Moćan, Dora.
(2018).
Melancholy in the novels of Goce Smilevski (Coversation with Spinoza and Freud's Sister).
Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of South Slavic Languages and Literature.
[mentor Baković, Ivica].
Abstract
Melancholia and how it affected people changed throughout the history. In 5th century BC, it was considered as a disease caused by an excess of black bile. Shortly after, it was a state in which people succumbed who were under Saturn's impact which was then considered as the most godly of all planets.
After a while, many theoretics and psychoanalysts started offering their views and conclusions about this condition. Among the most recognized are Freud, Lacan and Julia Kristeva all of which observed how loss affects people and tried to understand which loss is so deep that instead of being experienced through grief, turns into melancholia.
Although melancholia is seen as a heavy and burdensome condition, it found its place in art: poems, novels and paintings and is often interpreted as sweet sorrow that is embraced in life of tortured artists. One of those who used melancholia as a motif in his novels is a macedonian writer Goce Smilevski who adressed melancholia through fictional lives of Baruch Spinoza and Adolfina Freud. He places non-fictional characters in historical time in which they actually belonged to, but he fills out empty pages of their lives with fictional situations as to commemorate those who weren't able to speak for themselves and whose stories were buried with time. In his novels, Smilevski inserts quotes from Kristeva's book Black Sun, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and interposes famous paintings such as Rembrant's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and Bellini's Madonna and Child and Crucifixion. This concept of placing other peoples quotes in his novel and referencing to other forms of arts, such as mentioned paintings, is called intertextuality which Smilevski inserts in all his books balancing successfully between fiction and reality.
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