Serbian Modernism and Poetic Memory: Rastko Petrović’s Medieval Serbian Myths, the Trauma of World War One and European Aesthetic Forms

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel showcases research into the poetic and novelistic work of the Serbian Modernist writer, Rastko Petrović (1898-1947), who started his literary career as a 17-year-old school boy when he followed the retreat of the Serbian army over the Albanian mountains in 1915; he died in Washington DC as a refugee from post-war Communist Yugoslavia. Petrović introduced a new poetic style into Serbian literature which was Proustian in expression and Dostoevskian in psychological force. The first two papers of the panel will examine his poetic work Veliki drug, which is a foundational text for his future writing, as well as his poems dealing with Kososvo motifs (which could be collectively called Kosovski soneti 1917), using Serbian medieval cultural motifs in a Modernist stylization. The third paper will focus on a comparative analysis of Petrović’s poetic procédé in the war novel The Sixth Day (published posthumously in 1962) and the work of the Norwegian novelist, Knut Hamsun, whose novel Hunger (1890) also deals with the theme of the trauma of subjectivity and memory in a proto-Modernist style. The panel will also attempt to address how the public memory of the Albanian retreat played out during the interwar period and in Petrović’s interpretation of it, showing how his solution aligns with a Modernist approach to writing about war trauma and mourning.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Nada Petkovic, U of Chicago

Papers

• Early Poetry of Rastko Petrović in the Context of The Poetics Space of Gaston Bachelard - Milan Gromovic, U of Novi Sad (Serbia)

• Memory and Mourning in Rastko Petrović's Poetry - Dunja Dusanic, U of Belgrade (Serbia)

• The Poetics of Hunger as Trauma in The Sixth Day. - Slobodanka Millicent Vladiv-Glover, Monash U (Australia)

Discussant

• Nada Petkovic, U of Chicago