Antun Gustav Matoš
Encyclopedia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, short story
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
writer, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, essayist and travelogue
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
writer. He is considered the champion of Croatian
Croatian literature
Croatian literature is a definition given to the compilation of novels, dramas, short stories, poems and other various work of written kind entirely attributed to the medieval and modern culture of the Croats and the Croatian language....
modernist literature
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
, opening Croatia to the currents of Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an modernism, and one of the greatest Croatian literary figures of all time.
Life
Matoš was born in TovarnikTovarnik
Tovarnik is a municipality in the Vukovar-Syrmia County in Croatia. According to the 2001 census, there are 3,335 inhabitants, 90.61% which are Croats. The municipality is part of Syrmia. It is the birthplace of great Croatian poet Antun Gustav Matoš....
in the region of Syrmia
Syrmia
Syrmia is a fertile region of the Pannonian Plain in Europe, between the Danube and Sava rivers. It is divided between Serbia in the east and Croatia in the west....
. When he was two years old, his parents moved to Zagreb
Zagreb
Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...
, where he went to primary and secondary school. His attempt to study at the Military Veterinary College in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
ended in failure. He was conscripted in 1893, but he deserted in 1894, fleeing from Croatia to Šabac
Šabac
Šabac is a city and municipality in western Serbia, along the Sava river, in the historic region of Mačva. It is the administrative center of the Mačva District. The city has a population of 52,822 , while population of the municipality is 115,347...
and then to Belgrade
Belgrade
Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...
. He spent the next three years in Belgrade, living in his own words as a "cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...
player, journalist, and man of letters". In January 1898 he traveled to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
and Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, stayed for a while in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, and then moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
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
Esophageal cancer
Esophageal cancer is malignancy of the esophagus. There are various subtypes, primarily squamous cell cancer and adenocarcinoma . Squamous cell cancer arises from the cells that line the upper part of the esophagus...
. He wrote two dozen published or unpublished works: poems, short stories, articles, travelogues, criticisms and disputes.
Writing
Matoš is the central figure of Croatian modernismModernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
(moderna), a radical change in Croatian literature
Croatian literature
Croatian literature is a definition given to the compilation of novels, dramas, short stories, poems and other various work of written kind entirely attributed to the medieval and modern culture of the Croats and the Croatian language....
under European influences, as it quickly absorbed contemporary tendencies and styles such as Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
, modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
or impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
, relying on French literary heritage from Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
to Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, Barres
Maurice Barrès
Maurice Barrès was a French novelist, journalist, and socialist politician and agitator known for his nationalist and antisemitic views....
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
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
purposes (except during communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
).
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
Modernist literature
Modernist literature is sub-genre of Modernism, a predominantly European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms...
. 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
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
's genius and the superior, concise precision of Merimée
Prosper Mérimée
Prosper Mérimée was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. He is perhaps best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen.-Life:...
and the natural feel of Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents....
's satire, he told his friend Milan Ogrizović in a letter.
Fiction
His short storiesShort story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
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 ZagrebZagrebZagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...
and ZagorjeHrvatsko ZagorjeHrvatsko Zagorje is a region north of Zagreb, Croatia. It comprises the whole area north of Medvednica mountain up to Slovenia in the north and west, and up to the regions of Međimurje and Podravina in the north and east...
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
Grotesque
The word grotesque comes from the same Latin root as "Grotto", meaning a small cave or hollow. The original meaning was restricted to an extravagant style of Ancient Roman decorative art rediscovered and then copied in Rome at the end of the 15th century...
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
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...
s, Matoš was one of the greatest Croatian innovators. Landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
, 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
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
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 poetryPoetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
in his late period, around 1906, and wrote only around 80 poems. There can be no doubt that his great mentor was Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
, 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
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
form, the gift for the musical qualities of verses, the harmony of words, colors and smells (synesthetic
Synesthesia
Synesthesia , from the ancient Greek , "together," and , "sensation," is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...
metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
), a very refined rhythm
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
, and the mix of talking and singing intonation
Intonation (linguistics)
In linguistics, intonation is variation of pitch while speaking which is not used to distinguish words. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. Intonation, rhythm, and stress are the three main elements of linguistic prosody...
.
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
Elegy
In literature, an elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.-History:The Greek term elegeia originally referred to any verse written in elegiac couplets and covering a wide range of subject matter, including epitaphs for tombs...
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
Patriotism
Patriotism is a devotion to one's country, excluding differences caused by the dependencies of the term's meaning upon context, geography and philosophy...
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
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
oppression.
Criticism
Matoš left a deep impression on the literary genres of criticismCriticism
Criticism is the judgement of the merits and faults of the work or actions of an individual or group by another . To criticize does not necessarily imply to find fault, but the word is often taken to mean the simple expression of an objection against prejudice, or a disapproval.Another meaning of...
, essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
and newspaper article. While using a strong impressionist
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
approach to the works of Croatian (Kranjčević
Silvije Strahimir Kranjcevic
Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević was a Croatian poet. His reflexive poetry, reaching its zenith in the 1890s, was a turning point that ushered modern themes in Croatian poetry.-Early life:...
, Vidrić
Vladimir Vidric
Vladimir Vidrić was a Croatian poet. He is considered one of the major figures of the Croatian secessionist poetry.-Life:...
, Domjanić
Dragutin Domjanic
Dragutin Domjanić was a Croatian Kajkavian poet.Domjanić was born in Zelina. He became the first writer in Croatian literature to achieve complete and artistically mature melodiousness and rhythmicity of the Croatian Kajkavian expression. Having graduated law, he served as a judge in Zagreb and...
, Kamov
Janko Polic Kamov
Janko Polić Kamov was a Croatian writer and poet.He was born in Sušak, Rijeka. Rebellious by nature, he was expelled from Rijeka high school and dropped out of the school in Zagreb. Because of his participation in the demonstration against the Hungarian governor in Croatia, Khuen-Héderváry, he was...
) and Serbian writers (Sremac
Stevan Sremac
Stevan Sremac was a Serbian realist and comedy writer. He is considered one of the best truly humorous Serbian writers.-Biography:...
, Veselinović
Janko Veselinović
Janko Veselinović is the name of:*Janko Veselinović *Janko 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)