Kultura (Skopje) (Sep 2014)
The Kaval or the Piano – The Racin Essay on Folk Poetry
Abstract
Kosho Racin (1908-1943) is a Macedonian national icon, the creator of the innovative nationally-linguistic poetic undertaking. Racin’s name, among other things, is tied to the beginnings of the Macedonian literary criticism, bearing in mind that he (in the years prior to the Second World War) published a few literary-critical articles on the pages of the then Yugoslav periodicals, whereas a part of the texts in this category (such, as for example, he essay on folk poetry which is the subject of interest of this paper) were traced back to his estate and was published long after the liberation.“Until present day we have not heard a more subte apotheosis of folk poetry as the eternal creative stand-out from the one uttered by Racin” – writes Dimitar Mitrev in honor of his essay on folk poetry.The Racin essay, “The Macedonian Folk Song” confirms the most beautiful definitions of the subtle, border-line, heterogeneous discourse called the essay, as the “perfect attempt”, “an eternal yearning for a system”, according to György Lukács, or as “a miniature linguistic counterpart of the musical shape, a variation on a theme”, as Kica B. Kolbe puts it.
