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This paper focuses on the prosodic properties of disyllabic, that is to say, feminine rhymes in Serbian poetry. On the basis of a quantitatively analyzed poetic database, which includes eight poets, four from the Romantic and four from the Post-Romantic period, we have identified word stress as a highly relevant prosodic property. The investigation of its role in creating rhyming pairs resulted in a classification of feminine rhymes into three types: resonant, semi-resonant, and non-resonant. This classification is based on the presence or absence of stress in the domain of rhyme, which begins with the rightmost strong metrical position in a line, followed by a weak final syllable. In resonant rhymes both lines that form a rhyming pair contain stress in their domains, in semi-resonant rhymes only one of the lines contains stress, while in non-resonant rhymes, stress is absent from both. The role of stress is demarcative: it signals the beginning of the domain of rhyme, thereby considerably promoting its effectiveness. The most effective are resonant rhymes, with demarcated domains in both lines, next in effectiveness are semi-resonant rhymes, with demarcation in only one of the lines, while non-resonant rhymes, which lack demarcation, are the least effective. Based on this classification, clear differences can be established not only among individual poets, but also among poetic eras. Moreover, the classification of feminine rhymes into resonant, semi-resonant and non-resonant allows for a detailed insight into their lexical composition, that is, into the prosodic profiles of words that constitute them.
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The subject of this research is the Serbian folk wedding song (in the range of variants) recorded on the fieldwork in the region near the Beli Timok river (southeast Serbia), together with Vesna Đukić in 1997 and 1998. The song was documented in the village of Koželj from Anka Cvetković and Dragica Ivković. The song is simple in con¬tent, but it has complex semantic and functional implications. It used to be sung around the ceremonial table (sofra), when girls decorate the main wedding ritual bread (sobornik). It speaks of the tasks that boys and girls do at some point (picking flowers and cutting a tree), then about the death of two young people who do not manage to fulfill the task – the girl is bitten by a snake and the boy cuts himself by an axe. In the continuation of the song victims are taken to the church, where they are buried, and trees later grow on their graves, a pine on the boy’s grave and a fir on the girl’s grave. Finally, the pine talks to the fir asking her to grow so their roots could meet and their tops could intertwine, which brings the closure to the motif variants of the folk songs about a boy and a girl who finally unite after death. The entire content of the song fits the complex of ceremonies connected to obstructed initiation that ends as a sacrifice, which the paper clearly indicates. Therefore, the content of this song which was performed around the ritual bread and ceremonial table was a warning to all those who participated in the wedding.
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Through a short review of Vojislav Ilić’s dithyrambic poetry, the paper tries to draw special attention to his most successful poem in this genre – A Little Gypsy. This poem at the linguistic-stylistic level and at the level of the creative process corresponds to a number of other poems previously written, and the paper seeks to clarify certain linguistic, compositional and semantic inscrutabilities with a comparative approach, as well as to point out the biographical conditionality of such Vojislav’s solutions, primarily the one which is contained in the (forbidden) love for Mileva Jakšić.
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The paper discusses and comments on Živko Milićević’s negative review of the manuscript Hronika moje varoši (Chronicle of my town) by Momčilo Nastasijević, sub¬mitted to the Serbian Literary Association in 1931. The review was submitted without a date so the year when it was written was determined later. It is kept in the Archive of the Serbian Literary Association. It is a testimony not only to a revolutionary time ripe with poetic differences, but also speaks a lot about the people involved, about literary squabbles and generally about the cultural circumstances in the undoubtedly vivid period between the two world wars. The history of this interesting case in our publishing is part of the history of our literature and our cultural history in general. The Chronicle of my town was first structured in an unusual way and then published in a roundabout way, later becoming part of our literary canon. The process started with a negative review and consequently a refusal of publication, which was followed by the author’s bitter reaction that went unnoticed. Then came a crushing text written by one of the greatest authorities of that time and present day as well, but it all ended with the manuscript being published posthumously. This was followed by reprints, numerous selections of authors and an¬thologies, two editions of collected works (one of them a critical edition) and introduction to the curricula of schools and universities. This process of canonization lasted for almost six decades since the moment discussed in this paper. Years and decades later literary and cultural public was the one that made a final verdict in the conflict described here. Although Nastasijević was always a kind of an exclusive author with a narrow audience, the Chronicle of my town became an unavoidable title of Serbian avant-garde prose and Serbian literature in general.
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The paper presents the results of a research of the meaning of floral and faunal motifs in Miloš Crnjanski’s Migrations (1929). The nature world in his work has so far been analyzed in the light of folklore tradition and the relation between Sumatraism and the myth. The aim of the paper is to address the issue in its entirety, to produce a full-length motif typology and try to find an answer to the ultimate question of its meaning. The Apollonian and the Dionysian principle are conditioned by nature, so in this novel, Crnjanski has revived tragedy in the Nietzschean sense.
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Die Gedichtsammlung Istočnice von Ljubomir Simović fördert die Formen der Tradition, die sich nach Symbolik und aktivierten Werten von den in der serbischen Kultur vorherrschenden Formen unterscheiden. Istočnice ergeben diesen Unterschied auf axiologisch-ideologischer und auf archetypisch-anthropologischer Ebene. Im ersten Fall geht es darum, universelle humanistische Werte im Gegensatz zum ideologisch gefärbten Bild der neueren nationalen Geschichte zu vertreten, und im zweiten, die Darstellungen des mythisch-weiblichen Prinzips zu aktivieren, die unterscheiden sich von Darstellungen des patriarchalisch-epischen Prinzips, das in der serbischen literarischen und kulturellen Tradition am stärksten betont wird. In der Interpretation einiger Gedichte aus Istočnice und anderen Sammlungen von Simović wird gezeigt, dass das Streben nach der Bestätigung einer anderen Tradition eine der Konstanten seiner poetischen Welt ist.
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A product of Albahari’s close adherence to the poetics of postmodernism, the use of metafiction in Description of Death simultaneously draws and blurs the line between reality and fiction, never concretely discerning the two, but rather questioning both their singular natures and those same natures in relation to each other. The story Description of the death of Ruben Rubenović, former fabric merchant serves as a prime example of linguistic metafiction, wherein the autoreflective instances focused on the powerlessnes of language staunchly represent the view of language as a purely fabricated entity, completely void of the ability to derail the eponymous death. The stories Essay and Cinema both utilize several levels of fictionality. The autoreflective, metafictional instances serve as implications that the plot that they are ruminating about is wholehartedly fictitious. However, by incorporating several film characters that are without a doubt presented as fabrications, Albahari forms a whole new level of fiction – one that is fictitious in relation to the non-film characters. At the same time, by placing himself – Albahari the writer – in the position of a character easily discernable from that of Daniel the writer, Albahari’s texts become complicated in the sense that there is now present a whole new layer of the duality of reality and fiction – one that is as close to real life as the film characters are to pure fiction. In doing so, Albahari creates a sort of hierarchy of reality and fiction, in which the film characters represent the purest form of fiction, owing to the fact that the characters of the stories acknowledge them as such. Next, the characters themselves – although real from the point of view of the film characters – become fictitious in relation to Daniel, who reveals himself as the author of the stories in which he serves as the protagonist. Finally, Albahari himself forms the highest, least fictional level of the hierarchy, denoting Daniel as a fictional character from his own view. The entire duality of reality and fiction is therefore relativized: depending on the point of view, most parts of the hierarchy can be viewed both as real and fictional, proving Albahari’s ability not only to meticulously follow the postmodern poetic, but to question it as well, ironically making him all the closer to the paradigm of the postmodern writer.
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(Slavica Garonja Radovanac. Anthology of Serbian Lyrical Folk Poetry of Krajina. Novi Sad: Native Association "Sava Mrkalj", 2020, 445 pages)
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(Miloš Crnjanski. Romantic anarchist of the 20th century. Collection of works with international scientific conference held on April 12, 2019 at the University "Etves Lorand" in Budapest. editor Dragan Jakovljević, Budapest: Department of Serbian Language and Literature, Department of Slavic Philology Faculty of Philosophy, Etvès Lorand University, 2019, 113 pages)
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Rosanna Morabito. L’ultima meta. L’isola (Island) by Meša Selimović. Edizioni dell’Orso. Alessandria, 2020 (Collana di studi slavi Slavica))
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Veselin Čajkanović dedicated a quarter-century, between 1921 and his death in 1946, to reconstructing the pre-Christian religion of the Serbs. From the very outset, he paid particular attention to the special significance of the wolf in the Serbian folk tradition, eventually coming to the conclusion that the supreme god of the Serbs goes back to their mythical ancestor, imagined initially in a theriomorphic, wolfish form. Such a totemic manistic approach is nowadays hardly convincing. Čajkanović failed to notice the essential fact determining the position of the wolf in the traditional worldview, present since the origins of humankind. The wolves are perceived by humans collectively, as they are highly social animals with a strong hierarchy and determined roles within their packs. This predestined them not only to be domesticated under the name of dogs as early as the paleolithic age, long before any other animal species but also to serve as a model for human behaviour, at first in collaborative hunting and later also in war. Among the Indo-European peoples, the wolfish behaviour used to be imitated by the adolescents passing the rites of the warrior initiation. Their yearslong training ended sometimes with a whole generation of these young “wolf warriors” being expelled from the community in order to find themselves elsewhere a new home and rape wives – which was, inter alia, the pattern of the early Greek colonization and of the Italic ver sacrum – or to scout foreign countries as the first step towards a large-scale migration. A memory of the warrior’s bands of this kind, behaving wolfishly and disguising themselves as wolves, survives in the European folklore as the werewolves, i.e. lycanthropes, whom Čajkanović (as well as many others) erroneously identified with vampires, i.e. the walking dead, whereas they were originally living humans temporarily transformed into wolves. The epic figure of a prince-sorcerer endowed with lycanthropic traits can be traced back to the Common Slavic past, primarily based on the comparison of the Vseslav of Polotsk, Volh Vseslavjevič of the Russian byliny, with the Despot Vuk Grgurević, ZmajOgnjeni Vuk (‘Wolf the Fiery Dragon’) of Serbian heroic songs, but also the popular legend of Saint Sava, the patron saint of Serbia, who seems to have assumed some themes and motifs originally connected with this pagan type of hero, which inspired Čajkanović to put forward the hypothesis that among the Serbs a wolf became a Christian substitute for their pagan supreme god.
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Veselin Čajkanović’s The Dictionary of Serbian Folk Beliefs About Plants is one of the most exhaustive and systematic works dedicated to Serbian folklore and beliefs concerning the magical and healing properties of plants. In addition to Serbian ethnobotanical concepts, Čajkanović also included folk notions about diseases which relate to the folk religion, and especially to the demonological concepts of the traditional Serbian culture. His posthumously published study served as the basis for much subsequent ethnological research of ethnomedical notions in Serbia. In this paper, we read Čajkanović’s book as a comprehensive source of ethnographic data presented in the Dictionary, in order to a gain deeper understanding of the ways in which Serbian people perceived, defined, assorted and classified plants, turning their ecological environment into a resource for physical survival and sociocultural subsistence of the collective. The traditional Serbian rural communities lived in close contact with nature, and the ability to identify and associate similar species, to distinguish them from other species, and to communicate that knowledge to future generations, was crucially important for their sustentation. Our task in this paper will be to develop a mental model of the nature in traditional Serbian culture, as well as its inherent set of elementary principles by which the plant world was perceived and utilized in the context of the traditional Serbian village. Following this line, we will additionally try to demonstrate how Čajkanović’s rich and decades-old ethnobotanical material can be reinterpreted by adopting the more recent methodological frameworks of structural and cognitive anthropology.
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