Barac Antun: Bijeg od knjige

Antun Barac: Escape from the Book

"Escape from the Book" edited posthumously by Jure Kaštelan, is one of the most valuable works that appeared on the horizon of Croatian literature in the 1960s. Its author, Antun Barac, known in our country above all as an excellent literary historian, erudite and literary theorist, presents himself here as the writer of painful notes created during the internment in the infamous Ustasha prison Nova Gradiška during the Second World War; we also get to know him as a poet who was born by the imperative of time, so in that sense these poems are a reflex of the nausea and bitterness of war. Antun Barco's book is divided into three parts, separate thematic units: the first, "About Books and People" is written polemically and feuilletonistically; reveals a refined understanding of literature and what we call "the eye of literature". Everything here is charged with electricity, seething with interesting discoveries, imaginative, lapidary conclusions about deeds and people. The second part "KZSTG" (abbreviation for Stara Gradiška Penitentiary) is the very core of the book. It is a series of lyrical and thought-rounded sketches, meditations, observations, retrospections with a philosophical emphasis on the meaning of life, hysteria and madness of war, memories, etc. They are actually miniature novellas, written fluently, interestingly, they derive their growth from concrete data or images, with a special emphasis on the point of the novella itself. From all these documents - written secretly in the cell - about the subtlest flickers of the soul, one important understanding of the world that is dominant in Barč's entire oeuvre sparks: an ethical feeling, ataivist and engaged. The third part of the book "Through clenched teeth" is in a way a polemical confrontation with important questions of literature and creation. Antun Barac, Croatian literary historian and critic (Kamenjak near Crikvenica, 20 November 1894 - Zagreb, 1 November 1955), received his doctorate in 1918 with a thesis on Vladimir Nazor. Since 1930, he has been a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. From 1947 he was a regular member of the Academy. Barac contributed significantly to the contemporary Croatian science of literature in the context of European literature, as evidenced by his many books. Among others: "Book of Essays" (1924), "Articles on Literature" (1935), "Literature and People" (1941), "The Greatness of the Small" (1947), "Yugoslav Literature" (1954).