(s): Cultural history, Theology and Religion, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: postsecular studies in literature; Serbian poetry; Lalić; Pavlović; unorthodox; experience
Summary/Abstract: The paper aims to present two models of unorthodox Christianity related religious experience in the poetry of two twentieth-century Serbian authors: Ivan V. Lalić (1931–1996) and Miodrag Pavlović (1928–2014). In their works, both poets reflect on the existential situation of contemporary humans by reinterpreting cultural texts from antiquity to modern times. This paper is a comparative analysis of their poems that refer to Christian texts, including the Bible as well as Byzantine and Orthodox literature. In Lalić’s poetry, especially in the books The letter/The writing (Pismo, 1992) and The four canons (Četiri kanona, 1996), God is presented as capricious and unpredictable, yet silent and mostly absent. The lyrical subject feels doubt, enhanced by the experience of death and evanescence; nevertheless, love inspires him to constantly search for a relationship with God. However, the effort of faith seems to have only one direction and depends exclusively on the subject’s will. Pavlović plays an ironic game in his works with Christian texts of culture, especially in the book The bright and the dark holidays (Svetli i tamni praznici, 1971), in which the sacred constantly mixes with the profane. The rebellious and blasphemous approach to Christian texts that is represented by the lyrical subject is not a mere negation of the traditional idea of holiness. Most of all, it can be understood as an attempt not only to overcome classical oppositions in thinking about the world and humanity, among which there is a dichotomy between the immanent and the transcendent, but it is also an attempt to rearrange the whole of reality. In poems by Lalić and Pavlović, modern consciousness is in throes with the experience of transcendence.

• Details
• Contents