Kodni sistem Slovenska knjizevnost Avtorji Urednistvo <-> bralci |
Jezik in slovstvo Povzetki |
Jezik in slovstvo Kazalo Kazalo letnika |
Andrej Surla
Minilo je sedemdeset let od izida Jarceve zbirke Clovek in noc
Seventy Years After the Publication of Miran Jarc's Collection Man and the Night
Slovenski sinopsis
English synopsis
English summary
In the vast body of Jarc's poetry, prose, dramas, texts on literature and critical texts, the central place indisputably goes to the poetry. The three collections of poems represent the three stages of Jarc's poetic, and above all philosophical development.
Man and the Night is his first collection, cotaining his 1917 - 1925 lyrical poems. He published it by himself at Easter in 1927, i.e. at a time when, with the prevailing preference for New Reality, he had already publicly renounced expressionism.
The increasing maturity of the poems throughout the collection is supported by the author's increasingly articulate view of poetry. He demands of the poet to be unrelentlessly self-critical: the poet should only speak out when »he feels the need and internal justification for it«; the expression should be formally economical, free of decorative wordiness, focused on the central message. The target of Jarc's direct attacks was especially the fashionable sonnetism.
In his text on Izidor Cankar's novel S poti, the 19-year old poet developed his own typology of writers. He divided them into »individualists« (Byron, Verlaine, Ivan Cankar) and »classicists« (the Parnassians, Flaubert, Izidor Cankar): the art of the former is pervaded by an insatiable yearning to solve the eternal conflict with reality, while the latter managed to put an intellectual distance between themselves and this tragic inner turmoil. Jarc views his own art as an endeavour to reach the point of understanding. And its basis, as he wrote in a private letter as early as 1919, is »symbolism« and »the theory of relativity« (the reality around us is a reflection of a higher reality, while the power of knowing is always only relative).
Responses to Man and the Night reflect the various models of the Slovene literary criticism of the 1920s and 1930s. The Catholic circle saw in Jarc a God-seeking man, but they differed in their judgements on the free form of this poetry (France Vodnik did interpret it as a conscious, period-appropriate objection to any form of art for art's sake). The Liberal Mirko Pretnar recognised in it a stamp of the infinite night encompassing the contemporary time, from which the poet did not seek to escape into religious feelings, but persisted in a stubborn individual confrontation with it. Josip Vidmar had doubts about how genuine Jarc's cosmic fear was, perceiving it as too naive and sought-after. Ten years later, Ivo Brncic offered a sociological interpretation of the collection as an organic poetic expression of the social anarchy of the 1920s.