August Cesarec
August Cesarec (4 December 1893 – 16 July 1941)
Cesarec was born in
After the war, he became a member of the
Cesarec, who had discovered his literary talent in his teenage years, became known as one of the leading Croatian literary figures of his time.
Together with Miroslav Krleža he was one of the founders of the literary magazine Plamen in 1919.[3] Cesarec had a significant body of work in literary magazines, over 200 articles in total, two collections of which were separately published in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.[3]
He initially wrote a number of poems, which were often an expression of his feelings and ideas on social and political issues. He later stopped writing poems and switched to prose.[3] He wrote about seventy works of prose, most of them short stories and novellas, with some novels, a handful of dramas and some travel memoirs (not all of which were literary). The bulk of these were written between 1922 and 1932. Only a third of these had been published during his lifetime.[3]
In 1922 he fled to
In 1934, he illegally crossed the border again to attend the First Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow and then the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935.[3] In 1937, he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939.[4] He then went to Paris, and in 1938 returned to Yugoslavia, where he was arrested at the border again.[3]
Cesarec was a known polemicist, having contributed to Plamen, Borba, Književna republika, Komunista, Zaštita čovjeka, Nova riječ and Izraz.[3]
He often argued for Marxist points of view, having redacted and prepared for print the Serbo-Croatian translation of
In March 1941, a few days before the
The manuscripts of August Cesarec are preserved in the Archive of the Croatian Institute of History.[3] A number of monographs were made about him, including those published in Zagreb 1946–1964, a collection published in Belgrade/Zagreb/Sarajevo in 1964, a section in the "Five centuries of Croatian literature" published in Zagreb in 1966, and collections published in Zagreb 1970–1972 and then in 1982–1986.[3]
Posthumously, his novels Careva kraljevina, Zlatni mladić and Bjegunci achieved the most acclaim, in addition to the short story Tonkina jedina ljubav.[3]
The phrase zlatni mladić, lit. 'golden youth', based on the protagonist of his 1920s novel who engaged in excesses of nouveau riche, entered the general vocabulary in Croatia.[5]
Sources
- ^ a b "August Cesarec". hrt.hr (in Croatian). Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
- ^ a b c d e Draško Ređep (1971). Živan Milisavac (ed.). Jugoslovenski književni leksikon [Yugoslav Literary Lexicon] (in Serbo-Croatian). Novi Sad (SAP Vojvodina, SR Serbia): Matica srpska. p. 62.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y Brešić 1989.
- ^
Kadić, Ante (1960). Contemporary Croatian Literature. The Hague: Mouton. p. 49. Retrieved 21 October 2022.
He visited Russia twice (in 1922, and from 1934 to 1937) and was in Spain in 1937 [...].
- ^ Rašović, Renata (1 September 2018). "Zlatna mladež - 'Mali je iz dobre familije': Bahata 'djeca s Instagrama' premlaćuju, plaše, ubijaju u prometu..." [Golden youth - 'The kid is from a good family': Arrogant 'kids from Instagram' involved in beatings, intimidation, vehicular homicides...]. Večernji list (in Croatian). Retrieved 25 December 2022.
Further reading
- Stipetić, Zorica (1973). "Uloga Augusta Cesarca i Miroslava Krleže u stvaranju Komunističke partije Jugoslavije" [The Role of August Cesarec and Miroslav Krleža in the Creating of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia] (PDF). Časopis za suvremenu povijest (in Croatian). 5 (3): 71–95. ISSN 0590-9597. Retrieved 28 November 2019.
- Brešić, Vinko (1989). "CESAREC, August". Croatian Biographical Lexicon (in Croatian). Miroslav Krleža Lexicographical Institute.