Summary
Miroslav Krleža: Provocative Thoughts
The idea of the editors and organizers of this book was to provide an insight into the most important things that Krleža wrote about art and artistic themes. Krleža's opus is huge, and the literature on ticks is even bigger; however, no matter how small it is, this book is, we believe, a welcome novelty for Krleža fans and those who are about to become one! There are already seemingly similar selections of characteristic passages from Krlež's oeuvre. First of all, it is the five-volume Panorama of Views, Concepts and Phenomena edited by Anđelko Malinar from 1975, which was "blessed" by Krleža himself. Understandably, most of the quotes from our selection can be found in it, but within much broader excerpts. But unlike that huge edition, our selection for the first time focuses exclusively on "artistic themes" and (as much as possible, because Krleža talks about many things even when he talks about art) does not contain Krleža's views on politics, history, philosophy or, for example, economics. At the same time, the editor's special task was to choose exactly that sentence (or several shorter sentences) with which Krleža expresses his opinion on a particular topic in the clearest and shortest way. In the firework of long, complex and precisely baroque sentences, woven mostly into the extensive and very dense fabric of the text, sometimes it was not easy to do this, because in such a procedure there is always a danger of "missing the point" or choosing a less important excerpt. This book is therefore, in fact, only a kind of Krleža for beginners, so we hope that it will lead those readers who have not yet done so to reach for the integral texts, and that those who are well versed in Krleža's oeuvre will still come in handy as a reminder or a kind of signpost, a guide through Krleža's "artistic themes".
Biblos Newsletter
New titles, special copies and quiet recommendations from the antiquarian bookshop.