Nature and christian motifs in Đuro Sudeta's poems and in his novella „Mor“

Ivezić Talan, Melanija. (2019). Nature and christian motifs in Đuro Sudeta's poems and in his novella „Mor“. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Comparative Literature.
(PDS književnosti, izvedbenih umjetnosti, filma i kulture) [mentor Slavić, Dean].

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Abstract

This doctoral dissertation brings the analysis of nature and Christian motifs in Đuro Sudeta‘s poems and his novella Mor. The main thesis is that there is a connection and interdependence of the inner world of the subject and the outer world of nature in the corpus of texts, and it is examined from several angles: literary critical, theological, and psychological. The research was prompted by the scarcity of literary critical evaluations of Sudeta’s oeuvre, or, by the fact that, until now, no thorough analysis of his literary work has been done (there is only one collection of critical essays which has been published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth). The dissertation aims to define the conceptual and poetic background of the landscape in the texts. According to Amiel's saying that any landscape is a state of the soul, Sudeta’s topophilia is analyzed in connection with his Christian, especially Franciscan, view of the world. Sudeta is not a lonely literary figure in this regard. Croatian poetry from the beginning of the last century (Nikola Šop, Dragutin Domjanić, Vladimir Nazor, Ivo Horvat, and others) gives plentiful evidence of the strong popularity of St. Francis, as well as the affirmation of the Franciscan ideas in literature. From this perspective, the conceptual and motif parallelisms that are present in The Canticle of the Sun (Laudes Creaturarum) by St. Francis of Assisi and in the poems and the novella Mor by Đuro Sudeta are analyzed. The dissertation also analyzes the extent to which Modernist tendencies in the art of the early twentieth century influenced Sudeta’s writings. Through a selection of comparative readings, the author is powerfully associated with the lyrical landscapists of the Modern and Avant-garde Croatian literature (Antun Gustav Matoš, Vladimir Vidrić, Croatian young lyricists, Antun Branko Šimić). The dissertation begins with an overview of the previous critical essays on Sudeta’s oeuvre, both in Croatian literary criticism and in the context of the national literary historiography. Based on the insights into individual literary history concepts and methodologies, as well as the positioning of the author within selected histories and reviews of the national literature, the observations about the evaluation of Sudeta’s poetic oeuvre are made, and the detected features of his works are compared. In the following chapter, the main poetic guidelines are determined within the individual collections of poetry, which, in conclusion contributes to shaping the outline of the author's developmental path. The phonetic dimension of Sudeta’s poetry is also explored. The critical interpretation of the selected poems relies on Branko Vuletić's research. In the further text the symbolic meanings of Sudeta’s "intimacy spaces" (native landscape, a simple house and a mother) are examined. The theoretical backgrounds include Bachelard's phenomenological studies, that is, his philosophy of imaginative rest and quiet. This is followed with an analysis of the dominant compositional directions, as well as the marked dualism in the composition of Sudeta’s collections of poetry. In the second part of the dissertation, the multidimensionality, i.e. the poetic "density" of the novella Mor is explored. The generic, stylistic, and genre-specific crucial concepts of the text are defined. In addition to an overview of the motifs and structural processes characteristic of the impressionist poetic orientation, the influence of the avant-garde (expressionist) trends on Sudeta’s prose is analyzed. The results of the research (based on Staiger's study Basic Concepts of Poetics) indicate that the novella Mor pervadingly belongs to the lyrical style. It was also revealed that Sudeta's works demonstrate belonging to the contemporary literary trends, but, at the same time, present aberration from them, thus not entirely following any of the dominant stylistic formations of his time. We recognize this as one of the most important indicators of the unending relevance and value of this modest poetic oeuvre. The final part of the research deals with the comparison of the novella Mor and the selected poems in the thematic-motif layers of the texts. Pointing to the correlation of motifs in Sudeta’s oeuvre, the unity of the author's inspiration is emphasized. Hence, the foundation of the statements of Ilija Jakovljević and Mate Ujević about the connection between life and work of Catholic writers is confirmed.

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