Antun Gustav Matoš (June 13,
1873 - March 17, 1914) was a Croatian
poet, short story writer,
journalist, essayist and travelogue writer. He is considered
the champion of
Croatian
modernist literature, opening
Croatia to the currents of
European
modernism, and one of the greatest Croatian literary figures of all
time.
Life
Matoš was
born in Tovarnik
in the
region of Syrmia
, today in
the Croatian Vukovar-Syrmia
County
. When he was two years old, his parents moved
to Zagreb
, where he
went to primary and secondary school. His attempt to study
at the Military Veterinary College in Vienna
ended in
failure. He was conscripted in 1893, but he deserted
in 1894, fleeing from Croatia to Šabac
and then to
Belgrade
. He
spent the next three years in Belgrade, living in his own words as
a "
cello player, journalist, and man of
letters".
In January 1898 he traveled to Vienna and Munich
, stayed for
a while in Geneva
, and then
moved to Paris
in 1899,
where he would stay for five years. During his stay in
Paris, he wrote his greatest stories. In 1904 he returned to
Belgrade, visiting Zagreb in secret (as he was still a deserter) in
1905, 1906 and 1907. Finally, in 1908, after thirteen years abroad,
he was pardoned. He finally settled in Zagreb, where he died of
throat cancer. He wrote two dozen
published or unpublished works: poems, short stories, articles,
travelogues, criticisms and disputes.
Writing
Matoš is the central figure of Croatian
modernism (
moderna), a radical
change in
Croatian literature
under European influences, as it quickly absorbed contemporary
tendencies and styles such as
symbolism,
modernism or
impressionism, relying on French literary
heritage from
Baudelaire to
Mallarmé,
Barres and
Huysmans. Estheticism and artistic norms
became the primary value criterion. National and social activism,
which used to be virtually the only measuring stick, became only a
part of a wider mission of Croatian writers. After Matoš, the
writers were not expected to create art for
propaganda purposes (except during
communism).
He entered into Croatian literature in 1892 with a short story
called
Moć savjesti (The Power of Conscience). Its
publication is considered the start of Croatian
moderna. He wrote down his
thoughts on literary creation and role models on several occasions.
As for short story writers, I have the greatest affection for
Poe's genius and the superior,
concise precision of Merimée
and the natural feel of Maupassant's satire, he told his
friend
Milan Ogrizović in a
letter.
Fiction
His
short stories are usually divided
into two groups, based primarily on his themes, but also his
techniques, methods and styles:
- realistic stories taking place in local
settings of Zagreb and Zagorje
and with
characters taken from real life,
- bizarre tales with weird, individualist characters.
Both groups share a strong lyrical note and love plots. They were
created in parallel, at the same time, which indicates that it was
no "evolution" of Matoš as a storyteller, but that he strove to use
different subjects for his "studies in style", as he described
them.
Many elements of his stories with Croatian themes, such as the
social problems of his time, spilled into his cycle of
grotesque fantasies. That cycle, however, mainly
explores the themes of mysterious love, death and nocturnal states
and phenomena. For that purpose, Matoš reduced the plot, deeply
analyzed the individual destinies of his heroes, removed
superficial and anecdotal elements, and introduced implausible
events and bizarre characters. Such tales push psychological
motives to the forefront, while the social element becomes
secondary. Because of all this, the grotesque tales abandoned the
regional and national for the
cosmopolitan.
In his
travelogue, Matoš was one
of the greatest Croatian innovators.
Landscape, not as a part of a tale, but as an
independent subject, was introduced by Matoš to the Croatian
literature under the influence of Barres. His landscapes are not
external images, but active settings in which the author moves. In
fact, their purpose is not only to evoke feelings, but also to
develop associations that lead to thoughts about wildly different
issues. Such clearly
impressionist
strategy, which uses the landscape for emotional excitement that
spills over to all kinds of topics, is a typical feature of almost
all the prose works of Matoš. He wrote many exceptional travelogues
where the landscape is the only subject, the most famous being
Oko Lobora (Around Lobor).
Poetry
While he wrote and published short stories, travelogues, criticisms
and articles over his entire career, Matoš started seriously
writing and publishing
poetry in his late
period, around 1906, and wrote only around 80
poems. There can be no doubt that his great mentor was
Baudelaire, since he took many
formal elements from the great poet and wrote enthusiastically
about Baudelaire on several occasions.
The style of his poetry is marked by the predilection for the
sonnet form, the gift for the musical
qualities of verses, the harmony of words, colors and smells
(
synesthetic metaphor), a very refined
rhythm, and the mix of talking and singing
intonation.
His main poetic themes in the early phase are
love and
flower, as he merges the abstract quality of love with the
concrete poetic symbol of flowers. Another recurrent theme is
death, which suffuses his poems with an
elegiac quality, an intense feeling of transience and
passing, a merging of dreams and reality, with stifled colors and
sounds, and the experience of love as pain. His best love poems are
Samotna ljubav (Lonely Love),
Djevojčici mjesto
igračke (To a Child Instead of a Toy),
Utjeha kose
(Comfort of Hair).
He wrote some of the best landscape poetry in Croatian literature,
reflecting his emotional states in poetic landscapes of
Jesenje
veče (Autumn Evening) or
Notturno. On the other hand,
he also used poems to express his
patriotic feelings.
In his best patriotic
poems – Stara pjesma (Old Song), 1909 and
Iseljenik (Immigrant) – the poet, who returned to his
homeland in 1908, shows his disappointment with the Croats under
Hungarian
oppression.
Criticism
Matoš left a deep impression on the literary genres of
criticism,
essay and
newspaper article. While using a strong
impressionist approach to the works of
Croatian (
Kranjčević,
Vidrić,
Domjanić,
Kamov) and Serbian writers (
Sremac,
Veselinović, Pandurović), Matoš often
stated his own artistic beliefs in his articles. Since he believed
art meant beauty, he considered the intensity of poet's expression
or the individual writer's style as the main criterion for the
valuation of literature. For this reason, he made no difference
between genres: fiction, poetry and criticism are all just art,
which should primarily reflect the individual character of the
artist and their ability for original expression. Still, despite
such general criteria, he never neglected the national element when
analyzing Croatian writers.
Works
Poems: collected poetry
(posthumous)
Short stories
- Iverje (Fragments, 1899)
- Novo iverje (New Fragments, 1900)
- Umorne priče (Tired Tales,1909)
Essays
- Ogledi (Essays, 1905)
- Vidici i putovi (Horizons and Roads, 1907)
- Naši ljudi i krajevi (Our People and Lands, 1910)
References
External links
Wikis
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