Images of Impossible, Poetics of Revolutionary: Vladimir Nazor’s Partisan Poems and Imagination of Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Revolution II: The Politics of Narratives and Images of Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle: Past for Future

Abstract

The paper will analyze Partizan Poems (Pjesme partizanke) by Croatian poet Vladimir Nazor, published in 1944 and written during Nazor’s participation in Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle during World War II. Nazor’s Partizan Poems will be contextualized in art and culture reflecting Yugoslav People’s Liberation Struggle which was a constant from the very beginning of the struggle to the very end of the county’s dissolution in various genres and forms. What makes this book of poems special in that context is the poetic reflection of immediate experience in writer’s participation in People’s Liberation Struggle which resulted in specific poetic images, politics and affections connected to it. As stressed out in new approaches on partisan art and culture (Močnik, 2016; Kirn, 2016), especially in new readings of partisan poetry done by Miklavž Komelj (2009), partisan art holds an important poetical and political quality of the impossible on what I rely in retracing poetical imagery of Nazor’s book. The paper will be dominantly focused on discussing quality of poetic language and images of struggle, resistance and unity with the political effect of hope and strength. Analysis will retrace such poetic imagery, showing how quality of impossible is being sustained in between representative struggle of fascist violence and utopian antifascism which both had symbolic and concrete manifestation of the writer’s immediate present.

Author

• Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)