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236 O n 5 December 1941, in the cultural pages of Hrvatski narod, the novelist Zlatko Milković drew attention to a matinee performance at the Croatian National Theater of readings of the works of the younger generation of poets by famous Croatian actors and actresses, students from the acting school, and the poets themselves. Among the poets taking part were Frano Alfirević, Gabrijel Cvitan, Dobriša Cesarić, Vinko Nikolić, Ante Bonifačić, Vinko Kos, and Olinko Delorko. Although the poets were very different in their style of writing and the kinds of subjects they explored in verse, they were united in being young and ambitious and, in many cases, supporters of the Ustasha regime. According to Milković, they represented “a new dawn of Croatian poetry” and “the best young Croatian poets.” These names, he wrote, “have given a decisive characteristic to our artistic creation, creating a unique view of the world and building notions that today we discern in the spiritual creation of our nation.” In a speech preceding the poetry reading, Dušan Žanko emphasized “the significance and importance of Croatian poetry , its meaning through the decades’ struggle for the liberation of Croatia, as well as its significance today when the dream of Croatian statehood and a free and great homeland has been achieved, in which poetry as well as all other branches of art can develop unhindered.”1 For the Ustasha regime, 1941 marked the death of one form of literary expression and the birth of a new one. In the same way that regime adherents ChaPTeR 5 BETWEEN ANNIHILATION AND REGENERATION Literature, Language, and National Revolution between annihilation and regeneration 237 believed that an older political generation had made way for a younger one, so the new Croatia heralded a new younger generation of poets and writers, who had first emerged in the interwar period. The emblematic figure of the new artistic spirit was Mile Budak, particularly his series of novels Ognjište (The Hearth, 1931–38), about patriarchal life in the Lika Mountains. The playwright Vojmil Rabadan called Mile Budak’s Ognjište “the ideological credo and victorious hymn of the new Croatia” and compared its characters to those in Trojan legends. This cycle of novels, he wrote, was “the most important event in modern Croat literature,” and for Croat nationalists it had provided “a psalm of faith in the freedom and victory of the soul” in a time of cultural and political pressure. In his novels such as Na ponorima (On the Abyss, 1932), meanwhile, Budak correctly identified Jews and Serbs as those “responsible for Croatian misery and advocate[d] a return to the village,” while in San o sreći (A Dream about Happiness, 1940), he showed “love towards women and the homeland.”2 But new literary expression went much further than this. According to Dušan Žanko, the new artistic spirit was symbolized not just in the 1941 theater adaptation of Ognjište by Tito Strozzi or Rabadan’s play Zora uskrsnuće (Dawn of the Resurrection, 1941), a paean to the national revolution. It could also be seen in the numerous new plays by both young and established Croatian playwrights being performed by state theater companies in Sarajevo and Zagreb and in regional theaters. For Janko Žanetić, Croatian literature was “another link in our history; it is not another part or even only one of its chapters. It is the second edition of our long Golgotha , our suffering and denial, our struggle and principles—our history. In it one can read Sufflay’s spiral of history, in it one can see all our ascent and collapse, in it one can see mirrored the waves of our history.” In the new Croatia , he wrote, a new young generation would be the interpreters of the Croat literary experience, not carrying “the sick illusions of old bohemians and the ‘modern’ poems of manipulated youth” or the “stamp of dark and tortured youth.”3 In 1942, the Society of Croatian Writers (Društvo hrvatskih književnika— DHK) published an anthology of verse devoted to the works of a new generation of poets, Between Two Wars. The anthology had been published, the DHK wrote in the foreword, so that these poets could express their gratitude to the “warriors and victors” whose sacrifices had enabled not only the creation of an independent Croatia but also the rebirth of Croat literature. In this collection designed to reflect the richness of contemporary Croatian literature , each poet had been asked to...

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