Hum (Jan 2007)
CROATIAN TRADITIONARY CULTURE AND LITERATURE IN PERIODICALS AND MONOGRAPHS FROM ROMANTICISM UP TO DATE
Abstract
Croatian tradition culture and literature witness about the thirteen-century life of the Croats. Folk rituals and customs, oral literature and the language of the people that formed and handed it down, are the most deserving for the preservation of the Croatian identity. In the tradition culture and literature of the Croats one can observe the influences of Slavic and other European peoples. The first Croatian folklorist Petar Hektorović in his Fishing and Fishermen’s Talk (1568) originally recorded two bugarshtitsas (popular quindecasyllabic / hexadecasyllabic ballads), three odes and one ballad. A more systematic recording and study of the Croatian folk customs and oral literature started in 1813 with “Circular” of the bishop of Zagreb, Maksimilijan Vrhovec, who called to recording and gathering of oral literature and old manuscripts. In 1877 the Central Croatian Cultural and Publishing Society (Matica hrvatska) sent out a “Call for Gathering of Croatian Folk Songs” and by December 1896 it had gathered 157 anthologies with more than 24500 songs. The oral literature of the Croats, as well as that of the Serbs and Bosniacs, was admired and translated by many European philologists and writers, such as: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder, Johannes von Müller, brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Therese Albertine Luise von Jacob under the pseudonym of Talvj, Prosper Mérimée, Walter Scott, John Bowring, Adam Mickiewicz, Aleksandar Sergejevič Puškin, Alphonse de Lamartine. The following people spent some time in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia where they researched oral literature: Alberto Fortis, Ludvik Kuba, Millman Parry, Albert Bates Lord and others. The Croatian tradition culture and literature experienced their new flourishing in the early 1990s. Since that time up to our days some fifty monographs from the Croatian ethnology and oral literature have been published.
