Anonymous Primorac (pos. XVIII century)
The geniuses of the early Bokelians (Dominik Buća, Paskvalić, Bona, Marijan Bolica, Cizila), and the geniuses of the late ones, which is already the XNUMXth century, Antun Bizanti, Krušala, Vicko Zmajević, Balović, have something in common: they both wake up, like some kind of sea monster, at sea rather than on land.
The existentialist text appears in Boka only with a deeply private experience of life. It is born alongside a critical attitude towards the world. Critical culture - not a carnival element nor a one-sided oral rapture - gives birth to an existentialist germ: the tremor of our being and the consciousness that we tremble.
The textual expression of that consciousness is confirmed through a critical text. Just as a living man who loves, fears and rejoices in the poetry of Anonimo Primorc, a poet from the end of the XNUMXth century, feels himself first - on the waves of the blue sea - and only then everything else, so he, a living poet, whose heart beats for a living fiancee, feels his concrete essence (as is the case in private and critical textuality) and not an abstract, ethical distance.
The present is the only consolation in existentialist (private) textuality.
Dobrotski Anonim, whom Miloš Milošević and don Gracija Brajković call in their anthology Baroque Poetry (1976) The Unknown Sailor of Dobrot, this is how he feels about life - a flash in the storm. The man who saw death up close now sees love - direct existentialist shudder, privacy!
ŽASED, a collection of poetic transcriptions, an old-fashioned songbook, contains poems that I single out here under the signatures 295/t-296 and 29-29/t. The collection as a whole was discovered by the two of them within the framework of anonymity in the Baroque era. Along with the theoretical and editorial reflections of Radosav Medenica, Miroslav Pantić and Milorad Pavić, this selection of Brajković and Milošević, a literary gifted theologian and a theologically gifted polyhistor, is most deserving of joining anonymous authors to a common body of private and critical text in Boka of the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries, the body of baroque literacy on our Adriatic (Balkan) coast. The birth of existentialism, on the plan of the turn that Bok represents in our history (the retort of Byzantium and the West), I read as the emancipation of the Balkans. In our country, through the birth of private textuality (Dubrovnik, Vojvodina, Boka), dormant Europeanism thundered. Bokel's cultural thought went down well in the Slavic world because it was something new, an expansion of the local field of struggle, a spark of emancipation, as our
Anonymous Primorac:
I've been in the dark until now,
And now my sun is running out.
Critical energy touched the coast through privacy. This is how I understand Bokele's critical-private culture in the process of emancipation from the epic: on the level of ideas and private literacy. The birth of private textuality - (a critical and concrete experience against the forever finished and perfect epic world, despite that world) - is a pure paradox. That's why I think that the genius of Bokele was more of a wind than a thought - it blew from the mountainous hinterland, but stirred up the sea!
A new consolation
A sweet discovery of privacy (the ship sinks; - the sailors each mourn for someone; - the poet mourns himself; - at last he happily returns to his court; - his sweetheart is waiting for him there; - the poet knows his happiness), it. etc., represents, in fact, a subversion of the worn-out pattern of high and forever completed ethics and ethical perfection.
The revelation of a private and critical text is a revolutionary gesture. The author's text is a living nerve in the sea of the comforting present (in contrast to the distant and perfectly dead past). Literary becomes existential - I believe that existential textuality could touch the spirit of the backwater Venetian province first through anonymous poetry, not publicly but anonymously.
The private experience of a relativized world, despite epic eternity, untouchable perfection, corresponds to the new cultural climate and changes the ideology of eternity for a profane piece of comforting present.
Existential trembling - after long droughts of ideological radiation.
One such process - to turn my attention for a moment to recent Euro-American (that is, our common, generational!) history - was the Hippie movement. The hippies proved that it is possible to revive the Euro-Atlantic West in an instant. (And what else did the province of Boca, although with a strong Venetian wind in its sails, demonstrate at one time than that, despite everything, the East can be revolutionized not only in the confined space of a lagoon?!).
With the early Bokelj, I am convinced again and again that without the upheaval that literature must carry, there is no justification.
Is it possible for just six years to revolutionize powerful Western culture - yes: Between the years 1965 and 1971 something happened to make the world on one side of that divide all but unrecognizable to the world on the other side - says Barry Miles, one of the central figures of the Hippie movement, biographer of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. For better or for worse (it very much depends on whom you ask), those seven years revolutionized western - and eventually global - culture as utterly as any of the great turning points in our history. What happened were the Hippies.
(Cf. more details HIPPIE, Sterling Publishing, New York, 2003, back flap.)
Privacy and existence
Anonymous Primorac, a man already tested in a deeply profane (therefore significant) experience of the modern XNUMXth century, without hesitation changes the ideological legacy of consciousness and body, complete ideological stability, for a moment of survival in a storm at sea near the saving Malta:
Celebrate whatever day comes
Telling the heavenly powers,
When in Malta, for surgati,
We arrived before nightfall.
Anonymous does not know, nor will anyone in his century, until the early Soren Kierkegaard, what existentialism is. [(It will not take a long time to reach a compromise on what the cry called existentialism means (Yugoslavian encyclopedias, for example, define it sacrilegiously and scandalously: an idealistic philosophical and literary direction as a contemporary expression of civic ideological confusion).]
However, what Anonymous Primorac feels with his heart and being is that there is only one comfort - the present. The present in which he survives a shipwreck near Malta and returns alive and happy to his beloved in Boca:
Although this same night
He came from the sea to the court,
Set out at dawn
To secretly go to the court.
Boka - a literary step for the entire Slavic world.
The early Bokels took the chance to happily exchange the epic experience of the world (highly moral public life, but without privacy) for the life of a small man without ideology, but with deep privacy.
This province, grown into a classic, is the distance between the ideological epic on the one hand and the petty joy of life on the other. The step of the early Bokelje in the XNUMXth century. with the appearance of a private text (Marijan Bolica, Bernard and Jeronim Pima, the Skura brothers), spread in the XNUMXth century (Antun Zambela, Zanović, Nenadić) my smallness is considered a literary relevant gesture - behind Dubrovnik and even alongside the people of Dubrovnik - in terms of South Slavic literacy.
Existentialism is a man with a private experience of death. Love with a private experience of death.
This is how I would define the difference between the perfect but distant ideology of epic and ethics on the one hand and the imperfect but comforting earthly dramaturgy of small joys and sorrows on the other. I see this late Bokel, whom I call Anonymous Primorac, how he loves and how he dies, and that, for me, is existentialist literature.
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