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Vladika Platon Atanackovic | Miloš Svetić | Ivan Jugovic |
By an amazing coincidence, the beginning and the end of the initial period in the literary history of Sombor are both marked by a poetic apotheosis – the earlier being dedicated to the town, and the later, to the Virgin. From this dusty and muddy free royal town, bidding a farewell to it, and to his life, Fra Bona Mihaljević, a friar of the Franciscan convent of Sombor, abolished by the emperor Joseph II’s decree, in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, put out in 1787 his desire for Sombor to be his last, eschatological, abode: Albeit bidding thee farewell, / I wish to rejoin thee in heaven. / Me, a voyager now, I mind not singing / for little time in this world do I have left. At the beginning of the twentieth century, confessing to the Virgin his contrition for his past ‘sinful detours’, so that he would be able, thus purged, in ecstasy, at the point of the absolute, where differences of all ages are mute, to rejoin the dead dear he had deified, Laza Kostić wrote his celebrated poem of penitence Santa Maria della Salute (1909). In the sign of such a metaphysical association, the literature that was being written in Sombor quickly covered the distance from the literary work as a linguistic phenomenon with a communicative function to a highly aesthetic linguistic phenomenon, taking notice of stylistic orientations of the epoch along the way. Namely, only a decade or two after the modest beginning marked by Mihaljević, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resonant with Rococo, Classicist and pre-Romantic tones, the poets of Sombor gathered round Vaslije Kovačić’s Grammar School and the Preparatory School showed a considerable capacity for artistic expression. An entire generation of poets pursuing a rocaille form of Classicism (Avram Mrazović, Jovan Berić, Ivan Jugović, Nikolaj Šimić), or a purely Classicist concept (Platon Аtanacković), and jointly striving to solve the major problem of bilingualism, successfully tried their hand at every important literary genre of the time: ode, elegy, epitaph, necrology, biography.
Apart from and high above them there stood the erudite figure of Jovan Hadžić, alias Milos Svetić, a founder of Matica srpska, the editor of the Letopis (Chronicle) and Golubica (Dove), law-writer, historian, poet and translator. A devotee of Classical metres, in the early 1840s he expanded the Classicist repertoire of his poetry to embrace national subject-matter, timidly announcing the end of Classicism in Serbian poetry and the beginning of Romanticism.
The epoch of Romanticism in the literature of Sombor was marked by the poetry of epigones. The longest-lived (1860–1914), it brought about the sound and the rage, an oversized and often pretended patriotic feeling, and an abundance of insipid patriotic verses such as those fostered on the pages of the Golub (Pigeon), a literary paper for Serbian youth (1879–1914). In rare moments of intimate and meditative inspiration, however, the poetry of this period was able to discard the enforced cliché, testifying to a greater gift of some poets (Mita Popović, Nika Grujić Ognjan, Petar Despotović, Ivan M. Popović, Vojin Bikar).
The later poetry of L. Kostić, with Dj. Jakšić and J.J. Zmaj a coryphaeus of Serbian High Romanticism, brought about its deconstruction and self-destruction. The poet of national idolatry until the mid-1870s, he became in his Sombor period (1895–1910) a satirist on national mythology and mythomania as instruments of political praxis. His last poem, exceptional in many respects, is also exceptional in its being a sudden and triumphant flare of a dead literary epoch, the Indian summer of Serbian Romanticism overtaken by new literary styles.
The narrative and poetic oeuvre of Veljko Petrović is the most conspicuous characteristic of the Yugoslav period in Sombor’s literary history. At the very beginning granted, from the highest place of Serbian literary criticism (J. Skerlić), the glorious title of renovator of patriotic poetry, Petrović, however, was at his best in story-telling, introducing into his realistic manner, inherited from his famous Vojvodina predecessors J. Ignjatović and S. Sremac, modern tones of psychological observation or an element of grotesque in depicting man and the world. Portraying the Serbian bourgeois society in Hungary, he literary sublimated his hometown in a mythical poetonym of our literature – Ravangrad (Plainborough). In his versatility (poet, translator, encyclopaedist, art historian, publicist, editor), Veljko Petrović bears much resemblance to Jovan Hadžić.
From the circle of young authors gathered in the 1960s round the literary magazine Pokret (Movement) there have arisen the creative individualities of Boško Ivkov and Miroslav Josić Višnjić. Their production in the best tradition of the so-called across-the-river style (Miloš Crnjanski, Isidora Sekulić, Milan Kašanin), and diversified in genre (poetry, short story, novel and essay), is also recognizable by its lyricism and a filigree, baroquelike strain, on occasion driven to the slippery edge of artificiality.
Radivoj Stokanov
