Univerzitetska Misao (Jan 2022)
Dystopian excursus of dramatic expressionism
Abstract
Even though the dystopian genre, when it comes to literature, is mostly related to prose, it occasionally also appears in drama. We have witnessed such an example within the dramatic work of Croatian, that is, then Yugoslav, literary expressionism. In the early 1920s, Josip Kulundžić wrote two, from today's perspective diachronically, interesting, ideologically-thematically-motivically heterogeneous and stylistically and compositionally divergent, but ingenious dramatic texts; pyrandelistic conceptual play Kako će sa Zemlje nestati zlato and the unpublished, a kind of deconstructivist play Dr. Elektar. In those plays, both at the expressive and content level, in the manner of original, naked expressionism with hints of futurism and strongly influenced by pyrandelist dramatic poetics, the author will present a dystopian-science fiction concept of the (dramatic) world that will symbolically refer to socio-historical and the cultural-ideological context of the time. Strong dystopian signals of the mentioned plays will mark them as one of the first dramatic, but also literary texts in general in Croatian and then Yugoslav literature, but also as texts that even today, in the diachronic cross-section of literary historiography, with their symbolic context, can illuminate some social, cultural and literary-dramatic phenomena of that, as well as of this time.
